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BOOK REVIEWS

Review of Senosios raitijos ir tautosakos s=lveika:
kultiirine Lietuvos DidZiosios Kuni&aikitystes patirtis

Jurare Siekonyte, Lithuania

An international conference entitled "The Interaction of Old Literatme and Folldore: The

Cultural Experience of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania" was held on December~, 1997, in Vilnius,

Lithuania, at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folldore. This conference was dedicated to the

450th anniversmy of Catechisms.. the first Lithuanian book written by Martians MaZvydas.

Participants in the conference came from Lithuania, Latvia, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Ukraine,

Hungary and Germany and included historians, folldorists, scholars of mythology, literature scholars,

library specialists, and linguists. The conference stressed interdisciplinary approaches to the

multilingual written records of the Grand Duchy ofLitbuania (GDL). The records are of great

historical and cultural importance to the contemporary world, and twenty six.papers focusing on the

thematic, semantic, symbolic and contextual aspects of these records were presented. The conference

papers have been published in book form in Senosios raStiios ir tautosakos saveika: kultiirine Lietuvos

DidZiosios Kuni(?ik~ty~ patirtis. Vilnius, Lietuvil! literatiiros ir tautosakos institutas, 1998. They

are in four languages: English, Lithuanian, Russian and Polish. For purposes of this review, we will

report on the folldore articles.

Most of the folldore papers treat Slavic themes. J. Novikov discusses Russian folldore texts

which mention Lithuania and the Lithuanians. He reports that the ethnonym "litva" is found in

Russian epic songs (byUna) and that Lithuanians are mentioned in legends, proverbs, and riddles. B.

Kerbelyre analyzes the story about Algirdas' march on Moscow, as it is attested in the Yevreinov

Redaction and in the Bykhovets Lithuanian Manuscript Chronicle, and concludes 1hat, while this

narrative shares many symbols with Russian oral tradition, it is nonetheless an independent legend. A

Nepokupnij, an author interested in the wedding songs of Ukraine, Belams and Poland, observes that

1he ethnonym "Utva" can sometimes be used in these songs to refer to the bridal couple. This would

indicate that contact between the Lithuanian!; and the Slavs dates back to antiquity. The aim of

O. Belova's article is to analyze apoctyphal and folldore motifs in the Old Russian "Tale about the

Birds." The author concludes that this literary monument absorbed local folk beliefs and preserved a

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fragment of traditional folk culture. A. Semenciuk discusses the attitude toward the Lithuanians

reflected in Polish chronicles. He notes that the Polish chroniclers Dlugosh, Miechowski, Bielski,

Stryj"kowski were not only historians, but also geographers, ethnographers, folklorists. Approximately

half of the papers deal with the acceptance of Christianity in the GDL.

Some papers cover mythological topics. V. Petruchin uses Slavic parallels to give a new

interpretation the Sovij myth in the Johannes Meletius Chronicles. J. I..auruSas engages in a polemic

with other scholars on the topic of Duke Sventaragis and suggests that the etymology ofSventaragis

indicates that the name means "burial :fire." V. Voigt's paper is a comparative study of Baltic and

Finnic gods. The author acknowledges the lack of similar studies and tries to awaken interest in this

topic.

The cultmaI heritage of the GDL includes ethnic minorities and N. A. MoTOzova and V. N.

Cekmonas discuss the contemporary folklore of Lithuanian Old Believers, focusing on the decline of

oral tradition among them as people gradually forget real events and distort them. G. MiSkiniene

examines the manuscripts of Lithuanian Tartars which reflect ethnic and philosophical features

characteristic of Muslim nations.

In sum, Senosios I'aStiios ir tautosakos saveika: kultiirine Lietuvos DidZiosios Kunigai1c~es

patirtis helps us discover new facts and new faces in Lithuanian history and shows us that this field is

still open to exploration and new interpretation.

 SEEFA Journal 1999, Vol. IV No. 2