№ 2 (2024)

This is a study of the main aspects of the scholarly activities of Andrei Nikolaevich Vlasov (1955–2023), a famous archaeographer and folklorist, who was Head of the Department of Russian Folklore of the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkinskii Dom) of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The article focuses on Vlasov’s lifelong activities: his textual analysis of the hagiographies of northern Russian saints, his collection and publication of folklore sources and manuscripts, and his study of works by local historians. Vlasov considered the hagiographic texts from the Ustiug region in the context of the book and manuscript tradition of the 16th and 17th centuries. This approach allowed him to discern the historical and literary peculiarities of these hagiographic texts, to inquire about their origin, and to highlight the problem of the formation of regional literature. In the expeditions to the Russian North that Vlasov organized, he carried out both archaeographic and folklore studies. As a result of this field work, Vlasov and his colleagues published collections of folklore texts. After many years of studying local cultural traditions, the scholar became aware of the importance of all “written manifestations” produced by local residents and therefore began collecting them even more thoroughly. The authors of this article pay special attention to Vlasov’s work on the Svod russkogo folklora (Corpus of Russian Folklore) series.

This article briefly highlights the history of the settlement of the two northeastern regions of Siberia — the areas of the Indigirka River (Russkoe Ust’e) and the Kolyma River — and discusses the history of the process of the recording of the local epics. The study pays particular attention to the influence of the medieval Russian version of Flavius Josephus’s History of the Jewish War on the local epics. The article analyzes variants of the epic “Mikhail Danilovich the Underage Hero,” which makes use of the name of Titus, the destroyer of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. The author proposes the hypothesis that the name Elizar, which is found in the episode of “The Raid of the Lithuanians,” was also borrowed from the History of the Jewish War. For the Russian people of the Indigirka and Kolyma regions, this connection of the oral song and epic tradition with handwritten texts became one of many ways to establish their national identity in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The study of interethnic folklore interactions, including the problem of «folklore bilingualism», requires a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach. One of the interdisciplinary areas that applies to folklore interactions is synergetics, which studies the behavior of complex systems of a different nature. The author confirms the main parameters of the folklore tradition as a complex, self-organizing system that is capable of a long-term quasi-stable existence. By maintaining its plasticity, the tradition can resist small perturbations and restore the «gaps» and deformations that inevitably arise at different points. Nevertheless, under the constant, intensifying influence of the external environment, this disequilibrium begins to increase rapidly. When the critical threshold value is reached, the system jumps to a new, again quasi-stable, state and acquires new, often completely unexpected, order parameters, which have a probabilistic character. The key role in such transitions is played by folklore borrowings as random and alien factors. The author examines the Izhma-Kolva folklore tradition as an object of a synergetic study of the processes that are associated with the birth of a new culture with emergent properties. The article considers several interrelated factors that determined the special features of the subculture of the reindeer herders, which developed as a result of the contacts between the Izma Komi group and the Kolva Nenets group. The study also analyzes how these factors determined the uniqueness of the bi-ethnic and bilingual «Performer—Text—Audience» folklore system that emerged among those people.

This study analyzes the redaction of the Life of Saint Prokopii, a holy fool from Ustiug, that was written by Dimitrii of Rostov for his Book of the Lives of Saints (Cheti Minei). The main source for this redaction was the Life of Prokopii of Ustiug from the Prologue (Synaxarion). It provided the main outline for Dimitrii’s work, but its style is different. Dimitrii retold the Prologue text skillfully and only occasionally borrowed some phrases from it. His second source was the expanded redaction of the Life of Prokopii of Ustiug. Dimitrii’s text contains some episodes that are found only in this expanded redaction. Dimitrii’s redaction of the Life of Prokopii of Ustiug was quite popular, as is evidenced by its steady and strong manuscript tradition. It is found not only in manuscript copies of his famous Cheti Minei but also in different hagiographic miscellanies. Several later redactions of the Life of Prokopii were based on it as well. An example of the Menologion redaction by an unknown bookman is published in an appendix to the article.

The Story of the Violent Deaths of Fathers Filipp and Terentii is an understudied Old Believer text about the beginnings of the Filippovtsy branch of the Bezpopovtsy group and about the self-immolation of its founder, Elder Filipp, and some of his followers in 1742. The subject of The Story explains the interest of the Old Believers in this text. Sixteen copies of The Story, which date from the 18th to the early 20th century, have so far been identified in Old Believer manuscript miscellanies, most of which come from the Russian North. The article pays special attention to the copies of The Story in the manuscripts of the «Wanderers» subgroup of the Old Believers, which date from the late 19th and early 20th century, because they contain unique details. The Story is based on real events and follows the principles of historical narration of the Vyg literary school. Striving to preserve the memory of the people and the events of the past, the author of the story consistently recorded the facts that were reported by the participants and witnesses of the events.

This study adds to a series of articles by the author about the relationship between the manuscript book culture and the oral culture on the Winter Coast region of the White Sea. The article examines the functioning of an apocryphal story called A Dream of the Mother of God, which was popular in that region in the 19th and 20th centuries. A nineteenth-century manuscript copy of this text, now in possession of the Department of Manuscripts of the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, was once obtained from the Kriukov family. In 1939, a spiritual verse on the same subject was recorded from the performer M. S. Kriukova. She learned the plot of the spiritual verse on the Tersky Coast of the White Sea; her version of the verse is close to the one found in recordings from the western part of the Pomor’e. Nevertheless, she handles the text quite freely and expands its plot with additional details. The texts of the manuscript copy of the spiritual verse and of the version performed by Kriukova are published in an appendix to the article.

When exploring the history of folklore studies, it is important to remember the practice of collecting folklore and ethnographic data, which became widespread among local residents in the twentieth century. A large number of materials that were gathered by local people is now stored in regional archives. The article analyzes materials collected by Pavel Grigorievich Zashikhin (1905–1992), a resident of the Krasnoborsk district of the Arkhangelsk region and a local historian. His materials are preserved in the Archive of the Krasnoborsk Historical Memorial and Art Museum. These materials are different in content and character; most of them are ego-documents (autobiographical prose, daily notes, trip and meeting diaries, letters, weather records). These documents also include information on Zashikhin’s research in the field of local history and about his collecting activities in the region (essays and drafts of his works, folklore and ethnographic records and self-records, newspaper clippings, and “memorable dates calendars”), and materials related to his literary work. A study of this personal archival collection of a prominent representative of local culture reveals the collecting and literary interests of a local historian and his aspiration to preserve and transmit the memory of himself and of his place of residence.