Russian folklore
Folklore, translated, means “ folk wisdom, folk knowledge". Folklore is folk art, artistic collective activity of the people, reflecting their life, views and ideals, i.e. folklore is the folk historical cultural heritage of any country in the world.
Works of Russian folklore (fairy tales, legends, epics, songs, ditties, dances, tales, applied art) help to recreate the characteristic features of the folk life of their time.
Creativity in ancient times was closely connected with human labor activity and reflected mythical, historical ideas, as well as the beginnings of scientific knowledge. The art of words was closely connected with other types of art - music, dance, decorative art. In science this is called "syncretism".
Folklore was an art organically inherent in folk life. The different purposes of the works gave rise to genres, with their various themes, images, and style. IN ancient period Most peoples had tribal legends, work and ritual songs, mythological stories, and conspiracies. The decisive event that paved the line between mythology and folklore itself was the appearance of fairy tales, the plots of which were based on dreams, wisdom, and ethical fiction.
In ancient and medieval society, a heroic epic took shape (Irish sagas, Russian epics and others). Legends and songs also arose reflecting various beliefs (for example, Russian spiritual poems). Later, historical songs appeared, depicting real historical events and heroes, as they remained in people's memory.
Genres in folklore also differ in the method of performance (solo, choir, choir and soloist) and different combinations of text with melody, intonation, movements (singing and dancing, storytelling and acting).
With changes in the social life of society, new genres arose in Russian folklore: soldiers', coachmen's, barge haulers' songs. The growth of industry and cities brought to life: romances, jokes, workers, and student folklore.
Now there are no new Russian folk tales appearing, but the old ones are still told and cartoons and feature films are made based on them. Many old songs are also sung. But epics and historical songs are practically no longer heard live.
For thousands of years, folklore was the only form of creativity among all peoples. The folklore of every nation is unique, just like its history, customs, and culture. And some genres (not just historical songs) reflect the history of a given people.
Russian folk music flax culture
There are several points of view that interpret folklore as folk artistic culture, as oral poetry and as a set of verbal, musical, gaming or artistic types of folk art. With all the diversity of regional and local forms, folklore has common features, such as anonymity, collective creativity, traditionalism, close connection with work, everyday life, and the transmission of works from generation to generation in the oral tradition.
Folk musical art originated long before the emergence of professional music Orthodox church. In the social life of ancient Rus', folklore played a much greater role than in subsequent times. Unlike medieval Europe, Ancient Rus' did not have secular professional art. In its musical culture, folk art of the oral tradition developed, including various, including “semi-professional” genres (the art of storytellers, guslars, etc.).
By the time of Orthodox hymnography, Russian folklore already had a long history, an established system of genres and means of musical expression. Folk music and folk art have become firmly established in people's everyday lives, reflecting the most diverse facets of social, family and personal life.
Researchers believe that in the pre-state period (that is, before Ancient Rus' took shape), the Eastern Slavs already had a fairly developed calendar and family household folklore, heroic epic and instrumental music.
With the adoption of Christianity, pagan (Vedic) knowledge began to be eradicated. The meaning of magical acts that gave rise to this or that type of folk activity was gradually forgotten. However, the purely external forms of ancient holidays turned out to be unusually stable, and some ritual folklore continued to live as if out of connection with the ancient paganism that gave birth to it.
The Christian Church (not only in Rus', but also in Europe) had a very negative attitude towards traditional folk songs and dances, considering them a manifestation of sinfulness and devilish seduction. This assessment is recorded in many chronicles and in canonical church decrees.
Lively, cheerful folk festivals with elements of theatrical performance and with the indispensable participation of music, the origins of which should be sought in ancient Vedic rituals, were fundamentally different from temple holidays.
The most extensive area of folk musical creativity Ancient Rus' consists of ritual folklore, testifying to the high artistic talent of the Russian people. He was born in the depths of the Vedic picture of the world, the deification of natural elements. Calendar-ritual songs are considered the most ancient. Their content is associated with ideas about the cycle of nature and the agricultural calendar. These songs reflect the different stages of life of the farmers. They were part of winter, spring, and summer rituals that correspond to turning points in the change of seasons. By performing this natural ritual (songs, dances), people believed that the mighty gods, the forces of Love, Family, Sun, Water, Mother Earth would hear them and healthy children would be born, a good harvest would be born, there would be offspring of livestock, life in love would develop and harmony.
In Rus', weddings have been played since ancient times. Each locality had its own custom of wedding actions, lamentations, songs, and sentences. But with all the endless variety, weddings were played according to the same laws. Poetic wedding reality transforms what is happening into a fantastic fairy-tale world. Just as in a fairy tale all the images are varied, so the ritual itself, poetically interpreted, appears as a kind of fairy tale. A wedding, being one of the most significant events of human life in Rus', required a festive and solemn setting. And if you feel all the rituals and songs, delving into this fantastic wedding world, you can feel the aching beauty of this ritual. What will remain behind the scenes are the colorful clothes, the wedding train rattling with bells, the polyphonic choir of “singers” and the mournful melodies of lamentations, the sounds of waxwings and buzzers, accordions and balalaikas - but the poetry of the wedding itself resurrects - the pain of leaving the parental home and the high joy of the festive state of mind - Love.
One of the most ancient Russian genres is round dance songs. In Rus', round dances were held throughout almost the entire year - on Kolovorot (New Year), Maslenitsa (farewell to winter and welcoming spring), Green Week (round dances of girls around birches), Yarilo (sacred bonfires), Ovsen (harvest festivals). Round dances-games and round dances-processions were common. Initially, round dance songs were part of agricultural rituals, but over the centuries they became independent, although images of labor were preserved in many of them:
And we sowed and sowed millet!
Oh, Did Lado, they sowed, they sowed!
Dance songs that have survived to this day accompanied men's and women's dances. Men's - personified strength, courage, courage, women's - tenderness, love, stateliness.
Over the centuries, the musical epic begins to be replenished with new themes and images. Epic epics are born telling about the struggle against the Horde, about travel to distant countries, about the emergence of the Cossacks, and popular uprisings.
People's memory has long preserved many beautiful ancient songs over the centuries. In the 18th century, during the period of the formation of professional secular genres (opera, instrumental music), folk art for the first time became the subject of study and creative implementation. The educational attitude towards folklore was vividly expressed by the remarkable writer, humanist A.N. Radishchev, in the heartfelt lines of his “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow”: “Whoever knows the voices of Russian folk songs admits that there is something in them that means spiritual pain... In in them you will find the formation of the soul of our people.” In the 19th century, the assessment of folklore as the “education of the soul” of the Russian people became the basis of the aesthetics of the school of composers from Glinka, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Borodin, to Rachmaninov, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Kalinikov, and folk song itself was one of the sources of the formation of Russian national thinking.
Russian folk songs of the 16th-19th centuries - “like the golden mirror of the Russian people”
Folk songs recorded in various parts of Russia are historical monument life of the people, but also a documentary source that captured the development of folk creative thought of its time.
The fight against the Tatars, peasant riots - all this left an imprint on folk song traditions in each specific area, starting with epics, historical songs and ballads. Like, for example, the ballad about Ilya Muromets, which is associated with the Nightingale River, which flows in the area of Yazykovo, there was a struggle between Ilya Muromets and Nightingale the Robber, who lived in these parts.
It is known that the conquest of the Kazan Khanate by Ivan the Terrible played a role in the development of oral folk art; Ivan the Terrible’s campaigns marked the beginning of the final victory over the Tatar-Mongol yoke, which freed many thousands of Russian prisoners from captivity. The songs of this time became the prototype for Lermontov’s epic “Song about Ivan Tsarevich” - a chronicle of people’s life, and A.S. Pushkin used oral folk art in his works - Russian songs and Russian fairy tales.
On the Volga, not far from the village of Undory, there is a cape called Stenka Razin; songs of that time were sung there: “On the steppe, Saratov steppe”, “We had it in holy Rus'”. Historical events of the late XVII - early XVIII centuries. captured in a compilation about the campaigns of Peter I and his Azov campaigns, about the execution of the archers: “It’s like walking on a blue sea,” “A young Cossack is walking along the Don.”
With the military reforms of the early 18th century, new historical songs appeared, these were no longer lyrical, but epic. Historical songs preserve the most ancient images of the historical epic, songs about the Russian-Turkish War, about recruitment and the war with Napoleon: “The French thief boasted of taking Russia,” “Don’t make noise, mother green oak tree.”
At this time, epics about “Surovets Suzdalets”, about “Dobrynya and Alyosha” and a very rare fairy tale by Gorshen were preserved. Also in the works of Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Nekrasov, Russian epic folk songs and tales were used. The ancient traditions of folk games, mummery and the special performing culture of Russian folklore have been preserved.
Russian folk theater art
Russian folk drama and folk theatrical art in general are the most interesting and significant phenomenon of Russian national culture.
Dramatic games and performances at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 20th centuries formed an organic part of festive folk life, be it village gatherings, soldier and factory barracks, or fair booths.
The geography of distribution of folk drama is extensive. Collectors of our days have discovered unique theatrical “hearths” in the Yaroslavl and Gorky regions, Russian villages of Tataria, on Vyatka and Kama, in Siberia and the Urals.
Folk drama, contrary to the opinion of some scientists, is a natural product of folklore tradition. It compressed the creative experience accumulated by dozens of generations of the broadest strata of the Russian people.
In urban areas, and later rural fairs Carousels and booths were set up, on the stage of which performances on fairy-tale and national historical themes were performed. The performances seen at the fairs could not completely influence the aesthetic tastes of the people, but they expanded their fairy tale and song repertoire. Popular and theatrical borrowings largely determined the originality of the plots of folk drama. However, they “lay down” on the ancient gaming traditions of folk games, dressing up, i.e. on the special performing culture of Russian folklore.
Generations of creators and performers of folk dramas have developed certain techniques for plotting plots, characterizations, and style. Developed folk dramas are characterized by strong passions and insoluble conflicts, continuity and speed of successive actions.
A special role in folk drama is played by songs performed by the heroes at different moments or sounded in chorus - as comments on ongoing events. The songs were a kind of emotional and psychological element of the performance. They were performed mostly in fragments, revealing the emotional meaning of the scene or the state of the character. Songs were required at the beginning and end of the performance. The song repertoire of folk dramas consists mainly of original songs from the 19th and early 20th centuries, popular in all strata of society. These are the soldiers’ songs “The White Russian Tsar Went,” “Malbruk Left on a Campaign,” “Praise, Praise to You, Hero,” and the romances “I walked in the meadows in the evening,” “I’m heading off into the desert,” “What’s clouded, the clear dawn " and many others.
