Dictionary East Slavic folklore gives. Test

St. Petersburg State University

Graduate work

Pagan traditions in the folklore of the Eastern Slavs and the Russian people (based on fairy tales and epics)

Subject: Russian heroic epic

6th year students of the evening department

Miroshnikova Irina Sergeevna

Scientific adviser:

Doctor of Historical Sciences,

Professor Mikhailova Irina Borisovna

Saint Petersburg

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 3

Chapter 4. Pagan ideas about death and immortality in fairy tales and epics of the Russian people

Conclusion

List of sources and literature

Introduction

The question of the pagan traditions inherited by the Russian people from the Eastern Slavs has been raised more than once in Russian historiography. Among the large number of works on this topic, the works of B.A. Rybakova, I.Ya. Froyanov and other scientists who have conducted extensive studies of various aspects of this issue. However, specific information is not enough, which is due to the scarcity of sources that provide too fragmentary information, which makes it difficult to solve this problem and form a holistic view of the pagan worldview of the ancient and Eastern Slavs. Paganism, being an archaic worldview of the Slavic tribes, naturally, was inextricably linked with all spheres of their life, and the subject of lively discussions that have been going on for the third century can be any of these areas.

The difficulty lies, as already mentioned above, in the lack and fragmentation of sources, which can be chronicles, writings of travelers who visited Russian lands, missionary reports, archaeological and ethnographic information, ancient Russian works of art, and, most importantly, works of oral folk art, where, as I.Ya Froyanov and YuI convincingly show in their essays. Yudin, the historical realities of social and political life are clearly visible at various stages of the development of the East Slavic society, the Old Russian people and the Great Russian people.

In view of the fact that in this thesis we will study the reflection of the pagan ideas of the Slavs in the fairy tale and epic epic, it is necessary to define the concept of "fairy tale". In the dictionary of V.I. Dahl, we find the following explanation of this term: “A fairy tale, a fictional story, an unprecedented and even unrealizable story, a legend. There are heroic, worldly, joker tales, etc. ”

The dictionary of the Russian language offers a similar interpretation: "A narrative work of oral folk art about fictitious events, sometimes with the participation of magical, fantastic forces."

But the most complete, from our point of view, the essence of this concept is revealed in the Literary Encyclopedia: a fairy tale is “a story that performs production and religious functions in the early stages of development in a pre-class society, i.e., representing one of the types of myth; in the later stages, existing as a genre of oral fiction, containing events unusual in the everyday sense (fantastic, miraculous or worldly) and distinguished by a special compositional and stylistic construction.

Now we consider it necessary to try to classify the fabulous material. It would be logical to use the simplest division into household tales, about animals and with magical content, in other words, fairy tales. This logic is called into question by V.Ya. Propp, noting that “the question involuntarily arises: do not fairy tales about animals sometimes contain an element of the miraculous to a very large extent? And vice versa: don't animals play a very important role in wonderful fairy tales? Can such a sign be considered accurate enough? Thus, from the very first step, we have to face logical problems. The researcher believes that “the situation with the classification of a fairy tale is not entirely successful. But classification is one of the first and most important stages of study. Let us recall, for example, how important Linne's first scientific classification was for botany. Our science is still in the pre-Linnaean period.” Nevertheless, the researcher still manages to isolate the type of “magic” fairy tale from the entire folklore variety of fairy tales using the following definition: “this is the genre of fairy tales that begins with the infliction of some kind of damage or harm (abduction, exile, etc.) or from the desire to have something (the king sends his son for the firebird) and develops through sending the hero from home, meeting with the donor, who gives him a magic tool or an assistant with which the subject of the search is found.

In the Literary Encyclopedia already mentioned by us, A. I. Nikiforov gives his classification, fundamentally based on the same triple system, and also highlighting additional types:

Tale of animals.

The fairy tale is magical.

The fairy tale is short story, with everyday plots, but unusual.

anecdotal.

erotic.

The story is legendary. The roots are closer to myths or to religious literature.

Tales-parodies (boring, teasing, fables)

Tales for children. Told by children, and often by adults for children.

Based on the foregoing, our first task is to separate the concepts of "everyday fairy tale" and "animal fairy tale" from each other, which is extremely difficult due to the presence of a huge amount of material, one way or another related to both types at once. Therefore, in our opinion, it is worth starting the division with those plots that cause the least doubt among researchers.

Tales about animals undoubtedly include those plots, all whose heroes are animals endowed with human reason, emotions, morality, and, above all, vices. Very often, such animals live in houses, wear clothes, communicate with each other in the same language (a cat and a rooster, a fox and a wolf, a hare and a bear.)

Another pole of the issue under consideration is the everyday fairy tale. Its distinctive features are, on the one hand, the fact that all, or almost all, the heroes are people. The presence of animals in such a tale is possible, but not necessary, and the main feature of these animals is that they are not humanized, but are domestic or wild animals. On the other hand, we must note here the presence of a very limited number of heroes (unlike in a fairy tale), their number usually varies from 1 to 6.

There is still a very large number of fairy tales outside the above groups (for example, the fairy tale about "tops and roots", the fairy tale "Masha and the Bears"). In this case, we propose to separate these tales into a separate "transitional" group and consider each plot separately, roughly determining the percentage in which the described types merge in it.

However, there is another important point in distinguishing the group of "everyday" fairy tales. This is in some way their "temporary" affiliation. Therefore, having identified specific features, we can separate the “most ancient” fairy tales, the foundation of which was laid back in pre-Christian times, from the “novelistic” fairy tales and anecdotal tales, most likely describing real cases and incidents from the life of landowners, peasants, clergymen of the XVIII - 19th century Thus, we must be able to distinguish, for example, the fairy tale "Rocked Hen" from the fairy tale "About how a peasant divided a goose."

We are compelled to point out these differences so clearly by some researchers, who mean by everyday fairy tales exclusively anecdotal tales. So, for example, S. G. Lazutin in the textbook for philological faculties "Poetics of Russian Folklore", quite rightly noting that in a household fairy tale "relationships are drawn not between animals and people, but only people", at the same time emphasizes that the heroes of the fairy tale are the peasant , master, soldier, merchant, worker. All his further reasoning is based on the analysis of the plots of the anecdote tale, such as, for example, the fairy tale “Priests Worker” mentioned by the author, tales of capricious ladies and stupid landowners, while our task is to discover exactly the most ancient layers that we can find in the most everyday fairy tale.

