Russkii shkolnyi fol'klor. at 'vyzyvanii' Pikovoj damy do semeinykh rasskazov. [Russ~an school
folklore: From 'summoning' the Queen of Spades to family stories] Moscow: LadOlllIc 1998.

744 pp.

Aleksandr Y. Pigin. Petrozavodsk State University.

In spring of 1998 the Moscow scholarly publishing center "Ladomir" published this new

book in the series "Russkaia potaennaia literatura" [Russian Secret literature]. The editor of this

volume is the prominent Petersburg folklorist and investigator of Russian culture and everyday

life, A. F. Belousov, who also compiled the first collection of school folklore in Russian

folkloristics, which appeared earlier (Shkol'nyi by' i fol'k/or: Y 2 ch. [Everyday school life and

folklore: in 2 parts], Tallinn, 1992).

Urban school folklore is a new topic of study in Russian folkloristics. The world of

children's subculture so contradicted the aims of official Soviet pedagogy that it was perceived not

merely as a marginal and forbidden sphere, but even as "nonexistent." For this reason the

"discovery" and the systematic study and publication of school texts were impossible until the

late 1980s and early I990s.

The collection under review is the most complete anthology of Russian school folklore

to date, and the most diverse in terms of the materials presented. The thematic and generic

range of texts published here is extraordinarily broad. The collection will acquaint a reader with

oral and written children's folklore, love lyrics and scabrous verses, children's games of

make-believe countries, children's magic and mythology, and texts both comic and sentimental:

methods for summoning the Queen of Spades, "zaum" [trans-sense] in children's poetry (by A. L.

Toporkov); children's scary stories, children's utopias (S. M. Loiter); ballads (S. B. Adon'eva);

girls' manuscript love stories (S. B. Borisov and S. I. Zhavoronok); girls' albums in the twentieth

century (Y. Y. Golovin and Y. F. Lur'e); the album of a children's colony (M. Y. Kalashnikova);

"the school chronicle" -- a peculiar kind of "explanatory dictionary" of school life (Y. F. Lur'e);

schoolchildren's parodic poetry, street graffiti, poems whose comic effect results from the

"deception" or disappointment of the expectation of a vulgar rhyme (M. L. Lur'e); "sadistic

doggerel" (A. F. Belousov); and family stories (I. A. Razumova).

The scholarly value of this edition depends not only on the published texts, but also on

research materials. In his introductory article, Belousov attempts to trace the historical

development of school folklore, which is indissolubly connected with the history of the Russian

school in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The fundamental conflict of school folklore

consists, in the investigator's opinion, in the clash of "constructive" and "destructive" attitudes

towards study, and of norms of adults' and children's culture. Belousov's conclusion is brilliantly

supported by his analysis of several examples of school folklore, which are organized as "parodia

sacra." These expose their topics to mockery, "turn them inside out," or take various

manifestations of grown-up culture to absurd extremes ("sadistic doggerel" and parodic school

poetry).

page 43 Fall 1998

 SEEFA Journal 1998, Vol. III No. 2



The introductory articles to each of the collection's sections are also of considerable

interest. I will pause briefly to discuss only three of them. In his article on the Queen of Spades

in school folklore, A. L. Toporkov not only describes the methods for "summoning" this specific

"demonologic" character, but also reveals the "particular myth-making possibilities" of children's

creative activity, following the mechanism of folklorization of a literary work (Push kin's story

"The Queen of Spades"). This last aspect is of particular interest in the context of the general

cultural problem of the transformation of "elite" texts into "apocrypha" upon their transmission

into a "heterocultural" milieu. S. M. Loiter's article, on children's "scary stories," also deals with

children's myth-making. She interprets these stories as mythological tales whose main theme is

death. Loiter devotes most of her attention to characterization of mythological characters in

the "strashilki" [scary stories], the manifestation in the texts of archetypal motifs and archaic

mythological concepts (such as shape-shifting, "armlessness-Ieglessness," or zoomorphic

survivals). This section ends with an index of types and plot-motifs for children's scary stories

("strashilki"), which will be useful to researchers beyond their study of children's mythology. One

particular discovery is that this collection is the first to treat children's family stories as folkloric

texts. The author of this section, I. A. Razumova, establishes the basic thematic varieties and

narrative forms of family stories (such as legends about a family's history, the origin of the

family's name, or stories about children that resemble jokes), and characterizes their functions in

family tradition.

All the research materials in the collection, articles, and commentaries to the texts are

compiled in a professional manner, without the slightest attempt to shock the reader or force

any ethical ("pedagogical") evaluation.

The anthology ends with a republication of two articles by G. S. Vinogradov

(1887- I945), the foremost investigator of Russian children's folklore ("Children's satirical lyrics"

[1925] and "Children's secret languages" [1926]), prepared by A. F. Nekrylova and V. V. Golovin.

(Translated by Sibelan Forrester)

SEEF A Journal page 44

 SEEFA Journal 1998, Vol. III No. 2