Late genres of Russian folk art - festivities
The heyday of the festivities occurred in the 17th-19th centuries, although certain types and genres of folk art, which were an indispensable part of the fair and city festive square, were created and actively existed long before these centuries and continue, often in a transformed form, to exist to this day. This is the puppet theater, bear fun, partly the jokes of traders, many circus acts. Other genres were born out of the fairgrounds and died out when the festivities ended. These are comic monologues of booth barkers, barkers, performances of booth theaters, dialogues of parsley clowns.
Usually, during festivities and fairs, entire entertainment towns with booths, carousels, swings, and tents were erected in traditional places, selling everything from popular prints to songbirds and sweets. In winter, ice mountains were added, access to which was completely free, and sledding from a height of 10-12 m brought incomparable pleasure.
With all the diversity and diversity, the city's folk festival was perceived as something integral. This integrity was created by the specific atmosphere of the festive square, with its free speech, familiarity, unbridled laughter, food and drinks; equality, fun, festive perception of the world.
The festive square itself amazed with its incredible combination of all kinds of details. Accordingly, outwardly it was a colorful, loud chaos. Bright, motley clothes of walkers, catchy, unusual costumes of “artists”, flashy signs of booths, swings, carousels, shops and taverns, handicrafts shimmering with all the colors of the rainbow and the simultaneous sound of barrel organs, pipes, flutes, drums, exclamations, songs, cries of merchants , loud laughter from the jokes of “boothy grandfathers” and clowns - everything merged into a single fair fireworks display, which fascinated and amused.
The large, well-known festivities “under the mountains” and “under the swings” attracted many guest performers from Europe (many of them were the owners of booths, panoramas) and even southern countries(magicians, animal tamers, strongmen, acrobats and others). Foreign speech and overseas curiosities were commonplace at metropolitan festivities and large fairs. It is clear why the city’s spectacular folklore often appeared as a kind of mixture of “Nizhny Novgorod and French.”
The basis, heart and soul of Russian national culture is Russian folklore, this is the treasure, this is what has filled Russian people from the inside since ancient times, and this internal Russian folk culture ultimately gave birth to a whole galaxy of great Russian writers, composers, artists, scientists in the 17th-19th centuries , military men, philosophers, whom the whole world knows and respects:
Zhukovsky V.A., Ryleev K.F., Tyutchev F.I., Pushkin A.S., Lermontov M.Yu., Saltykov-Shchedrin M.E., Bulgakov M.A., Tolstoy L.N., Turgenev I.S., Fonvizin D.I., Chekhov A.P., Gogol N.V., Goncharov I.A., Bunin I.A., Griboedov A.S., Karamzin N.M., Dostoevsky F. M., Kuprin A.I., Glinka M.I., Glazunov A.K., Mussorgsky M.P., Rimsky-Korsakov N.A., Tchaikovsky P.I., Borodin A.P., Balakirev M. A.A., Rachmaninov S.V., Stravinsky I.F., Prokofiev S.S., Kramskoy I.N., Vereshchagin V.V., Surikov V.I., Polenov V.D., Serov V.A. ., Aivazovsky I.K., Shishkin I.I., Vasnetsov V.N., Repin I.E., Roerich N.K., Vernadsky V.I., Lomonosov M.V., Sklifosovsky N.V., Mendeleev D.I., Sechenov I.M., Pavlov I.P., Tsiolkovsky K.E., Popov A.S., Bagration P.R., Nakhimov P.S., Suvorov A.V., Kutuzov M. I., Ushakov F.F., Kolchak A.V., Solovyov V.S., Berdyaev N.A., Chernyshevsky N.G., Dobrolyubov N.A., Pisarev D.I., Chaadaev P.E. ., there are thousands of them, which, one way or another, the whole earthly world knows. These are world pillars that grew up on Russian folk culture.
But in 1917, a second attempt was made in Russia to break the connection of times, to interrupt the Russian cultural heritage of ancient generations. The first attempt was made back in the years of the baptism of Rus'. But it was not a complete success, since the power of Russian folklore was based on the life of the people, on their Vedic natural worldview. But already somewhere in the sixties of the twentieth century, Russian folklore began to be gradually replaced by the popular pop genres of pop, disco and, as they say now, chanson (prison-thieve folklore) and other types of Soviet-style arts. But a special blow was dealt in the 90s. The word “Russian” was secretly forbidden to even be uttered, supposedly this word meant inciting national hatred. This situation continues to this day.
And there was no longer a single Russian people, they scattered them, they made them drunk, and they began to destroy them at the genetic level. Now in Rus' there is a non-Russian spirit of Uzbeks, Tajiks, Chechens and all other inhabitants of Asia and the Middle East, and in the Far East there are Chinese, Koreans, etc., and active, global Ukrainization of Russia is taking place everywhere.
English folklore - folk wisdom) is the name of folk art accepted in international scientific (including aesthetic) terminology. The term was introduced in 1846 by the English. scientist W. J. Toms; subsequently entered into scientific use in all countries. The concept of "F." initially covered all areas of the spiritual (and sometimes material) culture of the masses, then gradually its meaning narrowed. In modern There is no single generally accepted use of the term in science. In bourgeois aesthetics and cultural studies, the identification of the concepts of “F.” and “culture of uncivilized peoples”, or “primitive, communal culture”; The definition f is also common. as “relics of primitive culture in the culture of civilized societies”; at the same time, there is a definition of it as “the culture of the popular classes in civilized countries,” etc. In socialist countries, three main ones coexist. concepts that define poetry as: 1) oral and poetic creativity; 2) a complex of verbal, musical, gaming, dramatic and choreographic types of folk art; 3) folk art. culture in general (including fine and decorative arts). The second concept prevails. Reducing poetry only to verbal forms breaks the organic connections existing in folk art between words, music, play and other elements of art. creativity. An expanded understanding of F. as a whole art. culture ignores the specific differences between non-fixed and fixed (“objective”) forms of folk art. Marxist aesthetics proceeds from the dialectical-materialistic understanding of f. as a socially conditioned and historically developing art. activity of the masses of the people, which has a set of interrelated specific features (collectivity of the creative process, traditionality, unfixed forms of transfer of production from generation to generation, multi-elementity, variability), closely related to the work activity, life, and customs of the people. Having emerged as a precursor, throughout the centuries-old history of mankind, fresco has been both art and non-art, combining aesthetic and non-aesthetic functions. Not yet being “artistic production as such” (Marx), painting should not be identified with professional art (although it does not exclude the emergence of masters). Being the source of literature, composer's music, and theater, F. does not lose its relatively independent place in the history of art. It represents a system of types that is not entirely correlated with the system of genera and genres of professional art. The art of each nation is distinguished by its originality and pronounced ethnic identity, the richness of regional and local stylistic forms within each national art. At the same time, F, of all nations, expressing the worldview of the working masses, is characterized by the similarity of social and aesthetic ideals and ideological content.
Excellent definition
Folklore
English folklore, folk-lore) - folk art, art created by the people and existing among the broad masses (epics, fairy tales, ditties, proverbs, songs, dances, etc.). Are there verbal folklore (folk poetry), musical, dance, etc. (in the cultural aspect)? in the “broad” sense, all folk traditional peasant spiritual and partly material culture, and in the “narrow” sense - oral peasant verbal art. tradition. Folklore is a set of structures integrated by word and speech, regardless of what non-verbal elements they are associated with. It would probably be more accurate and definite to use the old one from the 20-30s. terminology that has fallen out of use. the phrase “oral literature” or not very specific sociological. limitation “oral folk literature”. This use of the term is determined by different concepts and interpretations of the connections between the subject of folkloristics and other forms and layers of culture, the unequal structure of culture in different countries of Europe and America in those decades of the last century when ethnography and folkloristics arose, the different rates of subsequent development, and the different composition of the main fund of texts. , which science used in each country. In modern times In folklore, four main concepts enjoy the greatest authority, which at the same time constantly interact: a) folklore - orally transmitted common experience and knowledge. This means all forms of spiritual culture, and with the most expanded interpretation, also certain forms of material culture. Only a sociological limitation (“common people”) and a historical and cultural criterion are introduced - archaic forms that are dominant or function as relics. (The word “common people” is more definite than “folk”, in a sociological sense, and does not contain an evaluative meaning (“ National artist", "people's poet"); b) folklore - popular artistic creativity or, according to a more modern definition, “artistic communication”. This concept allows us to extend the use of the term “folklore” to the sphere of music, choreography, and depiction. etc. folk art; c) folklore - a common verbal tradition. At the same time, from all forms of common people’s activity, those that are associated with the word are distinguished; d) folklore - oral tradition. In this case, orality is given paramount importance. This makes it possible to distinguish folklore from other verbal forms (first of all, to contrast it with literature). That. We have before us the following concepts: sociological (and historical-cultural), aesthetic, philological. and theoretical-communicative (oral, direct communication). In the first two cases, this is a “broad” use of the term “folklore”, and in the last two – two variants of its “narrow” use. The unequal use of the term “folklore” by supporters of each of the concepts indicates the complexity of the subject of folkloristics, its connections with various types of people. activities and people. everyday life Depending on which particular connections are given particular importance and which are considered secondary, peripheral, the fate of the main term of folkloristics within the framework of a particular concept is formed. Therefore, the named concepts in in a certain sense not only intersect, but sometimes do not seem to contradict each other. Thus, if the most important features of folklore are verbality and orality, then this does not necessarily entail a denial of connections with other artists. forms of activity or, even more so, unwillingness to take into account the fact that folklore has always existed in the context of folk everyday culture. That is why the dispute that flared up more than once was so meaningless - is folkloristics a philological or ethnographic science. If we are talking about verbal structures, then their study must inevitably be called philological, but since these structures function in folk life, they are studied by ethnography. In this sense, folkloristics is simultaneously an integral part of both sciences, at every moment of its existence. However, this does not prevent it from being independent in a certain respect - the specificity of the research methods of folkloristics inevitably develops at the intersection of these two sciences, as well as musicology (ethnomusicology - see Ethnomusicology), social psychology, etc. It is characteristic that after the disputes of the 50-60s. about the nature of folklore (and not only in our country), folkloristics was noticeably philologized and at the same time ethnographicized and moved closer to musicology and the general theory of culture (works of E.S. Markaryan, M.S. Kagan, theory of ethnicity by Yu.V. Bromley, semiotics of culture and etc.). The first and most expanding. the concept in its specific outlines could and should have arisen in the early days of the development of ethnography and folkloristics. These sciences could not yet offer a unified method for studying such diverse areas folk culture as a fairy tale (or ballad), a folk dwelling, an epic song and the blacksmith's craft. At the same time, they were not ready for a differentiated consideration of different spheres of traditional culture. The second concept (aesthetic), being rigidly programmed (only artistic forms of folk culture), is fraught with ignoring the natural nature of traditional archaic forms of folklore in the context of folk culture. The clear emphasis of the adjective “artistic” constantly threatens to turn into an evaluative category; the criterion is very relative. Aesthetic Upon closer examination, the function of many folklore genres turns out to be not the only one, not the dominant one. In its more or less pure form, it was formed relatively late. However, it was formed late even in the sphere of professional culture. So, in the history of Russian. lit. prose is what could be called fiction, for a cut aesthetic. function became dominant, arose only in the 17th century. Medieval literature, music, choreography, will depict. art in late times is perceived as predominantly artistic phenomena , however, in most cases the dominant function for them was practical, informational, magical, religious, and aesthetic. the function very often remained secondary, accompanying, arising at least in syncretism. unity with the above or other functions. In such a situation, dividing into artistic and