At the same time, returning to the classification of A. I. Nikiforov, we must pay attention to point 6, that is, “Children's fairy tales. Told by children, and often by adults for children." It seems to us that the researcher here means the same fairy tale, which we conditionally call "everyday".

In addition, there is another type of fairy tales, about which S.V. Alpatov writes as follows: “Stories about chance meetings or conscious witchcraft communication with brownies, banniks, wood goblins, water goblins, mermaids, afternoons, etc. are called bylichki. The narrator and his listeners are sure that such stories are true, true. The meaning and purpose of such stories is to teach the listener, using a specific example, how to behave or not to behave in a given situation. Bylichki serve as a living illustration of the ritual rules of human behavior, of the entire system of folk mythology.

So, we examined the classification of fairy tales according to the plot principle, but first of all, folklore is the bearer of the moral, pedagogical and psychological aspirations of society. In our opinion, S.G. Lazutin is mistaken, emphasizing that "the main goal of the storyteller is to captivate, amuse, and sometimes simply surprise, amaze the listener with his story." Of course, we understand that the researcher considered, first of all, the features of a fairy tale plot and the methods of its creation, but, as V.P. Anikin, "the artistic principle does not act as an independent component, it is always connected with the everyday and ritual goals of the works and is subordinate to them." According to B.N. Putilov, "one of the purposes of a fairy tale is to warn of cruel retribution for violating traditions." We also note that punishment threatens not only for violation of traditions, but also the rules of communication with the environment, moral principles, etc. - "The fairy tale satisfies not only the aesthetic needs of the people, but also their moral feelings." So, also A.S. Pushkin said: “A fairy tale is a lie, but there is a hint in it! A lesson for good fellows, ”and some sayings are as follows:“ I’ll tell one fairy tale ... if you like it - remember, there will be time - tell me, declare good people, and instruct someone on your mind.

Considering the pedagogical aspect of folklore, we can also divide it into 3 already named groups, but now according to the age principle.

So, "everyday" fairy tales carry primary knowledge about the world, about its structure, about celestial bodies (= deities) - the sun, moon, stars, about the elements - wind and rain in the first place. Consequently, this fairy tale, on the one hand, has some features of a myth, and on the other hand, fulfills the task of primary socialization of the child.

The child grows up, which means he must learn to distinguish between the concepts of “kind” and “non-kind”, therefore fairy tales about animals come to replace the everyday fairy tale. Yu.V. Krivosheev notes that “often animals in fairy tales are called “chanterelle-sister”, “wolf-brother”, “bear-grandfather”. This, to a certain extent, indicates the divergence of the concept of blood relations between humans and animals. This means that such fairy tales carry information about the rules of communication with "relatives". In addition, as already noted, the heroes of these tales - animals - are endowed with a human mind, emotions, morality, and after totemic views fade into the background - with vices, that is, later they began to clearly demonstrate to the listener the generally accepted rules of behavior.

And, finally, fairy tales are the final stage of the child's socialization through fairy tales. Here we are already observing complex conflicts, the rules of tribal relations, the appearance of helper animals and motives for transformations, in which, as A.I. Nikiforov, reflected the "animistic-totem worldview" of the Slavs.

It must be emphasized that the main emphasis in this work is on Slavic fairy tales, since they have a branched multifaceted plot, and, therefore, most clearly reflect the life and ancient worldview of the people who created them. The immeasurable value of this source is that "in fairy tales, the Russian people tried to unravel and untie the knots of their national character, to express their national worldview."

It is also important in our work to understand that the worldview layers we are studying can be found not only in the East Slavic fairy tale, but also in the fairy tales of ethnically close or neighboring peoples. Most indicative here are West and South Slavic tales, as well as tales of the Baltic peoples (Lithuanian, Estonian). And if East Slavic tales have common historical roots with the tales of other Slavic peoples, then in the case of the Baltic tales, constant cultural communication played a role here, and with Lithuanian ones, even direct borrowing, which occurred at a time when part of the East Slavic lands was part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania .

In addition to fairy tales, our work will also consider Russian epic songs, known to a wide range of researchers under the name "epics". It is worth noting that this term is artificial, introduced into scientific use in the 30s of the XIX century. amateur scientist I.P. Sakharov on the basis of the "epics of this time" mentioned in "The Tale of Igor's Campaign". In the Russian North, where the largest number of these folk works were recorded, they were known as "starin" and "starinok".

The situation with the study of the epic heritage was as difficult as in the case of fairy tales. On the one hand, the difficulty lay in the fact that we have not come down to, and perhaps did not have at all, records of epics earlier than the beginning of the 17th century. Taking into account the inevitable variability of any folklore text in oral transmission from generation to generation, we have to admit that even our oldest records of epics did not retain their original content and form. Later records of epics, made by scholarly collectors from the lips of the people in the 18th-20th centuries, quite naturally included a number of even further “layers” and underwent more or less changes and additions from a long series of generations of individual storytellers.

On the other hand, until a certain time, the historicism of the events reflected in the epics was considered by folklore researchers from the point of view of undeniable authenticity. So, V.F. Miller saw in the center of the epic plot a certain historical event that gradually lost its reality, distorted by popular thought. However, V.Ya. Propp notes that the epic "always expresses the age-old ideals and aspirations of the people", which means that to some extent it anticipates the course of history, thereby guiding it. Consequently, the folklorist should consider the events described by the epic not as real, which took place in history, but "in relation to epochs, periods of its development."

Sharp criticism of the concept of V.Ya. Propp subjected B.A. Rybakov. From his point of view, the Russian epic as a whole is a kind of oral folk chronicle, marking important events of its time with epics.

A similar view is held by F.M. Selivanov. In the article “The Bogatyr Epic of the Russian People,” he writes that “the connection between the epic Vladimir and the Kyiv prince Vladimir Svyatoslavich is beyond doubt.” The researcher expresses the opinion that epics, in their composition, could not but rely on specific facts. “So, the epic Dobrynya Nikitich had a historical prototype who lived at the end of the 10th - beginning of the 11th century, the maternal uncle of Prince Vladimir Svyatoslavich, his associate in military and political affairs. At least two epics - "The Marriage of Vladimir", "Dobrynya and the Serpent" - are associated with real events of the last quarter of the 10th century - the marriage of the Kiev prince to the Polotsk princess Rogneda and the introduction of Christianity in Rus'.

