Regulation of Burial Practices and Funeral Laments of the Old Believers-Bespopovts of Ust-Tsilma

Using the local tradition of the Old Believers-Bespopovtsy of Nizhnepechora as an example, the characteristics of the late existence of burial and memorial laments in the Ust-Tsilemsky district of the Komi Republic are described. The study draws attention to the rather late research of baptism by folklorists. The collection of the reports was not carried out systematically by different researchers. The 1929 records were published with a commentary only in 2013 and another major publication of the texts collected in 1942 dates from 1962. The reports have been published in other collections with varying degrees of completeness. Particularly in the 21st century, there are also analytical articles. This article examines the liturgical tradition from the perspective of an ethnographic research campaign, focusing on the functioning of the genre, the place, and the role of eulogies in funeral and memorial rites at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries. The factors contributing to eulogies' introduction into traditional funeral culture are described. The ritual terminology, the stable expressions that are the names of the laments and indicate their fulfillment, and the vocabulary represented in the laments by metaphorical substitutions and epithets are given. The importance of regulating the performance of lamentations in relation to the time of day is analyzed, and the restriction of their performance to certain ages and social groups is also considered. The local peculiarity of the performance of lament songs for the deceased, who showed disrespect to some family members during their lifetime and were abusers, through the lament songs, the unkind actions and deeds of the deceased person are shown. The article was written on the basis of field materials collected by the author in different years in the villages of Ust-Tsilma, as well as on the basis of published materials and archival sources kept in the scientific archive of the Komi Scientific Center of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Old Believers-Bespopovts, mourning and memorial laments, lamentations, funeral cries, folk terminology, oral narrative, ritual vocabulary