non-artistic is impossible: one flows into the other and exists in an organic complex. Moreover, such a dissection is impossible in the sphere of folklore. Folklore genres are grouped into two unities: the first of them is dominated by some kind of extra-aesthetic. function, secondly - aesthetic. The first includes ritual folklore, spells (the main function of which is magical and also ritual), lamentations (for those reasons), that means. part of the legends and tales (the function of which is primarily informational and which were not always retold “artistically”, at least the performers did not have such a psychological attitude). In the second - fairy tales, epic and historical. songs (in combination with the information function, acting in the form of historical memory), ballads, historical. songs and some other genres. The above is comparable to the situation that has always been characteristic of folk art. In peasant life there were almost no things that were not practical. appointments. Carving on the pediment of the hut, painting and carving on the spinning wheel, shape and ornament on household ceramics, decorations on women's clothing and hats, etc. organically combined practical and artistic. The study of folk art is one of the natural sections of ethnography, but to the same extent - the history of art, just as verbal folklore is one of the sections of philology and ethnography. Even folk music, considered in its entirety (“music of oral tradition,” as musicologists sometimes call it), contains forms with a very distinct practicality. function. Such is, for example, pastoral music, especially developed in mountainous regions, as well as forms associated with the most diverse. magical actions. Of course, there are also complexes (song, instrumental), aesthetic. the function of which is quite developed, but they can be understood in connection with those complexes for which it is practical. the function is equally important or simply dominant. The third of the above concepts highlights verbal forms and recognizes folklore as speech, verbal communication. This raises two problems. The first is the separation of folklore from everyday, business, practical life. speech. If any language is not just a tool for speaking or writing, but a system that models a human being. the world, ideas about the world, a picture of the world, then folklore (as well as mythology, literature) is a secondary modeling system that uses language as a material. The second problem is that, in contrast to everyday speech practice, which generates one-time texts according to certain rules (grammatical, logical, etc.), which together constitute the tradition of the language in which speakers communicate, folklore tradition is a transmission texts, the entry of texts into tradition, their assimilation and reproduction. There is also no clearly defined boundary here. Texts are delivered into tradition precisely in the process of verbal communication. Initially, one-off texts are created, including future folklore ones. These are texts of minimal volume - phraseological units, stable speech patterns that acquire a secondary meaning, a secondary modeling character, these are, as it were, “secondary words” that enter from speech into the tradition of the language. They acquire their function and become the simplest elementary folklore forms. The largest texts in terms of volume are contaminated fairy tales, epic poems, etc. Between the elementary and maximum forms there is a whole variety of folklore genres that have a wide variety of functions and structure. A differentiated approach is needed to closed and open structures (compare fairy tales and lamentations or lullabies), as well as to structures that have strong (all ritual folklore, play songs, etc.) and weak extra-textual connections (epic songs, ballads, many types of lyrical songs, etc.) Extra-textual connections are one of the most important criteria distinguishing a whole group of folk genres and literature. And finally, the fourth concept emphasizes orality as the most important feature of folklore. It is closely related to the third philological concept and is built on the desire to highlight oral forms among verbal forms, to connect the main features of folklore with a fundamentally different type of communication than in literature - direct and contact (fase to phase communication, direkte Kommunikation), as well as with the role of memory in the preservation and functioning of folklore, with the functioning of the text as a means of realizing both the process and the result of communication, with the variation and role in it of the performer (subject of communication) and the perceiver (recipient) as a potential performer. Theoretically, no less important is the problem of feedback, the dependence of the performer and his text on the listeners and their reaction in the process of perceiving the text, as well as the process of forming verbal formulas - stereotypes (the role of which in the performance process was written by A. Lord and his followers, and in Russia back in the mid-19th century - A.F. Gilferding). Development of the problem of orality in the 20th century. actually it was not her discovery that was specific. phenomena. “Orality” and “nationality” (= common people) figured in all four concepts, which were discussed above. This obliges us to evaluate “nationality,” at least purely theoretically, as a sociologist. a category that constantly appears in the works of folklorists. It arose in connection with folklore during a period that in the history of social thought is usually called romantic. This was the time when folkloristics (as well as ethnography) matured as a science. In the historical and cultural sense, this was the initial period of urbanization of the most developed countries Europe, when the process of eliminating archaic traditions began to take shape. Ethnography and folkloristics arose at a time when the ground began to disappear under their feet. The bearers of the archaic tradition increasingly turned out to be people from the lower social classes - peasants and the lower strata of townspeople. They seemed to folklorists to be the only guardians of ethnicity. traditions that at the time of maturation of the national. European identity peoples acquired special significance and a special cultural status. The parting with the archaic tradition stimulated the creation of a kind of illusion - the society of the New Age sometimes began to seem devoid of any tradition in comparison with the outgoing “traditional society”. Modern cultural studies emphasizes the connection between “culture and tradition.” There is no society without culture, i.e., according to E.S. Markarian, - an adaptive mechanism that ensures the functioning of the society. Such a mechanism cannot be formed without the “non-genetic memory of the collective” (Yu.M. Lotman), i.e. without tradition, which means heaven. at least represents a system of socially significant stereotypes. The transition from a pre-industrial society to an industrial and urbanized one was accompanied not by the elimination of tradition as such or (which in this case is the same thing) culture as such, but by the replacement of one system of traditions by another, one type of culture by another. That. the opposition of the pre-industrial society as “traditional” to the industrial society as “non-traditional” has no theoretical meaning. foundation and is preserved by inertia or (more often) very conditionally. This also applies to folklore. Any transmission of a text, folklore or literary, oral or enshrined in writing, distributed orally, by replicating a manuscript or a printed book, is a tradition. The difference between them is the difference in the content of what is transmitted through direct or indirect communication, in the methods of forming such transmission, in the set of stereotypes, the pace and methods of updating them. After the above considerations related to the outlined four main concepts of using the term “folklore,” the question arises: is it possible, taking them into account, to give a definition of folklore that could still be “cross-cutting,” i.e. correct for different peoples at different stages of history? If we focus on a narrow definition of folklore, associated with a philological and information-theoretical concept, but also take into account a broader ethnographic. context, then we could say that folklore is a set of verbal or verbal-nonverbal structures that function in everyday life. This refers to structures that function orally in contact groups (family, community, locality, district, region, ethnic group and within the area of a particular language or bilingualism). This definition does not contain any characteristics of content or style. features, genre, plot repertoire, because despite all the traditional nature of folklore, if we consider its centuries-old history, it was a dynamic phenomenon. At least, at different stages of the history of spiritual culture, it acquired certain (not always known to us) features. The functions of folklore as a whole and its individual genres could not help but change depending on the general changes in the structure of the entire spiritual culture, on the type of correlation between folklore and, relatively speaking, “non-folklore” forms and types of spiritual culture. If we keep in mind only the aspect that interests us, then we could talk about three stages of development of spiritual culture. The first of them could be designated as syncretic (an archaic type society). Folklore forms, incl. and those to whom the Crimea was already to some extent familiar aesthetically. function in its archaic. varieties (often secondary and not dominant), were closely intertwined with diverse complexes, which later gave rise to the most diverse branches of spiritual culture - rituals, beliefs, religion, myths, historical. performances, songs, narrative genres, etc. At this stage, folklore can be considered all forms of spiritual culture associated with language, or more precisely, all traditional verbal texts that form secondary language modeling systems (monofolklorism). Already at this stage, systems of folklore texts that are complex in their composition and structure arise and function, serving the various needs of archaic. societies - communicative, cognitive, social-classification, semiotic, practical (experience of economic activities, hunting, fishing, military clashes, etc., enshrined in the word). Archaic the period of development of spiritual culture is replaced by a stage of dualism (or, in the terminology of Yu. Kristeva (see Kristeva), a “post-syncretistic” period), which is characterized by a gradual transition from homogeneous monofolkloristics to the parallel existence of everyday and, relatively speaking, “extra-domestic” forms spiritual culture related to language, i.e. forms that arise outside the life of the primary contact social group (including so-called professional forms) or, conversely, created by it, but consumed outside its borders. In this sense, spiritual culture did not develop in isolation, but according to general laws that covered both material culture and the sphere of social organization of the society. Vivid examples in this sense are folklore and literature. The advent of writing was an extremely important event. If the performance of folklore works and their perception were always simultaneous and carried out within the framework of a primary formal or informal social group of a contact nature, then the author of a literary work and his reader communicate through a written text, and can be separated from each other by decades or hundreds of kilometers, or both simultaneously. Archaic syncretistic. the complex is increasingly differentiated. Along with folklore, literary and professional depictions are gradually being formed. art and theater. Within the folklore layer, the process of genre differentiation continues. Genres with a dominant aesthetic are identified. function (fairy tale, epic song, love song, etc.) and genres, in which they are non-aesthetic. function still continues to dominate (spells and incantations, ritual songs, so-called “non-fairy prose”, spiritual poems, etc.). The second group of genres retains its syncretism. structure, strong extra-textual connections, etc. archaic. peculiarities. Folklore ceases to be the only form of culture associated with language, but on the scale of the ethnic group it continues to prevail for a long time, because in the everyday life of the masses still plays a vital role. Over time, folklore gradually begins to lose some of its functions and transfers them, to a greater or lesser extent, to literature, professional theater, professional music and choreography. New functions generated by the development of society, all the more, give rise to new forms that exist in parallel with folklore, sometimes genetically related to them, but are no longer folklore. Most Europeans peoples throughout the Middle Ages and in the first centuries after it, folklore permeated the life of not only the common people, but also the middle and upper strata of the society. Before the invention of printing, the number of handwritten copies of any lit. the work was insignificant. And literature itself, for example in Russia, as already mentioned, back in the 17th century. has just begun to take shape as fiction, which is characterized by the dominance of aesthetics. functions. If in professional art we constantly encounter various varieties of “folklorism”, i.e. with the secondary use of elements of folklore, then folk life, as a rule, still knows predominantly the direct (primary) continuation of tradition. Texts that are non-folklore in origin, when they enter the oral and popular sphere, usually experience intensive adaptation to tradition and traditional ways of functioning. The third stage of the relationship between folklore and non-folklore forms of spiritual culture is historically associated with the New Age. It can be conditionally called the stage of urbanization. The gradual or more rapid reorientation of the village towards urban values and forms of culture, the elimination of mass illiteracy, the development of