However, despite these well-established opinions, I.Ya. Froyanov and Yu.I. Yudin believes that attempts are disastrous " purify historical facts, supposedly underlying the epic plot, from fiction and fantasy, "in view of the fact that this can lead to "ignoring both its plot and itself as a work of art." Scientists, proceeding from the thesis “history is not reduced either to individual facts or to their totality, it is a process”, argue that “in epics this process is reflected as such, but not in a scientific logical, but in an artistic form, and in particular in the form of poetic fiction. In search of a reflection of the ancient Slavic beliefs in the Russian epic, it seems necessary to us to proceed from this view of the historical basis of epic stories.

The main task of this work is to, based on the collected and systematized folklore material, trace the most important stages in the life and worldview of the Eastern Slavs, such as birth, the transition period from childhood to adulthood (initiation), the wedding ceremony and marriage, psychological and social changes in a person's life associated with the birth of the first child, and, finally, death. In addition, it is equally important for us to highlight the place of tribal relations in the life of our ancestors, their everyday ideas and the mystification of the surrounding world, characteristic of all pagan beliefs.

It should be emphasized that in the thesis there are often references to fairy tales and epics or to excerpts from them. These excerpts should be considered as illustrations to a particular issue under study.

In search of a reflection of the ancient Slavic beliefs in Russian folklore, it seems necessary to avoid superficial views on certain facts (in particular, to consider a fairy tale as some kind of ideal, fair world, where there is plenty of food, drink, wealth, and, therefore, oppose it to real life) . An equally important task of this work is that, despite the small number of reliable texts, the problematic nature of the reconstruction of the "original" forms of folklore based on the records of the 19th-20th centuries, among the later religious and everyday layers caused by the gradual penetration and rooting of the Christian faith in the minds of the people and the passage of a considerable amount of time, to single out the surviving particles of the pagan worldview, preserved in the people's memory, and then in folklore. This will make it possible, when combining these particles, to consider individual details in the overall picture of the everyday and spiritual life of pre-Christian Rus'.

Chapter 1

One of the foundations of the pagan worldview of the early and Eastern Slavs is the idea that human life, like any circle, has neither beginning nor end. Nevertheless, the birth of a new life in the mother's womb can be considered a certain starting point.

However, it is impossible to separate the concepts of "birth" and "death". So, A.K. Baiburin, studying the place of ritual in traditional culture, writes that “burial and birth are a single complex that regulates relations between ancestors and descendants: death causes the need for birth, which inevitably leads to death and a new birth.” The tale knows many plots where the heroes are a widow mother (meaning the father died) and a son, or vice versa, where the mother dies during childbirth. In other words, the motif of the death of an older relative and the birth of a child consanguineous with him implies the idea of ​​restoring balance, which exists in two versions: subjective (for the individual), when the soul goes to the next world (= next life circle), and objective (for the world) when a new soul takes the place of a departed soul.

The continuity of generations, which is especially emphasized in East Slavic folklore, reflects the high importance for society of the issue of procreation. For many centuries in Rus', in addition to fairly frequent lean years, there were also numerous inter-tribal conflicts, when many soldiers and civilians died or were captured in constant military clashes. In our opinion, this is precisely the reason for the issue of continuity of generations, which is so acute in folklore.

Particular attention is drawn to the fact that the heroes of the epic and fairy tales are particularly hypersexual, and this applies not only to men, but also to women. On the one hand, this is a sharply emphasized physiology of the characters (the hero “sees a huge snake, this snake swings its sting up to the ceiling”), or, as V.Ya. Propp, these are the pronounced female features of Baba Yaga. The researcher writes: "Signs of sex are exaggerated: she is depicted as a woman with huge breasts." On the other hand, the same hypersexuality is found in those folklore stories where acts of physical love are constantly mentioned or implied. So, in some fairy tales we find completely unambiguous indications of what happened, for example, in the fairy tale about the Daring Good Man, rejuvenating apples and living water: “Ivan Tsarevich took living and dead water and a portrait of Elena the Beautiful, fell in love with her; ... sat on a falcon and flew. Or the same action, but in a more veiled version, we find in the tale about Ivan Tsarevich and the hero Sineglazka: “he watered his horse in her well, but did not close the well, and left the robes.”

However, most often the process of conceiving children is compared to the leavening of bread dough. And this is not surprising, because bread in the everyday life of the Slavs had the same important and sacred meaning as the process of procreation, and the birth of bread from dough in the poetic consciousness of the people was tightly intertwined with ideas about the development of the child and his subsequent birth. Therefore, when meeting in a fairy tale the lines “I was ignorant, I opened the sourdough - I didn’t cover it,” you don’t have to think about what it is about.

Also, the unusual ways of conceiving and giving birth to children described in fairy tales cannot but attract attention. So, in folklore, a plot is quite common, according to which a queen who has not had children for a long time eats golden-finned fish (pike, ruff, bream, etc.) and immediately becomes pregnant. What causes this pregnancy?

To answer this question, you need to pay attention to the elemental affiliation of the culprit of the incident, that is, the fish. She lives in the water, and we know another creature directly related to the water element. This is the Serpent. Our assumption that the queen does not become pregnant at all from a fish dish, but from the Serpent, is also confirmed by the fact that the Serpent, as a totem animal, is the custodian of the purity of the princely (and, consequently, royal) family. Thus, the queen's pregnancy from a fish (= Snake) is nothing more than the dilution of ancestral blood with the pure blood of a totem ancestor.

Totemic representations are the most archaic, but in Slavic fairy tales one can also find a later rethinking of the conception of a child (future hero) from higher beings. So, in the Belarusian fairy tale “Osilok” an unusual phenomenon is revealed: “Suddenly a ball of fire flew through the window and began to swing around the hut. He swayed, swayed ... and rolled under the woman's feet. Baba grabbed the hem, and she felt so good that she sat down. Istoma took the woman. Most of all, we are interested in the nature of the unusual phenomenon, described as a "ball of fire." For this, we turn to the work of B.A. Rybakov, where he notes a very indicative phenomenon for our case: "ball lightning is a fireball slowly floating above the ground."

