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Notes of a Translator on Bogatyrev's Monograph:
Maeical Acts. Rites.. and Beliefs of Subcarpathian Rus'

Patricia A. Krafcik, Evergreen State College

Petr Grigorevich Bogatyrev was without question one of the most significant Russian

folldorists of the twentieth centwy. His participation in the organization and activity of the Moscow

Linguistic Circle which, along with the Petrograd Society for the Study of Poetic Language, gave birth

to the Russian Formalist School, and his subsequent work with the Prague Linguistic Circle nurtured

his own pioneering interests and activities in the field of ethnography. His life in Stalinist Russia was,

naturally, not without tragedy. He suffered immensely as a result of his work "abroad" as a translator

for the Soviet embassy in Prague between 1922-1939, as well as for his association with "foreign

folldorists," among them his compatriot Roman Jakobson who chose to immigrate to the United States

on the eve of the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia while Bogatyrev returned home to Russia.

Amidst the valuable pieces of scholarship he left behind are his studies of Rusyn folldore

from the Carpathian MOlmmln~, which he researched in a series offield expeditions dming the 1920s

and 1930s. Of these, the greatest gem is his monograph entitled Magical Acts. Rites. and Beliefs in

SubcaJ:pathian Rus'. published initially in a French translation by the Institute of Slavic Studies

(lnstitut d'etudes slaves) in Paris in 1929 lActes Ma~ques. rites et crovances en Russ;e

subcm:pathique). Here, he succeeded in describing what in the 1920s was still, as he stated in his

diary, one of the most archaic of Slavic peasant cultures. The relative isolation of the region with its

scattered mountain villages allowed for the smvival of traditional folklore and for the perpetuation of

ritual and magical practices which elsewhere were fading or already extinct.

Bogatyrev's monograph offers a full and systemic description of the ritual-mythological

aspect of Rusyn peasant life. After a lengthy introduction in which he discusses his use of the

synchronic method in his research - illustrated with numerous examples from Rusyn folklore

practices and beliefs - he moves through the feasts of the Orthodox and Greek Catholic liturgical

year descnDing in intricate detail various folk rites and beliefs connected with each of them. Finally,

he scrutinizes significant moments in the peasants' lives - birth and baptism, weddings, and funerals,

as well as their experience of the world of apparitions and supernatural beings - and, here again.

describes intriguing folk rituals related to these.

In 1998, the first English translation ofBogatyrev's monograph under the title Vampires in

the Car.pathians: Magical Acts. Rites. and Beliefs in SubcaJ:pathian Rus'. was published by Columbia

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University Press's East European Monographs series under the auspices of the Carpatho-Rusyn

Research Center as part of the center's own series entitled "Classics of Carpatho-Rusyn Scholarship."

For this publication I reworked an initial translation by independent scholar Stephen Reynolds. For

the sake of accuracy, I consulted closely both the original French publication and a subsequent

Russian publication of the work which appeared in the Soviet Union in 1971 a few months before

Bogatyrev's death (as Magicheskie deistvie. obriady i verovaniia Zakar.pat'ia in a single-volume

compilation ofBogatyrev's works entitled Voprosy teor;; narodnogo iskusstva. Moskva, pp.

167-296). Along the way, I discovered that some individual lines and a handful of whole paragraphs

had been entirely omitted from the Soviet version. It is certainly possible that the author himself

might have had a band in revising his own work, but the nature of the omissions seems to suggest that

they were most probably made by a censor. What might have disturbed a Soviet censor in 1971 about

Bogatyrev's scholarly observations in this study ofSubcarpathian Rusyn folklore of the 1920s1

The problem passages, as it tmns out, did not concern Subcarpathian Rusyn folklore per se at

all. The passages which the censor found dangerous or offensive were, in fact, largely those in which

Bogatyrev went beyond Rusyn folklore to reach for some kind of analogy to an item under discussion

which he knew and found useful from the Russian context. These are passages, then, which might be

of special interest to both Rusyn and Russian folklorists. For instance, the :first omission occurs in the

Introduction under a section subtitled "The cmrency of magical actions and rites." In discussing

generally the persistence of folk. beliefs into modem times, Bogatyrev notes that folk. religion has

remained as powerful as Christianity among all the nationalities in Russia, including Russian peasants

and that, for example, there has been a "rebirth of paganism ... not only among the Cheremis [Mari]

of the steppe, but even among those of the district of Krasnokoksajsk. ... " (p. 16 in the English

translation; p. 182 in the Soviet version) The censor's omission begins at this point, with Bogatyrev's

observation that: "This renaissance obviously occurred during the time of the Russian revolution of

1917 and the Soviet regime."