education systems, printing, the press, and later radio, television and other technical means of mass communication leads to the fact that the social area of folklore forms continues (and now decisively) narrow. National nationalities emerge. forms of language and art. culture. Folklore heritage is more or less actively used in their creation, but generalization is limited. homogeneity (homogeneity) of spiritual culture develops not in the folklore sphere, but in the sphere of professional forms of literary, musical, theatrical, etc. creativity, just like the national the language develops as a written supra-dialectal language. This stage is characterized by the increasing penetration of professional forms into the life of the nation (including both its lower and higher social strata) through books, periodicals, cinema, radio, television, sound (and later video) reproducing mechanisms, etc. . With the very wide spread of written forms in conditions of mass literacy, new oral (more precisely, auditory and audiovisual) technical technologies are rapidly developing. forms of communication of a non-folklore nature, which are used, in particular, for the transmission of texts of both a literary and folklore (or conditionally folklore, secondary) nature. A network of over-(super-) contact connections is formed, which covers entire regions of the globe and overlaps the connections of contact groups of different scales. The latter play an increasingly smaller role in the process of transmission and accumulation of culture. Folklore heritage is increasingly preserved in generalized or secondary forms. This was the main direction of development. At the same time, in the 20th century. in a number of countries that suffered the most from the gigantic military clashes of the century, one can note periods when something like a backward movement took place, a resuscitation of oral forms of an everyday nature. This was especially evident in Russia during the Civil War and the Great Patriotic War. Let's lie. folkloristics, striving to understand the general patterns of development of folklore, cannot but take into account the fact that it is perceived by the peoples themselves as a precious ethnic expression for them. specificity, the spirit of the people. Of course, the relationship between the universal and the specifically ethnic is each time determined by the specific conditions of the development of an ethnos - the degree of its consolidation, the nature of its contacts with others. ethnic groups, characteristics of settlement, mentality of the people, etc. If we use the categories of generative grammar, we could say that general, international. patterns, as a rule, appear at the level of deep structures, and specific national ones - at the level of surface structures. If we turn, for example, to fairy tales or epic plots. songs (their international recurrence has been well studied), then one cannot help but state what their plots mean. degrees are international, and their embodiment in actual texts varies across different ethnicities. and local traditions, acquiring certain ethnic. features (language intimately connected with folklore, the realities of everyday life, beliefs, a set of characteristic motifs, from which, as A.N. Veselovsky said, “plots come to life,” especially the images of heroes and their behavior, natural conditions, in which action develops, characteristic social relationships, etc.). Both fairy tale and epic traditions create their own world, as it were, which has no direct analogies in reality. This world is invented by collective fantasy; it represents a transformed reality. However, no matter how complex the connection between fairy-tale reality and true reality is, it exists and reflects not simply and not only something universal, but also the peculiarities of the life and thinking of a certain people. Lit.: Kagarov E.G. What is folklore // Artistic folklore. T. 4/5. M., 1929; Gusev V.E. Folklore: (History of the term and its modern meanings) // SE. 1966. N 2: Same. Aesthetics of folklore. L., 1967; Rusin M.Yu. Folklore: Traditions and modernity. Kyiv, 1991; Folklore in the modern world: Aspects and ways of research. M., 1991; Putilov B.N. Folklore and folk culture. St. Petersburg, 1994; Historical and ethnographic research on folklore. M., 1994; Mirolyubov Yu.P. Russian pagan folklore: essays on life and morals. M., 1995. K. V. Chistov. Cultural studies of the twentieth century. Encyclopedia. M.1996
Folklore and literature are two types of verbal art. However, folklore is not only the art of words, but also an integral part of folk life, closely intertwined with its other elements, and this is the significant difference between folklore and literature. But also as an art of words, folklore differs from literature. These differences do not remain unshakable at various stages of historical development, and yet the main, stable features of each of the types of verbal art can be noted. Literature is an individual art, folklore is a collective art. In literature there is innovation, and in folklore tradition comes to the fore. Literature exists in written form, a means of storing and transmitting an artistic text, a book serves as an intermediary between the author and his addressee, while a work of folklore is reproduced orally and stored in the memory of the people. A work of folklore lives in many variants; with each performance it is reproduced as if anew, with direct contact between the performer-improviser and the audience, which not only directly influences the performer (feedback), but sometimes also joins in the performance.
Anika the warrior and death. Splint.
Publications of Russian folklore.
The term “folklore,” which was introduced into science by the English scientist W. J. Toms in 1846, translated means “folk wisdom.” Unlike many Western European scientists who classify folklore as the most diverse aspects of folk life (even culinary recipes), including elements of material culture (housing, clothing), domestic scientists and their like-minded people in other countries consider oral folk art to be folklore - poetic works created by the people and existing among the broad masses, along with musical and dance folklore. This approach takes into account the artistic nature of folklore as the art of words. Folkloristics studies folklore.
The history of folklore goes back to the deep past of humanity. M. Gorky defined folklore as the oral creativity of the working people. Indeed, folklore arose in the process of labor, always expressed the views and interests of mainly working people, in it, in the most varied forms, a person’s desire was manifested to make his work easier, to make it joyful and free.
Primitive man spent all his time on work or preparing for it. The actions through which he sought to influence the forces of nature were accompanied by words: spells and conspiracies were pronounced, the forces of nature were addressed with a request, threat or gratitude. This indivisibility various types essentially an artistic activity (although the creators-performers themselves set purely practical goals) - the unity of words, music, dance, decorative art - is known in science as “primitive syncretism”, traces of it are still noticeable in folklore. As a person accumulates more and more significant life experience, which needed to be passed on to subsequent generations, the role of verbal information increased: after all, it was the word that could most successfully communicate not only about what was happening Here And Now, but also about what happened or will happen somewhere And once upon a time or some day. The separation of verbal creativity into an independent form of art is the most important step in the prehistory of folklore, in its independent, although associated with mythological consciousness, state. The decisive event that paved the line between mythology and folklore proper was the appearance of the fairy tale. It was in the fairy tale that imagination - this, according to K. Marx, a great gift that contributed so much to the development of mankind - was first recognized as an aesthetic category.
With the formation of nations, and then states, a heroic epic took shape: the Indian Mahabharata, Irish sagas, Kyrgyz Manas, Russian epics. Lyrics not related to ritual arose even later: it showed interest in human personality, to experiences common man. Folk songs from the period of feudalism tell about serfdom, about the hard lot of women, about people's defenders, such as Karmelyuk in Ukraine, Janosik in Slovakia, Stepan Razin in Rus'.
When studying folk art, one should constantly keep in mind that people are not a homogeneous concept and are historically changeable. The ruling classes sought by all means to introduce into the masses thoughts, moods, works that were contrary to the interests of the working people - songs loyal to tsarism, “spiritual poems”, etc. Moreover, in the people themselves, centuries of oppression accumulated not only hatred for exploiters, but also ignorance and downtroddenness. The history of folklore is both a process of constant growth in the self-awareness of the people and the overcoming of what their prejudices were expressed in.
According to the nature of the connection with folk life, folklore is distinguished between ritual and non-ritual. The folklore performers themselves adhere to a different classification. For them, it is important that some works are sung, others are spoken. Philological scholars classify all works of folklore into one of three categories - epic, lyric or drama, as is customary in literary criticism.
Some folklore genres are interconnected by a common sphere of existence. If pre-revolutionary folklore was very clearly distinguished by the social class of its speakers (peasant, worker), now age differences are more significant. A special section of folk poetry is children's folklore - playful (drawings of lots, counting rhymes, various play songs) and non-playful (tongue twisters, horror stories, changelings). The main genre of modern youth folklore has become the amateur, so-called bard song.
The folklore of every nation is unique, as is its history, customs, and culture. Epics and ditties are inherent only in Russian folklore, dumas - in Ukrainian, etc. The lyrical songs of every nation are original. Even the shortest works of folklore - proverbs and sayings - express the same idea in each nation in its own way, and where we say: “Silence is golden,” the Japanese, with their cult of flowers, will say: “Silence is flowers.”
However, already the first folklorists were struck by the similarity of fairy tales, songs, and legends belonging to different peoples. This was explained at first common origin related (for example, Indo-European) peoples, then by borrowing: one people adopted plots, motifs, images from another.
A consistent and convincing explanation of all phenomena of similarity can only be provided by historical materialism. Based on a wealth of factual material, Marxist scientists explained that similar plots, motifs, and images arose among peoples who were at the same stages of socio-cultural development, even if these peoples lived on different continents and did not meet each other. Thus, a fairy tale is a utopia, a dream of justice, which developed among various peoples as private property appeared in them, and with it social inequality. Primitive society did not know a fairy tale on any of the continents.
Fairy tales, heroic epics, ballads, proverbs, sayings, riddles, lyrical songs of different peoples, differing in national identity both in form and content, are at the same time created on the basis of laws common to a certain level of artistic thinking and established by tradition. Here is one of the “natural experiments” that confirms this position. The French poet P. J. Beranger wrote the poem “The Old Corporal”, using as a basis (and at the same time significantly reworking it) a “complaint” - a special kind of French folk ballad. The poet V. S. Kurochkin translated the poem into Russian, and thanks to the music of A. S. Dargomyzhsky, the song penetrated the Russian folklore repertoire. And when, many years later, it was recorded on the Don, it was discovered that the folk singers had made significant changes to the text (and, by the way, to the music), as if essentially restoring the original form of the French “complaint,” which the Don Cossacks, of course, had never heard. This is reflected in the general laws of folk song creativity.
Literature appeared later than folklore and has always, although in different ways, used its experience. In the same time literary works have long penetrated folklore and influenced its development.
The nature of the interaction between the two poetic systems is historically determined and therefore varies at different stages artistic development. On this path, the process of redistribution of the social spheres of action of literature and folklore, which takes place at sharp turns in history, which, based on the material of Russian culture of the 17th century, is extremely important. noted by Academician D.S. Likhachev. If back in the 16th century. storytellers were kept even at the royal court, then a century and a half later, folklore disappears from the life and everyday life of the ruling classes, now oral poetry is the property of almost exclusively the masses, and literature - of the ruling classes. Thus, later developments can sometimes change the emerging trends in the interaction of literature and folklore, and sometimes in the most significant way. However, the completed stages are not forgotten. What began in the folk art of the time of Columbus and Afanasy Nikitin uniquely echoed in the quests of M. Cervantes and G. Lorca, A. S. Pushkin and A. T. Tvardovsky.
In the interaction of folk art with realistic literature The inexhaustibility of folklore as an eternal source of continuously developing art is revealed more fully than ever before. The literature of socialist realism, like no other, is based not only on the experience of its immediate predecessors, but also on all the best that characterizes literary process throughout its entire length, and on folklore in all its inexhaustible richness.