The researcher is trying to find out the relationship between the Perun sign - the six-beam wheel - and the attributes of the thunder god. For us, first of all, it is important that the "ball of fire", very reminiscent of ball lightning, indicates the presence of Perun. And as we remember, the conception of heroes (heroes) with the direct participation of the god of thunder is a widespread motif in world mythology. (“Birth of Perseus”, “Birth and education of Hercules”, etc.)

One can, of course, wonder if this plot in East Slavic fairy tales is a later borrowing from the above Greek myths? Here it is necessary to pay attention to the fact that if such a possibility existed, then in view of the later Christianization of Rus', the honor of being the father of a hero would never have gone to a pagan god, but at least to an archangel or the Christian god himself.

Therefore, we can conclude: despite the fact that Perun in the role of guardian of the purity of Slavic blood is a later phenomenon than, for example, the totemic Serpent, but, undoubtedly, the plot where he acts as the father of the future hero dates back to pre-Christian Rus' . It seems possible even to assume that the motif of conception from God is not only not a fantasy of later storytellers introduced into the tale, but also goes back to the time of the Indo-Europeans - equally the ancestors of both the ancient Greeks and the ancient Slavs.

However, in addition to information about the unusual conceptions of children, one can find folklore evidence of their unusual births. In the overwhelming majority of cases, extraordinary births are associated with a certain fairy tale plot that fits into the following scheme: an extraordinary birth - a test outside the home - a return home (for a male hero) and an extraordinary birth - a life outside the home - a return home (for women). This scheme leads us to the idea that the primary task of fairy tales of this type is the story of the passage of the rite of initiation by men and the period of life in the forest house of women. However, we will consider the problem of initiations reflected in East Slavic folklore in the second chapter of this work, and here we will only point out the very fact of the connection of miraculous births with the plot dedicated to initiation. Now we are interested in the birth of a child in an unusual way, therefore, bearing in mind the further development of the action, we will consider the event itself and its features.

Analyzing fairy tales with plots of this type or close to them, we have already noted that, according to the ideas of the Slavs, as well as other peoples neighboring them, natural elements contribute to the birth of a child - fire, water. Looking ahead, we note the participation in this process of two more forces - earth and air. In most cases, one of the elements stands out in a fairy tale, but the combinations that take place (for example, fire and earth) allow us to make an assumption that the joint participation in the creation of the body of a newborn of all four forces was originally implied. So, in the fairy tale "Baba Yaga and Zamoryshek" heroic children are born from chicken eggs. Here it is necessary to pay attention not even to the religious meaning of the concept of "world egg", from which both heaven and earth originated, and, as a result, the first people, but to the species affiliation of these eggs. The fact is that chickens, or rather, roosters, were considered sacred birds in Rus'. One can even make an assumption that the image of the firebird - a fiery bird - arose as a result of the deification of the rooster in the popular mind. The reasons for this, obviously, lie in quite logical conclusions - the cry of a rooster marks the end of the night (the time of evil spirits) and the onset of the day, the sunrise. Therefore, we can hardly be mistaken if we assume that the rooster in the worldview of our ancestors was inextricably linked with the sun, and, consequently, with warmth and, finally, with fire. Returning to the miraculous birth of children, it must be emphasized that it is precisely the described properties of the divine fiery bird that determine the birth of not just children, but heroes - people who initially possess sacred knowledge and abilities that will later help the heroes pass the test.

The fiery nature of extraordinary children is also reflected in another fairy tale - “Medvedko, Usynya, Gorynya and Dubynya-bogatyrs”. Here a child is born right in the oven: “Grandma, unwrap it, it’s hot here! “The old woman opened the damper, and a living girl lies in the oven.” It should be noted that this time the child is female, therefore, women, in the understanding of the Slavs, to the same extent as men, were bearers of the sacred principle. This conclusion is also confirmed by the fact that the girl born in the oven later became the wife of a totem animal - a bear, who, with a prepared treat, "has been waiting for a long time" for the appearance of girls, from which he eventually chooses his bride.

The joint participation of the elements (fire and earth) in the appearance of a child is assumed in the fairy tale "Clay Ivanushka", where the grandfather fashioned his son from clay, and then put him on the stove, as well as in one of the variants of the fairy tale "Ivashka and the Witch", in which the grandfather brought from forest “lutoshka”, that is, linden forest peeled from the bast, and put it in the oven, and some time later the hero took out the child from under the stove.

Quite often there are references to the appearance of children from some part of the tree, which we perceive as one of the ways of material reflection of the elements of the earth. So, in another version of the fairy tale "Ivashka and the Witch", the son of an old man and an old woman appears from the deck. Exactly the same picture can be observed in the fairy tale "Tereshechka".

The water essence can be communicated to the child not only in the form of fish eaten by the mother, but also in the form of the material from which the child is created, that is, snow. In two fairy tales similar in plot - “Bag, sing!” and "Snegurochka" - the old man and the old woman fashioned the future daughter as a snowman, after which she miraculously came to life. In the fairy tale "Fyodor Vodovich and Ivan Vodovich" the tsar's daughter becomes pregnant from drinking water from a well.

The birth of a child is less often mentioned in fairy tales due to the interference of the elements of air in this process. These are either indirect indications of the relationship between a woman and the Whirlwind (Wind), when the woman is abducted by the latter, or subtle hints about the origin of the hero, thanks to his name - “Whirlwind the Prince”. In the Karelian-Finnish epic, one can already find an unambiguous indication of the cause of conception:

The wind shook the maiden, ...

The wind blew the fruit on the girl.

In addition, among Russian proverbs and sayings, the expression “the wind blew” has been preserved, implying pregnancy from an unknown man. V.Ya. also mentions the birth of a child from the air element. Propp. Analyzing one of the tales, he writes: “A girl becomes pregnant from the wind. "He was afraid that she would not be spoiled. And he put me in a high tower. And the masons blocked the door. In one place there was a hole between the bricks. A gap, in a word. And once that princess stood right next to that gap, and the wind blew her belly."

Thus, based on the examples just given, we can conclude that, although the participation of the father and mother in the creation bodythe child (that part of a person that belongs to the visible world) is not denied (either an old man makes a child, an old woman cradles him in a cradle, or they make him together), but the main role in this process, according to the ideas of the creators of fairy tales, belongs to the natural elements.