Immediately hereafter, two full paragraphs are missing from the Soviet version. In them

Bogatyrev notes that "Orthodoxy and sorcery ... form an unexpected union" throughout rural Russia,

and the sorcerer or sorceress in every village is as important as the priest, the schoolmaster, and the

fe/'dsher [a sort ofhea1th officer]. "Formerly," Bogatyev remarlcs, "sorcery was forbidden and

practiced only clandestinely. Now it is done openly." Sorcerers have even kept up with social

progress, he states, and now record their conjurations in registers, two of which Bogatyrev says he has

in his possession - "in which very old recipes based on the powers of herbs, earth, and metals are

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accompanied by bizarre conjurations."

In a third paragraph on this same page, Bogatyrev was permitted to state that he himselfhad

observed how widespread superstitions were among "Prague actors and in various segments of the

urban population - which sounds like he is referring only to Czechs, so apparently the statement was

acceptable to the censor - but then the censor omitted Bogatyrev's next stunning announcement that

superstitions were also widespread among the Russian working class, "from which the auditors at the

Wolker's University founded in Moscow by the Soviets were recruited."

Narrative endnotes attached to all of these observations are also missing from the Soviet

version. In 1hese notes, Bogatyrev drew from the observations ofV. G. Tan-Bogoraz who offers

examples of contempomy vestiges of old practices and beliefs in a 1924 compilation, entitled Storyi i

nol!)'i bvt. Tan-Bogoraz wi1nessed, for instance, a sorcerer's attempt to exorcise severnl preswnably

possessed women in a wolkers' neighborhood in Leningrad in 1923, an event which had attracted few

in 1917 but drew an enormous crowd six years later. Bogatyrevadds that a priest who intervened to

save 1he sorcerer, whom the crazed women had attempted to 1hrow off a bridge, was himselfbeaten by

1hem. It is not hard to see that the Soviet censor could not permit these observations which stood in

such blatant contradiction to 1he enlightenment which 1he October Revolution of 1917 was thought to

have contributed to 1he new Soviet man and woman.

Further in his study, Bogatyrev discusses what he calls motivated and unmotivated magical

actions. In the first, practitioners feel they know and can explain why they are undertaking certain

actions. In 1he second, practitioners are not certain why they must engage in certain actions within a

particular rite or ritual, but rather "conform themselves to the details rigorously out of fear that

otherwise they will destroy all1he power of the magical action or will neglect some essential detail."

Bogatyrev believed 1hat the peasant population of Subcarpathian Rus' engaged largely in motivated

magical actions, but that unmotivated magical actions formed 1he bulk of such activities on 1he part of

"persons belonging to the middle social stratwn in the towns of Russia: shopkeepers. workers, and

certain professions (actors, for example) among whom, for various reasons, superstitions are

widespread" He went even further to observe that the intellectual class - and this most certainly

means the Russians since there was no intellectual class among the Rusyn peasantry he was studying

- engages in bo1h motivated and unmotivated magical actions, as well as turning some magic actions

into games or attempting rational explanations of1hem. Needless to say, all of this was omitted from

the Soviet version of the monograph. (p. 26 in the English; p. 193 in the Soviet version)

A final example of an omitted paragraph is found in the last section of the monograph dealing

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with "Apparitions and Supernatural Beings.» Here, Bogatyrev discusses the complex art of

storytelling with its interweaving of fact and fantasy, and how narrators may couch their retelling of an

event in traditional tale forms in order to appeal more successfully to their audience. He illus1Iates

this phenomenon with reference to a legend, "recently in circulation in Russia, of a communist's wife

who brings a devil into the world.» "This legend, " he says, "is presented as an account of a real event,

but in some variants exhibits the influence of folk tales.» Bogatyrev draws from the research of

Russian folklorist V. Smimov who "recorded three variants of the legend at Kostroma," and observes

that "augmented by current motifs. the legend spread throughout Russia and reached as far as

Ukraine." As with all the material described above and omitted from the Soviet version, one can only

imagine the censor's horror at this observation. (p. 143 English; p. 289 Soviet)

Unfortunately, we may not ever know exactly what Bogatyrev's role was in the production of

the Soviet publication of his monograph Magical Acts and the other studies which appeared in the

volume published in 1971. After losing his positions as head of the literature department at Moscow

State University and the Institute of Ethnography of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and undergoing

official and brutal "criticism" at the end ()fthe 194Os, Bogatyrev by 1971 was no doubt grateful for

the rehabilitation which allowed him to work again for what turned out to be only five years in the

Academy of Sciences and Moscow University. The publication of his some of his scholarly research

by 1971, even if scrutiIiized by a censor, also no doubt gratified him We can only now hope for the

publication of all ofhis scholarship, including an uncensored version of his fascinating monograph on

Rusyn folklore.

   SEEFA Journal 1999, Vol. IV No. 2