The law “On the Protection and Use of Cultural Historical Monuments”, adopted in 1976, also includes “recordings of folklore and music” among national treasures. However, recording is only an auxiliary means of recording folklore text. But even the most accurate recording cannot replace the living spring of folk poetry.
Hello, dear readers of the blog site. Modern literature has its beginning and one of its forerunners was the folklore genre.
Even before the invention of printing, works of folk art were passed on by word of mouth.
Let's take a look today at what folklore is in the modern sense, what functions it performs, who studies it and how, by what features folklore works can be distinguished and, of course, let's look at examples of such works in Russian creativity.
Folklore is our genetics
The term “folklore” (from the English folk-lore “folk wisdom”) appeared in Europe at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries. In Russia it began to be actively used in the 30s of the 19th century.
He generalized ideas about literary and musical works (songs, dances) created by a group of unknown authors from the people over several tens (or hundreds) of years in the distant historical past.
Until the twentieth century, folklore also called works of decorative, applied and architectural creativity.
Simply put, folklore is oral folk art. Currently, the concept is actively used in the musical and literary sense.
We are interested in the latter, and it is important to note that it is the first source of the emergence of fiction. Its second source is spiritual literature created in such cultural centers, like monasteries, influenced the people’s worldview with a cementing moral principle.
Folklore opened the floodgates of everyday colloquial speech, the sources of verbal imagery and fairy-tale fantasy.
Genres of folklore
Works of oral folk art are usually divided into three varieties:
- Lyrical;
- Epic;
- Dramatic.
As in fiction, epics are represented by traditional genres for each genre. Lyrical songs reveal hidden themes of folk life.
The following types are distinguished:
- historical;
- love;
- wedding;
- funeral;
- labor;
- road (drivers);
- robbers;
- comic.
Epic genres- , fairy tale, fairy tale, true story, fable, bylichka, byvalshchina.
Small genres folklore - proverb, saying, tongue twister, riddle, joke - also elements of the epic.
To present folklore dramatic works, you need to see the folk fair theater "rajek". The texts for him were written in a special verse - raeshnik. Christmas mysteries, farcical comedies, cartoons, everyday sketches - all this is folk drama.
Features of folklore works
Having carefully read the definition, we can identify several important features of folklore:
it's our genetics. If a people disappears from the face of the Earth, their culture can be “pieced together” with the help of fairy tales, legends, proverbs, and songs.
Russian folklore
Works of Russian literary folklore are studied from the first stages schools. These are Russian folk tales, proverbs, riddles. Older children get acquainted with epics about Russian heroes.
In high school schools study folklore sources of works classical literature: stories and poems by A. S. Pushkin, M. Yu. Lermontov, N. V. Gogol. Without knowing folk stories and characters, which in a sense have become the ABC of national imagery, it is impossible to fully understand the diverse world of Russian culture.
Many people think that apart from “Chicken Ryaba”, “Kolobok” and “Turnip” the Russian people have nothing to tell. This is wrong. Open a collection of fairy tales - exciting reading is guaranteed!
In a moment of lyrical melancholy, leaf through the collection of folk songs, or better yet, listen to them in musical accompaniment. What is sung about in them concerns everyone, touches the most secret strings, causes both smiles and tears. This is our sounding life, our knowing that everything in the world is repeatable.
What is the meaning of folklore works
Folk art is always functional, it does not appear out of nowhere and always has a clear goal. Scientists suggest share works of folklore for the following types:
- Ritual;
- Non-ritual.
The first type describes the repetition of ritual actions that are significant for many generations life events. Ritual folklore is divided into family and calendar. The first concerns the milestones of family life: matchmaking and weddings, the birth of children, the death of relatives. It is widely represented by wedding and funeral songs, lamentations, and incantations.
Worth it separately children's folklore with his lullabies, nursery rhymes, petes.
Non-ritual folklore is associated with the calendar circle of peasant life: the change of seasons and the economic activity of the toiling farmer. Each event of the cycle is accompanied by special songs: carols, chants, smells, etc.
Non-ritual genres include epics, fairy tales, ditties, riddles, proverbs, and sayings.
Studying folklore
You see how important folklore is! That is why it was necessary to create a separate scientific discipline to study it. It's called folkloristics. Along with ethnography, this science explores the life of ordinary people.
Ethnographers are engaged in describing dwellings, clothing, dishes, food, rituals, discovering objects of material culture, and folklorists do the same when studying artistic expression.
Their goal is to trace how the types and genres of artistic creativity changed, how new plots and motifs appeared, what social and psychological phenomena were reflected in certain works.
Outstanding domestic scientists I. M. Snegirev, I. P. Sakharov, F. I. Buslavev, A. N. Veselovsky, P. N. Rybnikov, V. Ya. Propp and many others became the first collectors of folklore works.
Under their editorship, collections of proverbs and tales were published, recorded by them on expeditions around the country. By obtaining ancient examples of folk art, folklorists give readers a rich world of our sounding past.
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Folklore
Folklore
FOLKLORE - artistic creativity of the broad masses, mainly oral and poetic creativity. The term was first introduced into scientific use in 1846 by the English scientist William Toms.
Literally translated, Folk-lore means: folk wisdom, folk knowledge. This term at first denoted only the subject of science itself, but sometimes it also began to be used to refer to the scientific discipline that studies this material; however, the latter is more correctly called folkloristics.
In addition to the term “folklore”, other terms are found in scientific use in different countries: German - Volkskunde, in a narrower sense of the word - Volksdichtung; French - Traditions populaires. In the 19th century In our country, the somewhat broadly interpreted term “folk literature” or “folk poetry” prevailed.
The artistic and historical significance of folklore was deeply revealed by A. M. Gorky, whose statements are of guiding importance in the development of the main problems of folkloristics. In his report at the First Congress of Soviet Writers, Gorky said:
“I again draw your attention, comrades, to the fact that the deepest and brightest, artistically perfect types of heroes were created by folklore, oral creativity working people. The perfection of such images as Hercules, Prometheus, Mikula Selyaninovich, Svyatogor, then Doctor Faust, Vasilisa the Wise, the ironic successor Ivan the Fool and, finally, Petrushka defeating the doctor, the priest, the policeman, the devil and even death - all these are images , in the creation of which rationality and intuition, thought and feeling were harmoniously combined. Such a combination is possible only with the direct participation of the creator in the work of creating reality, in the struggle for the renewal of life" (M. Gorky, Soviet literature, report on I All-Union Congress Soviet writers, M., 1935, p. 12).
F. is poetic creativity that grows on the basis of the labor activity of mankind, reflecting the experience of thousands of years. F., being ancient written literature and passed on from mouth to mouth, from generation to generation, it is a most valuable source for knowledge of the history of every nation, no matter what stage of social development it stands at. At the same congress of writers, A. M. Gorky addressed the writers of the Caucasus and Central Asia: “The beginning of the art of words is in folklore. Collect your folklore, learn from it, process it. He gives a lot of material to both you and us, the poets and prose writers of the Union. The better we know the past, the easier, the more deeply and joyfully we will understand the great significance of the present we are creating.” M. Gorky emphasizes in F. its labor and collective principles, its materialistic and realistic basis, and its artistic power. While highlighting the specific features inherent in oral folk poetry, M. Gorky at the same time does not contrast F. with written fiction as phenomena isolated from each other. In folk art he sees that deep and fertile soil on which essentially all the greatest works of literature rested.
Poetic poetry cannot be considered in isolation from other manifestations of spiritual culture. Oral folk poetry is closely connected with the areas of folk stage art (facial expressions, gestures, dramatic action - in the performance of not only the so-called “folk drama” and dramatized rituals - weddings, funerals, agricultural, round dances and games, but also in the telling of epics and fairy tales , when performing songs), choreographic art(folk dances, dances, round dances), musical and vocal arts. Consequently, folklore studies includes some sections of such disciplines as theater studies, choreography, and musicology (a section of it called “musical ethnography” or “musical philosophy”). At the same time, poetry cannot be studied without the help of linguistics, without studying the dialect in which these oral poetic works are created. However, folkloristics is, first of all, a part of literary criticism, and f. is a part of verbal art. F., like written fiction, is verbal and figurative knowledge, a reflection of social reality. But the creation of f. by the masses, the conditions of f.’s existence, the nature of artistic creativity in the pre-capitalist era, when a significant part of the old f. fiction. The collective principle in f., the anonymity of most folklore monuments, the significant role of tradition in f. - all this leaves its mark on f. and determines certain features of its study.
Folkloristics as a science has existed for almost a hundred years. Its emergence not as a random and amateur collection of oral poetic materials and their literary processing (such characteristic phenomena for Europe at the end of the 18th century, but for Russia in the first decades XIX century), and as a scientific study of F. it dates back to the first decade of the last century. The origin of folkloristics is closely connected with that broad trend in the field of philosophy, science and art of the early 19th century, which was called romanticism. In the idealistic romantic philosophy of that time, the assertion was very popular that the history of a people is determined not by the will of individuals, but is a manifestation of its “spirit”, the expression of which is all areas of collective creativity, where the creator is the people themselves (language, mythology, .).
The special sciences also reflected these trends. The linguistics of that time reflected them especially clearly; It was at that time that comparative linguistics was born (see Linguistics).
In the publication of F.'s first romantic publications, specific political goals clearly shine through. To understand them, one only has to take into account that these first publications coincide in time with the Napoleonic wars. Such is the famous collection of German folk songs compiled by the poets Arnim and Brentano, “Des Knaben Wunderhorn” (3 Tle, Heidelberg, 1806-1808), “Die deutschen Volksbucher” by Görres (Heidelberg, 1807) and finally “Kinder und Hausmarchen” by the brothers Grimm ( 2 Bde, B., 1812-1814).
The leading role in the actual scientific development of philosophy in the era of romanticism was played by the brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm (especially Jacob). In his general theoretical reasoning and in his works on specific issues of the history of law, language, and folklore literature, Jacob Grimm was guided, by his own admission, by “patriotic goals.” When studying folklore, Grimm used the same comparative method as he used in his work on language. Jacob Grimm and all his followers explained similar phenomena in the poetry of European peoples by the inheritance of a common poetic wealth from a single “Proto-Indo-European” ancestor. In an effort to reveal the most ancient features in fairy tales and legends, Grimm and his followers, in works of oral poetry, paid main attention to the remains of religious ideas; interest in myths especially increases when Sanskritologists (A. Kuhn, M. Müller) are followers of Grimm, who tried to find the origins of European folklore in Vedic hymns and spells; hence the Grimm school itself received the name “mythological” school in the history of science. With the greatest completeness, Grimm’s views on the nature of oral poetry and the history of its development since ancient times are presented by him in the book “German Mythology” (1835). Grimm's views were further developed in the mid-19th century. in the works of his followers - German scientists Kuhn, Schwartz, Mannhardt, English scientist Max Muller, French scientist Pictet and Russian scientists F. I. Buslaev, A. N. Afanasyev and O. F. Miller.