However, it should be noted that the role of the elemental principles is not limited to the fact that they participate in the process of the birth of the child's physical body. The well-known researcher of the early twentieth century, van Gennep, writes that it is in the “world of elements” that souls live . “They are underground or in the rocks. According to the beliefs of different peoples, they live in trees, bushes, flowers or vegetables, in the forest, etc. There is also a widespread idea that the souls of children reside in springs, springs, lakes, running water. It seems to us that the alien, otherworldly world (where the souls come from) is deliberately equated by the narrators with the “world of the elements”.

In the plots associated with the fire element and the furnace, as its manifestation, there is another important feature. As mentioned above, in the fairy tale, the conception of a child is often associated with the process of leaving bread dough. This comparison is by no means accidental if you look at it from the point of view of popular ideas, according to which the concept and action of "food" (in this case, bread - I.M.) merges with the acts of birth and death. The same observations confirm the ritual actions performed in relation to a child who was born sick or weakened. A.K. Baiburin describes the ritual of “baking” the baby as follows (one of the cycle of ritual actions carried out in order to adapt the newborn to the new world): “The sick child was placed on a bread shovel and put in the oven, as is done with bread. ... The symbolism of this rite is based on the identification of the child and bread ... he is, as it were, returned to the mother's womb so that he is born again.

The motif of putting a child on a shovel can be traced in many fairy tales dedicated to the rite of initiation. In this case, ritual “remaking”, the rebirth of a person is also implied, but at the moment we want to emphasize just such an associative series: conception - dough and baking, birth - taking bread out of the oven, and in the future, it is in the rite of initiation that we will consider “ eating" this "bread".

At the same time, the birth of a child is not only the creation of a physical body, but also the acquisition of a soul by this body, which, as we have already mentioned, comes as a result of an exchange with another world. It was these ideas that left their mark not only on the maternity ritual, but also on the attitude towards the children themselves. As A.K. Baiburin: “A newborn was not considered a human until a series of ritual actions were performed on him, the main meaning of which is to turn him into a human.” Up to this point, this is not only not a person, but an alien creature and, undoubtedly, dangerous to others. No wonder the woman in labor was removed to a safe distance, and babies were sometimes even considered demons. In general, as Arnold van Gennep writes, “the collective applies the same defensive tactics to the newborn as to the stranger.” All this, it seems to us, is reflected in a widespread fairy tale plot, according to which the child is either replaced by animals, or the father is told that “the queen brought not a mouse, not a frog, but an unknown animal.” Over time, as in many other cases, the true reason for the “weirdness” of the newborn was lost and replaced by the intrigues of envious relatives, which would seem logical in this case.

Thus, the fairy tale reflects all aspects of the ritual ideas of the Slavs about the emergence of a new generation - from the creation of a physical body, which was associated in folklore with "dough", then the birth of a "non-human" - an "unknown animal", "underbaked bread", to the statement, finally, through special ceremonies in the official status of a new person - "loaf".

Epics, as a later stage of the folk epic compared to fairy tales, rarely mention the birth of a child. However, in the most ancient of them there are colorful descriptions of the birth of a new warrior-hero. It is impossible not to notice that the mention of the sun in connection with the birth of a child unambiguously indicates participation in the process of the fiery principle:

When the red sun shone

Whether on that clear sky,

Then the young Volga was born

We will find a more detailed description in Kirsha Danilov.

And in the sky, enlightening the bright moon,

And in Kyiv a mighty hero was born,

How young Volkh Vseslavevich would be.

The damp earth trembled,

Stressed gloriously the kingdom of the Indians,

And the blue of the sea wavered

Here, the birth of a hero is compared with the appearance of a month in the night sky (which is used with the adjective “bright”, which, it seems to us, also refers this luminary to the elements of fire), and such principles as earth and water are also mentioned, which confirms our previous conclusions about the influence of the forces of nature on the appearance of a newborn.

Finally, the epic with the same name “The Birth of a Hero” describes the most colorful changes that occurred in connection with the birth of a child. It is entirely devoted to this event, which distinguishes it from a number of works of this genre, and allows it to be attributed to their most ancient form. Bylina in the traditional descriptive manner draws a collective image of the future enemy of the newly born hero. In the image of the "fierce Skimen-beast" we can easily find animal, bird and snake features:

He stood, the dog, on his hind legs,

He hissed, fierce Skimen, like a snake,

He whistled, a thief-dog, like a nightingale,

He roared, a thief-dog, like an animal.

This "monster", we believe, is a folklore meaningful climax of the initiation rite, in which the hero is ritually swallowed by a zoomorphic creature.

In conclusion of the first chapter of the thesis, we can draw the following conclusions: the arrival of a person into the world is an imbalance that is restored with the death of a blood relative. In the creation of the body of the child (the receptacle of the soul, which will become such after the completion of all the rituals of the maternity rite), not only the parents themselves participate, but also all four natural elements, which are not only the physical, but also partly the spiritual component of man. The figurative equalization of two processes - the conception and birth of a child and the baking of bread - is intended to bring the child to the next stage transition - the rite of initiation, when this bread is eaten. Consequently, the “miraculous birth” mentioned in many studies is actually ordinary, but it is represented by folklore meaningful views of the Slavs on this issue.

If the birth of a child, considered by us as the creation of a material body and the arrival of a person’s soul into “this” world can be designated as the first turning point in the life path, then the initiation rite is the next transition to a new psychological and social state. This is a frontier in human consciousness, separating different ways of thinking - as a person dependent on the decisions of parents and not responsible for their actions, or as a fully formed member of society. The psychological impact of this rite contributes to the transition of human consciousness to a new spiritual level. This is exactly what happens in many fairy tales and epic stories, where the theme of a person's full entry into society is touched upon.

The motive of the hero's initiation is so archaic, so hidden by layers of later processing and rethinking, that it is quite difficult to find traces of it. This task is further complicated by the performers of epics and fairy tales, who, often not understanding the reasons forcing the hero to act one way or another, interpret his actions in their own way. Nevertheless, even the fragmentary information that we have helps to draw some seemingly well-founded conclusions. The task of our research in this chapter of the thesis is to find a reflection of each of the stages of the initiation rite in the fairy tale and epic epic.

Ukrainian researcher V.G. Balushok, referring to van Gennep, notes that “any initiation is divided into three phases: 1. separation of the individual from the collective; 2. border period; 3. reincorporation into the team.