In Russia, as in Germany, the “mythological” school was also the first stage in the development of scientific folklore. As in Germany, scientific research was preceded by a period of romantic collection of “folk poetry” and its use for artistic purposes (folklore themes in Zhukovsky, Pushkin, early Gogol, etc.). P. V. Kireevsky’s passion for collecting folk songs yielded enormous results. Kireevsky, like other representatives of Slavophilism, in his hobbies was guided by sentiments close to German nationalist romanticism. Kireyevsky and other Slavophiles were not so much scientists as primarily publicists. In Russia, the first truly scientific folklorists were F. I. Buslaev and A. N. Afanasyev. The volume and nature of Buslaev’s activities are very reminiscent of the activities of Jacob Grimm. He was both a linguist and a historian of national literature and folk literature. Buslaev, basically, applied methodological techniques and theoretical guidelines of the mythological school to Russian and generally Slavic material. Buslaev’s views on folk poetry were set out clearly in his books: “Historical Sketches of Russian Folk Literature and Art” (2 vols., St. Petersburg, 1861) and “Folk Poetry” (St. Petersburg, 1887). The most extreme and ardent supporter of the mythological school in Russia was A. N. Afanasyev. To a much greater extent than Buslaev, he was characterized by all those passions for linguistic and mythological convergences that led to the fantastic constructions of many European mythologists. Afanasyev combined his numerous articles on mythology in a systematized and processed form in the famous three-volume work “Poetic Views of the Slavs on Nature” (M., 1865-1869). Afanasyev also deserves credit for compiling the first scientific collection of Russian fairy tales, “Russian Folk Tales” (1st ed. in 8 issues, M., from 1855-1863). Orest Fedorovich Miller was also a major representative of the mythological school in Russia. In his huge book “Comparative and critical observations on the layer composition of the Russian folk epic. Ilya Muromets and the Kiev heroism" (St. Petersburg, 1869) Orest Miller applied the principles of the mythological school to the interpretation of the Russian epic epic, but with such straightforwardness and lack of critical tact that not only its opponents, but even its supporters had to point out the author’s excessive hobbies. Many works of the Kharkov scientist A. were written in the spirit of mythological theory. A. Potebnya, who devoted a number of his works to the disclosure of specific poetic images in folk songs.
With the change in socio-economic life in Europe by the 60s. XIX century, with the development of industry, intensified by the expansion of European capital, with the deployment of the colonial policy of European states, issues of trade, financial, political and cultural relations with non-European countries began to gain increasing importance. New worlds opened up, and it became necessary to explain the newly discovered facts, in particular in F. For example. It turned out to be completely impossible to explain the similarity of plots in fairy tales of different peoples by their origin from a common ancestor. There had to be a new attempt to explain this similarity. Such an attempt was made by the German scientist Benfey. In 1859 he published with German translation a collection of Hindu stories “Panchatantra” (VI century AD), providing the publication with a long preface, which was destined to become a turning point in the development of folklore. Benfey pointed out the striking similarity of Sanskrit tales with European ones and with tales of other, non-European peoples. The similarity of the plots, according to Benfey, is caused not by the kinship of peoples, but by cultural and historical connections between them, borrowing; hence the names of Benfey’s theory - “comparative theory”, “borrowing theory”, “migration theory”, “the theory of wandering plots”, “wandering plots”.
The main reservoir from which European peoples drew materials for poetic creativity, according to representatives of the Benfey school, was ancient India.
For several decades this theory enjoyed great success. A number of supporters of the mythological school also joined the Benfeist camp, for example. Max Müller, in Russia - Buslaev, who wrote a vivid essay in the spirit of a new direction: “Passing stories and stories” (collection “My Leisure”, part II, M., 1886). The famous art critic V.V. Stasov passionately, with great exaggeration, defended Benfey’s point of view in his article “The Origin of Russian Epics” (“Bulletin of Europe”, 1868, Nos. 1-4, 6 and 7, reprinted in Vol. III Collection . op. Stasov, St. Petersburg, 1894).
The famous academician A. N. Veselovsky also worked in the spirit of the theory of borrowing for a long time. This is for example his work “From the history of literary communication between East and West. Slavic legends about Solomon and Kitovras and Western legends about Morolf and Merlin" (St. Petersburg, 1872). In the spirit of the same school of borrowing, Academician V. F. Miller wrote his first major work on Russian poetry (“Excursions into the field of Russian folk epic,” M., 1892). A. I. Kirpichnikov (“The experience of comparative study of Western and Russian epic.” Poems of the Lombard cycle, M., 1873), academician I. N. Zhdanov (“On the literary history of Russian epic poetry,” Kiev, worked in the direction of the same school. 1881, “Russian epic epic”, St. Petersburg, 1895, etc.), M. G. Khalansky (“South Slavic legends about Kralevich Mark in connection with the works of the Russian epic epic”, Warsaw, 1893-1895), A. M. Loboda (“Russian epics about matchmaking”, Kyiv, 1904) and many others. etc.
The famous Siberian traveler G. N. Potanin (“Eastern motives in the medieval European epic”, M., 1899) persistently, but without due methodological caution, defended the Eastern origin of the European heroic and fairy-tale epic.
Despite the enormous influence of the theory of borrowing on folklore studies in all countries, its weaknesses were gradually revealed: superficial, insufficiently careful use of plot comparison techniques and a tendency to talk about borrowing only on the basis of general plot similarities in legends, fairy tales, and epics. At the same time, it was lost sight of that the essence of the matter is not in the plot scheme only, but in the work of art taken as a whole, with all the features of its ideology and artistic form.
Some researchers, for example the French scientist Joseph Bedier, author of the monumental study “Fablio” (Paris, 1893), expressed a general skepticism about the futility of research on the migration of subjects. However, not all folklorists late XIX and the beginning of the 20th century. shared this pessimism.
So eg. the famous Russian Orientalist academician S. F. Oldenburg strongly objected to Bedier’s categorical statements and argued that in some cases it was possible to quite accurately establish borrowings and the path of migration of subjects.
When F. researchers encountered numerous cases of striking coincidences in the creativity of peoples not only unrelated to each other, but also far removed from each other geographically and historically, it turned out to be completely impossible to explain these coincidences by borrowing. Ethnographic, linguistic, and folklore studies acquired exceptional importance in Great Britain and the United States due to the enormous colonial conquests carried out by these states. As a result of accumulated observations by the English scientist Taylor (author famous book « Primitive culture") and his follower, the Scottish scientist Lang, put forward a new theory to explain the similarity of plots and motifs among a wide variety of peoples. This theory is called the “anthropological” theory. It was based on the position that all peoples generally go through the same paths of development and their poetic creativity is accomplished according to the same laws of psychology, therefore, it is completely natural to allow the independent emergence of poetic subjects among the most diverse peoples in the most remote geographical locations. Therefore, this theory is also called the “theory of spontaneous generation.” The anthropological school of the so-called anthropological school attached great importance. “survivals” or “relics,” i.e., remnants in poetry of elements more early cultures.
Behind last decades the principles of the anthropological school in England were carried out in the works of the famous ethnologist and historian James Fraser (author of the fundamental work on primitive religion “The Golden Bough”, in English (1890, the same, 3rd ed., in 12 vols., 1911-1915); on its abridged edition was translated into Russian, M., 1928, 4 issues). In his works, James Fraser exclusively great importance gives magic, which, in his opinion, played an extremely important role in primitive ritual actions and in the songs and other types of poetry associated with them. In the 20th century. On German soil, anthropological theory received some revision in the works of the famous psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (especially in his multi-volume “Psychology of Nations”), as well as in the German folklorists Leistner and von der Leyen.
Among the latter, this theory was modified into a “psychological” theory. Representatives of this school assigned great importance to the states of sleep and hallucinations in the process of creating poetic images and plots. One of the varieties of psychological school was the so-called. "Freudianism".
In Russia, anthropological and psychological school did not receive any noticeable development, except that many of the results of the anthropological school were used in the original teaching of Academician A. N. Veselovsky.
A. N. Veselovsky, who began his scientific activity in the spirit of the Benfey school of borrowing, and then mastered the principles of the anthropological school, combining them with the principles of Darwin's evolutionary theory, with Spencer's theory, made an attempt to draw a general picture of the development of poetic species. In his theoretical (unfinished) work: “Three chapters from historical poetics”, written by him in 1898-1899 (“ZhMNP”, 1899, Nos. 3-5, and separate ot., St. Petersburg, 1899, reprinted in Collected Works A. N. Veselovsky, series 1, vol. I, St. Petersburg, 1913), Veselovsky used the grandiose material of world poetry and made an attempt to establish the pattern of development of poetry in the first stages human culture, when different types of art were not yet separated from each other and when art itself was closely merged with the production and practical activities of man and religious and magical moments. He traced how poetry in its development moves from syncretism to separate, independent types of art, and within poetry there is a gradual differentiation of genera (epic, lyric, drama) and their types, through their gradual release from the ritual-magical complex. In parallel with the disclosure of the process from syncretism to differentiated types of poetry, Veselovsky established the development of poetic creativity along the line “from singer to poet.” With all the wealth of concrete observations made by Veselovsky, his theory as a whole cannot be considered correct, since the evolution of poetic forms was revealed to him immanently, although in some cases the material itself led him to pose problems about the connection between literature and social development.
Scientific theory Veselovsky is one of the most valuable elements of the legacy that remains from the bourgeois science of F. Unfortunately, Veselovsky’s works have still been little studied by Marxist literary criticism.
Another major phenomenon of bourgeois folkloristics should be considered the so-called. “historical school” led by academician V. F. Miller. This school has occupied a dominant position in Russian folklore scholarship since the mid-90s. right up to the Great October Socialist Revolution and even in the first years after it. The historical school did not strive, like the mythological one, to look for the origins of folklore phenomena in the ancestral home or in the ancestral language. The basis of historical theory was the establishment of specific connections between folklore and the history of the Russian people. The starting point of any folklore work, according to representatives of this school, is some historical fact. According to V. Miller’s formulation, counter processes are observed in poetry: the poeticization of a historical fact and the historicization of a poetic plot. The first attempts at historical explanation of Russian F. were made long before Miller’s main works, for example. L. N. Maikov (“On the epics of the Vladimir cycle,” St. Petersburg, 1863), N. P. Dashkevich (“On the question of the origin of Russian epics. Epics about Alyosha Popovich and how the heroes died out in Holy Rus',” Kyiv, 1883) and M. G. Khalansky (“Great Russian epics of the Kyiv cycle”, Warsaw, 1885). V. Miller, as already indicated, worked for many years in the direction of the borrowing school, but since the mid-90s. began to publish articles based on the principles of the “historical school.” These articles were combined by him into three large volumes of “Essays on Russian Folk Literature” (vol. I, Moscow, 1897, volume II, Moscow, 1910, volume III (posthumous), Moscow - Leningrad, 1924). In his “Essays,” devoted to the study of the history of individual epics, he went from the present to the depths of history, trying, with such a retrospective examination, to successively “remove” individual rows of “layers” or “layers” of the epic and hypothetically restore its original appearance.
The evidence, as well as some of its comparisons with historical and literary facts, were strained and not always convincing. The same should be said about the method in the works of his students and followers: A. V. Markov (“From the history of the Russian epic epic,” issue I, Moscow, 1905, and issue II, Moscow, 1907), S. K. Shambinago (“Songs of the time of Tsar Ivan the Terrible”, Sergiev Posad, 1914, etc.), B. M. Sokolova (“Historical element in the epics about Danil Lovchanin”, “Russian Philological Bulletin”, 1910, “Brother-in-law of the Terrible fighter Mamstruk Temgrukovich" ("ZhMNP", 1913, No. 7), etc.).
The performance of the “historical school” had a well-known positive side, since it was directed against the one-sided enthusiasm for the theory of borrowings and set as its task to connect F. with the history of the people.
But the historical constructions of Miller and his students were based on an erroneous, unscientific understanding of the historical process; Subsequently, the school’s mistakes were aggravated by attempts at a vulgar sociological interpretation of F.’s history.
V. A. Keltuyala used the results of the work of Miller and the historical school for his “Course on the History of Russian Literature” (Part I, Book 1, St. Petersburg, 1906; Part I, Book 2, St. Petersburg, 1911).
In this course (especially in its second edition), Keltuyala, relying partly on individual statements of Miller, put forward in categorical form the deeply incorrect position that the Russian epic epic, as well as all other types of Russian fiction, were not created by the people (i.e. . by the working masses), and by the dominant classes in the era of feudalism. With these statements of his, Keltuyala, as he thought, took a materialistic point of view and challenged the romantic-Slavophile and populist tendencies in folklore studies.
V. Miller in his later works, in turn already under the influence of Keltuyala, also put forward the problem of the social genesis of the Russian epic, a problem that had not previously attracted him a lot of attention. He also began to prove in detail the idea of a military squad of aristocratic and merchant environment, who created in her own interests that epic, which supposedly only later became the property of the “people”.
This view of Miller became generally accepted in Russian pre-October science, ch. arr. in relation to the Russian epic epic. The anti-nationality and incorrectness of this interpretation of F. has been proven recently by our Soviet criticism and folkloristics.
At present, as before, F. is used by the bourgeoisie of all countries for its class purposes. In Western Europe and America, a number of ramified scientific trends are known, which, however, for the most part are epigones of the above-mentioned folklore schools. The most widespread is one of the variants of the theory of borrowing, the so-called. “Finnish school” led by Helsingfors professor K. Krohn, who died in 1933. In 1907, together with the Swedish scientist Sidov and the Danish scientist Axel Olrik, he organized the international federation of folklorists “Folklore Fellows”, which began publishing the research series “Folklore Fellows Communications”, or “FFC” for short. One of the main tasks set for itself by the federation was to study fairy-tale, legendary and heroic stories, to determine the starting points of their origin and the geographical routes of their distribution. Typical examples of monographic works done in the spirit of the Finnish school can be considered the works of the former Kazan professor, now a professor in Tartau, Walter Anderson (“The Emperor and the Abbot. The Story of an Anecdote” - in Russian, vol. I, Kazan, 1916, in German language, Helsingfors, 1923). Among the Russian folklorists, Anderson's student N.P. Andreev worked in the same direction of the Finnish school. The main provisions of the Finnish school were set out in the book by Karl Krohn “Die folkloristische Arbeitsmethode” (Oslo, 1926).
If the theoretical and methodological principles of the Finnish school cannot but cause strong objections from the point of view of Marxist folkloristics as an installation of epigonizing Benfeism, brought to a formalistic exaggeration, then the purely technical side of the work of Scandinavian folklorists should be assessed quite highly.
One of the largest students of K. Krohn, Anti Aarne, compiled in 1911 “Verzeichnis der Marchentypen” (Index of fairy-tale plots, 1911), which has now become an international guide to the systematization of plot schemes. It was translated into Russian and revised accordingly, bringing under this index all the main collections of Russian fairy tales, N. P. Andreev (N. P. Andreev, “Index of fairy tale plots according to the Aarne system”, Leningrad, 1929). Following the example of Aarne, the American scientist Thomson compiled a multi-volume index of fairy tale motifs from different peoples of the world (Stith Thompson, Motif Index of Folk-Literature, vol. I-VI, 1932-1936). Currently, the representatives of the Finnish school themselves have admitted that their theory and methodology have reached a dead end. Sidov's proposed transition from comparative analysis international plots to the analysis of plots F. of only one nationality does not pave new paths, but leads only to national self-restraint, in which one cannot help but see some reflection of the nationalist tendencies of the bourgeoisie of a number European countries.
Bourgeois reaction is also making attempts to use F. for its own purposes. The weapon of grossly tendentious, anti-national distortion of F. for these purposes is the point of view of Hans Naumann, who considers F. to be an exclusively “relict” phenomenon; Nauman denies creative process among the masses. Nauman's position is entirely imbued with the spirit of caste.
As for Soviet folkloristics, over the 20 years of the existence of Soviet power, it has traveled a long and complex path of development. In the early years, however, the theories of pre-revolutionary bourgeois folkloristics still dominated university teaching and scientific organizations, ch. arr. historical school and migration theory. Being a part of literary studies, folkloristics naturally reflected those trends that existed in the theory and history of literature. This is how “formalism” found its reflection in folkloristics. Here we must take into account not only sporadic statements on folklore by V. Shklovsky and O. Brik, but also more systematic works on folklore by V. Zhirmunsky (in his books “Rhyme, its history and theory” (Pb., 1923) and “Introduction into metrics”, Leningrad, 1925) and especially two books on the formal analysis of fairy tales: R. M. Volkov, “The Fairy Tale” (Odessa, 1924) and V. Propp, “The Morphology of the Fairy Tale” (L., 1928).
The application of the methodological principles of the theory of N. Ya. Marr to folklore was of great scientific importance. "Palaeontological Analysis" linguistic phenomena in terms of understanding the stages in their development, developed by the Japhetidological new doctrine of language, was applied by Marr himself to the phenomena of f., especially to mythology (the study of “Ishtar”, etc.). A group of students of N. Ya. Marr, who formed the “sector of the semantics of myth and folklore” at the Institute of Language and Thought of the Academy of Sciences, published a collective work (“Tristan and Isolde”, Leningrad, 1932) in the spirit of Marr’s doctrine of language. The works of Academician N. Ya. Marr pose in a new way the problem of the coincidence of plots and images in the folklore of various peoples (for example, the legend of Prometheus with the legend of Amran among the peoples of the North Caucasus, the legend of the founding of Kyiv with a similar Armenian legend, etc.), explaining this coincidence not by inheritance from an unprecedented “proto-people” and not by borrowing, but by the unity of the process of development of language and thinking experienced by all peoples, the identity of the stage they are experiencing. It should also be noted that the Japhetidological school pays special attention to the physiology of the peoples of the USSR.
For a long time, largely under the influence of the vulgar sociological school of M. N. Pokrovsky, vulgar sociological trends in literary criticism (Frice and others), folklorists studied ch. arr. “sociological determination” of folklore phenomena. Instead of genuine Marxist analysis, they were usually engaged in detailing the vulgar sociological positions of Keltuyala and Miller, unable to adequately overcome the traditions of bourgeois methodology. The author of this article is also guilty of this.
At the end of 1936, on the initiative of Pravda, in connection with the resolution of the Committee for Arts on the production of Demyan Bedny’s play “Bogatyrs”, the concept of the aristocratic origin of the national epic (shared by the author of these lines) was sharply criticized, and its vulgar sociological nature was revealed the basis. At the same time, the articles in Pravda pointed out the possibility of bringing this vulgar sociological concept closer to the theoretical construction of bourgeois “scientists” like Hans Naumann. This fair criticism of reactionary folkloristic concepts played a role decisive role in Soviet folklore. The main problem of many Soviet folklorists was the insufficient use of the statements of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin about folklore and the principles of the methodology of Marxism-Leninism in general.
Marx and Engels were very interested in F. Their correspondence indicates that they mostly read and re-read in the original works the works of German, Danish, Norwegian, Scottish, Spanish, Serbian and Russian F. Marx and Engels’ high assessment of F. ancient Greece, the West and The East says its repeated use in scientific and polemical works. The founders of Marxism more than once noted the great importance of folklore as an artistic creation (see, for example, Engels’ letter to Marx about Old Danish ballads dated June 20, 1860). The immediate love of Marx and Engels for works of oral literature is evidenced by the memoirs of Lafargue, W. Liebknecht and others. The statements of Marx and Engels about folklore are extremely varied thematically.
Of great importance for understanding the phenomena of philosophy and its development was Marx’s famous statement (in the introduction to “A Critique of Political Economy”) about the Greek epic, about its mythological basis, about its connection with a certain stage social development and about the reasons for the artistic pleasure he has given to the present time.
In the literary heritage of Marx and Engels there are many statements on specific historical and historical-literary issues related to F. They were interested in elucidating the sources of certain folklore works, and the problem of the historical and geographical localization of the main images of F., the use of F. by writers and the meaning of F. as a historical and historical document. They always pointed out the enormous political role of folklore, the need to use it as a tool of agitation and propaganda, welcoming each time the publication of one or another text if this text was of interest in terms of the fight against the existing system. More than once they spoke about the revolutionary F., about its political function in the past and present, about class reworkings and distortions of it over the centuries and decades.
Historical meaning F., in particular folk songs, was repeatedly and persistently emphasized by Paul Lafargue. Lafargue even dedicated an entire treatise to F., the article “Wedding Songs and Customs” (in Russian in the collection of Lafargue’s articles: “Essays on the History of Culture”, M. - L., 1926).
G. V. Plekhanov came close to F.’s questions in his “Letters without an address” (“Scientific Review”, 1899, No. 11, and 1900, Nos. 3 and 6; reprinted in Plekhanov’s “Works”, vol. XIV, M. (1925)). One of the main problems that interested him was the problem of the origin of art. Among other Marxists, Vorovsky, Lunacharsky, and others have individual statements on F.