After passing the rite, a person rose to a different level of spiritual worldview. After certain events, which will be discussed below, fairy-tale and epic heroes acquire new properties, usually such as strength, wisdom, magical skills, but most importantly, they officially enter marriageable age. The meaning of all acts of this rite is to cause a dramatic change in a person's life; the past must be separated from him by a boundary which he can never cross.

Fairy tales that have retained the features of the archaic rite can be divided into two types:

fairy tales (with a plot divided into male, where the main character is a boy, and female, where the heroine is a girl, types), where the main milestones of the rite are described. This view is intended, we believe, for younger listeners.

fairy tales, where the entire rite is not always told, but some of its parts are considered in great detail - in our opinion, for an older (and therefore closer to the time of the rite) age.

We have already begun to analyze fairy tales of the first type in the previous chapter in connection with the question of the "miraculous" births of heroes, future neophytes. As mentioned, the plot of these tales completely repeats those cited by V.G. Balushkom stages. This type of plot is typical for a male hero. The features of the rite are revealed in the following events: a certain enemy (originally a totemic ancestor, whose image acquired a negative connotation during the transmission of the tale from mouth to mouth) lures the hero into the forest, where he is going to soak him in a bathhouse (this motif is most characteristic of the female type of plot) , then roast in the oven and finally eat. Looking ahead, we note that all these are pronounced stages of the climax of the rite. The return of the hero home occurs due to the suddenly manifested ability to communicate with a gray wolf who accidentally swallowed the hero, or with geese-swans shedding their feathers to the hero, or with a plucked duck carrying the hero on his back - such knowledge, according to the ideas of the Eastern Slavs, could only appear in a person, successfully passed the ceremony.

The female plot type is seen in the fairy tale much less often than the male one, and is not so noticeable. However, we cannot but pay attention to it. In the already mentioned fairy tale “Medvedko, Usynya, Gorynya and Dubynya-bogatyrs”, the heroine with her friends goes into a dark forest - another world - and stumbles upon a hut. This hut, as it seems to us, is one of the varieties of the “forest house”, about which V.Ya. wrote. Propp: “Men's houses are a special kind of institution inherent in the tribal system. … Its origin is associated with hunting as the main form of production of material life, and with totemism as its ideological reflection”, that is, this is not just a bear's lair, but the abode of a totem animal. The heroine of the fairy tale remains in this house. Thus, the fairy-tale material confirms the existence among the Slavs of the ritual presence of selected women in "men's houses". This issue was considered in great detail by V.Ya. Propp. He wrote about such a girl: “She is either kidnapped or, in other versions, comes voluntarily or accidentally; she runs the household and is honored.” There are tales that directly tell about such a life of the heroine (“The Groom-Robber”, “Magic Mirror”), but there are also those where the main attention is paid to another issue, and therefore the girl’s life in the “men’s house” is mentioned only in passing. So, in the fairy tale "Bag, sing!" a girl made of snow, picking berries, disappears in the forest, and then after a while returns to her former life, and they are looking for a groom for her. A similar development of the plot by V.Ya. Propp explains quite convincingly: “In the men's houses there were always women (one or several) who served as wives to the brothers. … The women stay in the houses only temporarily, and then they get married.” After spending some time in the men's house, the heroine fulfilled, as it seems to us, the main role assigned to her - she gave birth to a sacred child, marked with the blood of a totem ancestor.

Let us now turn our attention to the second type of tales, which describe in detail the various details of the initiation rite. The initial phase of initiation - the separation of the individual from the team - is associated with the unification of the boys, upon reaching the age of 6-8 years, into a certain adolescent group, where they remained until the age of 14-16. This time was devoted to the theoretical study of things necessary in later life.

We can find the same stage (albeit greatly exaggerated) in one of the initiatory tales “The Battle on the Kalinov Bridge”: “Three years later they became big and became strong heroes.” In the period limited by the age of three and the indefinite phrase “whether it’s been a lot or not,” the young heroes trained in throwing a club and hunting, and after that “they began to ask the king if he let them look at his kingdom.” This trip is the transition to the second stage of the rite.

In another tale with a similar plot, the time of this transition is even clearly indicated: “This is how Ivan passed 15 years old, he said to the king: Give me a horse, sovereign, on which I could get to the place where the snake is.” Thus, we see that when a boy reaches the age of about 12 years (there are many different options, limited by the general framework from 10 to 19 years old), he passes from the first to the second phase of initiation.

A group of adolescents, having received all the basic necessary knowledge and skills and united by this process, is delivered to the place of the ceremony, which, as emphasized by V.G. Balushok, in the forest. The forest, according to the beliefs of the Slavs, “was traditionally equated with the other world and opposed as a territory alien And undeveloped his , mastered home. border between topics And this the river is the light. This border is described as follows: “they arrived at the fiery river, a bridge lies across the river, and there is a huge forest around the river.”

The second phase of the rite, as it seems to us, is also divided into stages:

-apprenticeship, culminating in a kind of exam - the culminating initiation of the neophyte to higher powers.

-time of practical application of the acquired skills by the dedicated.

Thus, the moment when a teacher transfers knowledge to a student can be observed in the fairy tale “The Fast Messenger”, according to which two elders in the forest tell the hero the following: “If you need to run away somewhere quickly, you can turn into a deer, a hare and a bird with a golden head: we taught you ". Such a teaching is also told in the fairy tales “In the Sorcerer’s Teachings” and “Cunning Science”, which are similar in plot, in which the old sorcerer takes young people for training and teaches them to turn into different animals.

Then, before the upcoming “exam”, there follows a bathing rite, which, in our opinion, was carried out in order to wash away the past, cleanse the hero and prepare him for the coming test, when in the form of a fight, shedding of blood and, finally, ritual death, the young man proved his right become a full member of society. At the same time, we cannot agree with the statement of I. Ya Froyanov and Yu. I. Yudin that “bathing is opposed to being swallowed by the Serpent” and there is a “clash of two pagan worldviews”, rather, it is only a prelude, purification before a test of strength, dexterity , courage, in general, on the ability to independently survive in a dangerous world.

It should be noted that in fairy tales it is rarely indicated directly that the hero bathes in the river or the sea, but almost always he jumps out to meet the Serpent from under the bridge. For example, "Ivan the peasant's son jumped out from under the bridge ...", and a river flows under the bridge in fairy tales.

The stage of training logically completed the rite of passage from the premarital state to the marriageable state, from youthful to male. V.G. Balushok notes: “In the forest camp, the initiates experienced ritual death. This is the main feature of the liminal phase of initiation. Moreover, not only ritual death took place, but also the “swallowing” of those initiated by the mythical monster.”

We also meet this in a fairy tale, where the Serpent says to the hero: “You are Ivan, why did you come? Pray to God, say goodbye to the white light and crawl into my throat yourself ... ". In addition, it is emphasized that before the ceremony it was necessary to wear not only an ordinary, but also a shirt specially prepared for such an occasion: “grandmother, prepared a linen shirt for him, ... began to weave a second shirt from stinging nettles.”

At the conclusion of the rite reflected in the fairy tale, the Serpent “spits out” - spews the hero back, giving him his magical power.

Another important point is connected with the act of "swallowing" the neophyte. As O.M. Freidenberg, “when God kills ... a person, this leads to his resurrection. Consequently, not only food, but also death is perceived by primitive society differently than we do. … sacrifice And eat identically". In other words, the actions of the totemic ancestor imply the resurrection of the subject.

So, having passed the rite of initiation, a person rose to a completely new spiritual level. He washed off himself, and therefore forgot his past life. The reflection of such "forgetfulness" we meet in many fairy tales with different plots. So, in the fairy tale “Dunno” we read: “The king began to ask him: - What kind of person are you? - Don't know. - From what lands? - Don't know. - Whose clan-tribe? - Don't know". A similar situation is drawn in the fairy tale "About Ivan Tsarevich and the Gray Wolf", when the wolf says to the hero: "... how will he let me go with the nannies ... then you remember me - and I will be with you again." But to complete the feeling of life in a new quality, not only the young man forgot his past, but his parents did not remember him either. So, in the already mentioned fairy tales “In the study of the sorcerer” and “Cunning science”, the sorcerer requires the father to first recognize the son, because. only in this case the latter will be able to go back: “Have you come to pick up your son? ... only if you do not recognize him, he will remain with me forever and ever.

The young men who successfully passed the initiation gathered in the unions of blood brothers and, living in the forest, were engaged in hunting and "a kind of ritual raids." A necessary part of this stage of the ceremony was the extraction of a horse. The hero’s horse never appears by itself, it must be earned, or stolen, or found and exited from the “lousy colt”. And we see in folklore examples that the heroic horse, that is, the fighting horse, was given only to the most worthy young men - in the fairy tale "Baba Yaga and Zamoryshek" the magic mare says to the hero: "Well, good mo ?well, when you managed to sit on me, then take possession of my foals.

And, finally, the time comes for the final stage of the ceremony - returning back to the tribal team. A.K. Baiburin, studying maternity rites, draws attention to the fact that "the transition of a person from one age group to another, as a rule, was distinguished by all sorts of manipulations ... with hair." The same important "ritual action, which was part of the final stage of initiation, was probably the ritual haircut and shaving of the initiate." In the fairy tale “Neumoyka”, the ban on hair cutting is exaggerated, which is apparently due to the narrator’s misunderstanding of the true meaning of the actions performed by the hero of the fairy tale: “The work is easy: only 15 years do not shave, do not cut your hair, do not blow your nose, do not wipe your nose and don't change clothes." This is followed in the fairy tale by the mysterious actions of the “imp”, in which the features of the initiation rite actually emerge: “The devil chopped him into small pieces, threw him into a cauldron and began to cook ... and the soldier became such a fine fellow, what can I say in a fairy tale ... " .

Upon completion of training and all kinds of initiatory tests, young people who were ready for marriage returned to the clan team, having gained freedom and all the duties of its full members, therefore, usually immediately after the completion of the rite in the tales of initiation initiates, the wedding of a hero or heroes follows. But sometimes there are tales where initiation is not mentioned, but its echoes are reflected in the unusual abilities of suitors. For example, "an eagle flew in, became a good fellow: before I went as a guest, and now I have come as a matchmaker." The same story is repeated two more times, only its heroes are the falcon and the raven. Here we see young people who have just returned from initiation into society and have received the right to marry.

In addition, it should be noted that sometimes the rite of initiation (we should not forget that this is a difficult test of the ability to survive) ended tragically. This is confirmed by the tale "Two Ivan's soldiers' sons", in which both brothers die during the ceremony. Both of them are torn apart by a lion, into which the sister of a snake killed by one of Ivanov has turned. And the narrator notes with regret: “Thus the mighty heroes perished, the snake sister exhausted them.”

It is curious that the rite in question does not disappear without a trace after the Christianization of Rus'. He temporarily “falls asleep” in order to suddenly be reborn into a ritual of sending recruits to the service. This ritual retained such features as the group association of recruits. According to ethnographic information provided by A.K. Baiburin, a recruit always visited a bathhouse before leaving his home. In addition, the recruits were allowed to "deny the generally accepted daily rules", so they did all sorts of outrages that resemble the ritual raids of initiatory brotherhoods. These changes could not but be reflected in folklore. So, in fairy tales, along with Ivan Tsarevich and Ivan the peasant son, such heroes as Harness the ensign and non-commissioned officer Pulka appear. Moreover, the tellers themselves sometimes get confused and call the soldier a prince, and then again a soldier ("The Soldier and the Tsar's Daughter"). And in these tales there are certainly features of the rite: the hero needs a year “not to cut his hair, not to shave, not to pray to God” (“Non-commissioned officer Pulka”). So the only rite, which did not find a place among the church rituals, was revived almost in full on new soil.

We find no less eloquent descriptions of the various stages of initiation in the epic epic. As in fairy tales, the initial stage of the rite stands out here, when a group of 6-8 year old children receives the first necessary knowledge.

We can find confirmation of this in the epic about Volga Vseslavievich (Buslaevich), where other, different from the above, boundaries of the pre-initiation age are indicated:

Ros Volga Buslaevich up to seven years old

Volga, sir Buslaevich, went over the damp earth ...

And Volga, sir Buslaevich, went

Learn all sorts of tricks, wisdom

And all sorts of different languages;

Volga, sir Buslaevich, asked himself for seven years,

And lived twelve years.