As for V.I. Lenin’s attitude towards folklore, there were no direct statements of his in the press, but the memoirs of N.K. Krupskaya and V.D. Bonch-Bruevich have been preserved, which speak of Lenin’s great interest and attention to folklore. Bonch-Bruevich recalls: “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, while studying Dahl’s dictionary, loved to attend folk festivals, was interested in proverbs, loved revolutionary songs and quickly memorized them. Vladimir Ilyich carefully read the Smolensk ethnographic collection, noting the great value of the materials contained in it. When one day the conversation turned to oral poetry, Vladimir Ilyich asked to let him look through some collections of epics, songs and fairy tales. His request was fulfilled. What interesting material,” he said. - I briefly looked through these books, but I see that, obviously, there is not enough hands or desire to generalize all this, to look at it all from a socio-political angle, because on this material it would be possible to write an excellent study about the aspirations and expectations of the people. Look at Onchukov’s fairy tales, which I looked through - because there are wonderful places here. This is what we need to point out to our literary historians. This is genuine folk art, also necessary and important for the study of folk psychology in our days.”
JV Stalin’s statements about a culture “socialist in content and national in form” are of great guiding importance for Soviet folkloristics. In the light of this teaching, F. cannot but occupy a prominent place in public life. “And if it is a matter of introducing various nationalities to proletarian culture,” says Stalin, “then one can hardly doubt that this integration will take place in forms corresponding to the language and way of life of these nationalities” (Stalin I., “Questions of Leninism” , Sotsekgiz, Moscow - Leningrad, 1931, p. 178). This familiarization proceeds along with other forms, as attested by collectors and researchers of modern Soviet folklore, among all nationalities of the Soviet Union through national songs and tales, through proverbs and sayings, through various other types of national f., growing on the basis of the language and life of these nationalities.
The widespread, especially in recent years, amateur artistic activity of the workers and collective farm masses, in which traditional artistic skills in the oral, poetic, musical, dance, and visual arts play a significant role, opens up for researchers of folklore an immense field of observations that lead to conclusions leaving no stone unturned against the slanderous statements of reactionaries about the creative sterility of the working people.
The conditions of social life in the USSR presented folklorist researchers with a whole series of historical and theoretical problems that were not noticed or were deliberately obscured by bourgeois folkloristics.
“We have material both in natural resources, and in the reserve of human strength, and in the wonderful scope that has given folk art great revolution, - to create a truly powerful and abundant Rus'” (Lenin V.I., Works, 3rd ed., vol. XXII, M. - L., 1931, p. 376). “Such a revolution can be successfully carried out only with independent historical creativity the majority of the population, above all the majority of the working people” (Lenin V.I., Soch., 3rd ed., vol. XXII, Moscow - Leningrad, 1931, p. 440). These words of Comrade Lenin also apply to the field of art. The role of F. as the voice of modernity, as a reflection and instrument of the class struggle, as a means of agitation and propaganda, as a method of mass artistic education in the spirit of true internationalism and deep love for the socialist homeland, as a cultural heritage was clarified in numerous scientific, popularization and pedagogical works of Soviet folklorists . The close connection with practical issues of the political and economic life of the country very clearly distinguishes Soviet folkloristics from the narrow, armchair, often petty work of many folklorists in the bourgeois West.
Disclosure, in connection with the rise of the national culture of many peoples of the USSR, oppressed by the colonial policy of Tsarist Russia, of enormous oral and poetic riches, first of all heroic epic, provides abundant and fresh material for theoretical constructions in the field of folklore.
Guided by the Marxist-Leninist teaching of dialectical materialism, using the achievements of paleontological analysis of the new doctrine of language, Soviet folklorists make, albeit still timid, attempts to reconstruct the general history of F. and F. of individual nationalities. These attempts still encounter many obstacles, primarily in the insufficient development of specific issues and monuments of folklore, the absence of an exhaustive bibliography of F., insufficient coordination of the work of folklorists throughout the Union, and the still comparatively small number of specialized scientific personnel.
A huge role in raising public interest in folklore was played by the famous speech of A. M. Gorky at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. A. M. Gorky showed the greatest importance of folklore for understanding the history of peoples, the history of their literatures and for the development of Soviet literature.
The main centers of scientific collecting and research work according to F. there were Moscow and Leningrad. In Moscow, folklore work from 1923 to 1930 was concentrated in the Folklore Section of the State. acad. thin Sciences, transformed in 1930 into the State. acad. art history, as well as from 1926 to 1930 in the Folklore subsection of the Institute of Literature and Language RANION. The main workers of these organizations made many expeditions to collect different types of folklore, both in villages and in factories (in particular, the widespread study of proletarian folklorism is the merit of Soviet folklorists, since bourgeois folkloristics almost completely ignored this topic ).
In recent years, Moscow folklorists have united in the work of the Folklore Section of the SSP. From the beginning of 1938, a special department of Russian folklore was organized at MIFLI. In Leningrad, since 1930, the unifying folklore center has been the Folklore Section of the Academy of Sciences. In previous years, folklore work was carried out in the section of peasant art of the Eastern Institute of Art History and in the Fairytale Commission of the Geographical Society. Among the regional folklore centers, Saratov, Irkutsk, Voronezh, and Smolensk should be noted. In national regions and republics, work on folklore was widely developed in local scientific institutions: in the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, in the Belarusian Academy of Sciences, in Baku, in Tbilisi, Yerevan, in Tashkent, Ashgabat, etc. However, in a number of national republics and regions, folklore has been used more than once by local nationalist elements for their own purposes hostile to the socialist system. Despite individual manifestations of local nationalism and sometimes great-power chauvinism in folklore, the flourishing of genuine Soviet folklore speaks for itself. One of the brightest and clearest proofs of this is the volume “Creativity of the Peoples of the USSR” (XX years of the Great October Socialist Revolution in the USSR 1917-1937) (M., 1937, Pravda publishing house). This book, compiled from the best examples of folklore of various peoples, is evidence of the high cultural, political and artistic growth of the working people of the Soviet Union and an indicator of the enormous role that oral poetic creativity - folklore - plays in the life of the working masses.
Shows to what height folk poetry has risen in the USSR creative activity such folk poets, like the Lezgin ashug-order bearer Suleiman Stalsky and the Kazakh akyn-order bearer Dzhambul, whose names and songs are known throughout the Union and are surrounded by an aura of great glory. Bibliography:
Buslaev F.I., Historical essays on Russian folk literature and art, vol. I-II, St. Petersburg, 1861; His, Folk Poetry. Historical essays, St. Petersburg, 1887; Veselovsky A. N., Collected Works, Series 1, vol. I and vol. II, no. I, Petersburg, 1913; Miller V.F., Essays on Russian folk literature, 3 vols., M., 1897, 1910, 1924; Pypin A.N., History of Russian ethnography, vol. I-IV, St. Petersburg, 1890-1892; Speransky M.N., Russian oral literature, M., 1917; Loboda A. M., Russian heroic epic, Kyiv, 1896; Savchenko S.V., Russian folk tale (History of collecting and studying), Kyiv, 1914; Kagarov E. G., What is folklore. “Artistic folklore”, M., 1929, book. 4-5; Sokolov Yu. M., Immediate tasks of studying Russian folklore, ibid., 1926, book. 1; Him, Folklore and Literary Studies, in the book: In memory of P. N. Sakulin. Collection of articles, M., 1931; Him, The nature of folklore and problems of folklore studies, “Literary Critic”, 1934, No. 12; Zhirmunsky V.M., The problem of folklore, in collection. "WITH. F. Oldenburg. To the fiftieth anniversary of scientific and social activity (1882-1932),” ed. Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Leningrad, 1934; Azadovsky M.K., Preface to the collection. "Soviet folklore", vol. 1, ed. Academician Sciences of the USSR, Leningrad, 1934; Gorky M., Soviet literature (Report at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers), M., 1934; Him, On Literature, 3rd ed.; M., 1937; Piksanov N.K., Gorky and folklore, L., 1935; Against the falsification of the people's past (About the play “Bogatyrs” by Demyan Bedny), ed. “Art”, Moscow - Leningrad, 1937; Sokolov Yu. M., Russian epic epic (Problem of social genesis), “Literary critic”, 1937, No. 9; Van Gennepp A., Le folklore, P., 1924; Kaindl R. F., Die Volkskunde, ihre Bedeutung, ihre Ziele und ihre Methode, Wien, 1903; Corso R., Volklore. Storia. Obbietto. Metodo. Bibliografia, Roma, 1923.
Literary encyclopedia. - At 11 t.; M.: Publishing House of the Communist Academy, Soviet Encyclopedia, Fiction. Edited by V. M. Fritsche, A. V. Lunacharsky. 1929-1939 .
Folklore
(English folk-lore - folk wisdom), a term introduced in 1846 by the English scientist W. J. Toms to denote folk culture. In modern folklore, this word is understood in two ways - more broadly and more narrowly. In a narrow sense, folklore refers to oral verbal and musical folk art, and in a broader sense, it refers to the entire set of cultural phenomena generated by the creativity of a group or individuals within the framework of collective consciousness. In the latter understanding, folklore includes not only verbal genres, but also language, beliefs, rituals, and crafts. The most important feature of folklore, in contrast to literature and modern book culture in general, is its traditionalism and orientation towards the oral method of transmitting information and, as a consequence, variability, the absence of a stable form, the only correct option. Folklore is a phenomenon of collective consciousness, its existence is impossible outside of society; the performer needs a listener who simultaneously acts as a co-creator, helping the performer, and as a “censor”. Folklore is focused not on creating something new, like modern book culture, but on repeatedly reproducing what already exists, so cultural facts external to folklore (author’s poems that become folk songs) rarely penetrate folklore.
Folklore is characterized by formulaicity - the use of a large number of stable phrases, clichés, “commonplaces” that are repeated both within one and in different genres. At the core folklore creativity lies improvisation within the framework of tradition. The performer of a folklore text does not keep it in memory and does not pronounce it by heart, but each time at the moment of performance he creates it anew, constructing it, like a mosaic, from individual fragments. Therefore, it is almost impossible to record the same text word for word from one performer several times, even with a short time interval.
Folklore is based on man's most ancient ideas about the world around him and even in modern society contains traces of archaic beliefs, rituals, and mythological stories. Most of them are not perceived by the bearers of folklore as such, but are only reconstructed, however, already from the end of the 18th century. folklore attracted the attention of researchers as “living antiquity.” The role of folklore in the life of its bearers is much broader than the role of literature, music and other types of art in the life of a modern urban person. Folklore is a universal system that provides all the cultural and everyday needs of a person. Only a small number of folklore genres are entertaining in nature, while the rest are correlated with history, medicine, agronomy, meteorology and many other areas of modern knowledge. In modern life, some folklore phenomena have been repressed and disappeared, but others continue to exist and develop to this day.
Along with the folklore of the people as a whole, there is the folklore of individual closed groups, united by common interests, age, professional, gender and other characteristics: school, army, tourist, etc. Such folklore provides cultural needs and performs a unifying and isolating function. Knowledge of texts related to the folklore of a particular group also serves as a way of identification, separating one’s own from someone else’s. Encyclopedia of Cultural Studies