Volga will be seven years old,

Volga will be given to the seven wise men:

Volga understands all the tricks,

All cunning and all wisdom;

Volga will be seventeen years old,

Picks up a good squad...

Or in the epic about Dobryn Nikitich:

He grew up at twelve years old

His mother gave him letters to teach:

The diploma was given to him.

He grew up at fifteen

Begged my mother

Forgiveness-blessings

Drive far into the open field.

Thus, we see that when the boy reached the age of 12 (14,15,16,17) years, he passed from the first to the second phase of initiation. As we have already mentioned, this period of the life of the neophytes took place in the forest, in the men's house. In fairy tales, this territory is most often separated from the house by a river - another indicator that the initiates lived in another world.

Consider the stages of the second phase of the rite reflected by us. So, we can observe the moment of transferring knowledge from a teacher to a student on the example of the epic about Ilya Muromets and Svyatogor. First, the hero becomes the younger brother of Svyatogor: “he exchanged a cross with Ilya and called him a younger brother,” and then he receives an unusual power. Svyatogor tells him: “lean towards the coffin, towards a small crack, I will breathe on you with the spirit of a hero .... Ilya felt that the strength in him against the former was increased by three.” Analyzing the above fragment, we can assume that a group of old experienced warriors was present in the initiation camp, for whom, through the rite of fraternization (blood-cross), neophytes became younger brothers, subordinated in hierarchy, adopting military science, as a result of which almost the entire male population of the tribe became connected with each other by close blood ties necessary during the fighting.

At the end of the forest apprenticeship, the final "survival test" was held, preceded by the ritual cleansing of the neophytes in the water. So, in the epic about Dobrynya and the Serpent, first of all, the motif of the hero’s bathing and the relationship of this action with the appearance of the Serpent attracts attention. The epic is opened by the “instruction” of the mother of the young hero “not to go far in the open field, to that mountain and Sorochinskaya”, “not to swim in the Puchai River”. One gets the impression that Dobrynina's mother already knows in advance what will happen to her son, that he, having bathed, therefore, having begun the initiation ceremony, will eventually receive complete independence. Based on ethnographic data, I.Ya. Froyanov and Yu.I. Yudin notes that “initially, the initiates were sent to the place of the ceremony by their parents, who knew that they would be ritually swallowed by a monster and temporarily die.”

Bathing and cleansing from the past life is followed by being swallowed by a monster and ritual death:

I want - I'll take Dobrynya in the trunk

I'll take it in the trunk and take it down the hole,

I want - I'll eat Dobrynya.

Or in the epic about Mikhail Potyk:

And got along sucking a dead body.

In addition, it can be assumed that the Slavs considered it possible, after passing the rite of initiation, to acquire not only military and magical skills, but also the ability to survive on the battlefield:

Death is not written in Ilya's battle.

Finally, an equally important goal of the initiation was that the spirit of the neophyte united with higher forces, with the gods or with a totem animal, which happened through the use of hallucinogenic drinks and due to the highest nervous tension.

Like a fairy-tale hero, an epic character after initiation reached a completely new spiritual and social level. He washed away and forgot his past life, received a new name:

Now be it you, Ilya, by name,

Ishshe whether you are light and Muramets

That's why we called you shcho - Muramets.

Note that the hero is not only given a name, but also officially accepted into the community of the inhabitants of the city of Murom, naming "Muromets". So, from that moment on, the young man became a full member of society - he could take part in veche meetings, the people's militia, and get married. Also, after the rite of initiation, a person acquired strength, wisdom and, finally, invulnerability in battle - qualities so necessary for leading a new, adult life.

Now he was ready for the second stage of the frontier period, that is, for the practical application of all the acquired possibilities. This was expressed in the form of ritual raids by the squad of blood brothers on neighboring tribes:

Volga will be seventeen years old,

He picks up a good friend:

Thirteen fellows without a single one,

Volga himself was in the thirteenth.

He and his “brothers, a good squad” “caught all the kunny fish, they caught all the martens and foxes.” V.G. Balushok, referring to M. Dikarev, writes about the “entertainment” of such military unions in their free time: they “at the owners, who didn’t like them for some reason or didn’t let the girls go out into the street, broke and dismantled outbuildings, removed the gates, opened the huts, dragged carts and horses onto the roof, devastated vegetable gardens, etc.” Volga does something similar in a foreign kingdom:

And broke the stiff bows,

And broke the silk strings,

And he broke everything with red-hot arrows,

And turned the locks of the weapons,

And refilled the kegs with gunpowder.

Moreover, these actions of Volga should be considered not as harmless, in general, mischief, but as a "military fun" aimed at weakening the combat strength of a potential enemy. The practical application of the knowledge gained during training is reflected in military raids:

And they went to Turkish-land,

And they took the Turkish force to the fullest.

My squad is kind, good!

Let's start sharing now!

And, finally, the time came for the final stage of the initiatory ritual - the return to the native community. As we have already mentioned, the final stage of the rite included a ritual hair cutting, since this was forbidden throughout the entire time of initiation. Moreover, as it seems to us, the hero was cut after returning home:

Young Dobrynya Nikitich had yellow curls,

Three rows of curls curled around the top:

And you, the tavern's goal, hang on your shoulders.

Upon the return of the young man home, the parents ritually “do not recognize” their son, since according to tradition they were informed of his “death”:

Set aside the lattice gate

Meet the young Dobrynya from the pure field!

Get away you kindly, tavern nether,

From oblique windows,

Don't make fun of me

Over the victorious old woman:

And then I will shake my old age deep,

I'll go out into the street - I'm dishonestly spending.

Ah, you are the light-empress mother!

Why didn't you recognize your beloved son,

Young Dobrynya Nikitich?

Like a fairy tale, the epic notes cases of unsuccessful passage of the rite, which eventually ended for the neophyte not with ritual, but with real death. This is narrated in the epic "about the Good fellow, the unfortunate and the Smorodinka River." The narrative opens with a description of the first stage of the rite:

When was young

The time is great,

Honor-praise well done, -

Lord God have mercy

The sovereign-king complained,

Father-mother of a young man

Held in love

And the clan-tribe for the young man

Can't look...

But time has passed and

The berry rolled down

With sa [har] new trees,

A branch broke off

From curly from an apple tree,

The good fellow is lagging behind

From father, son, from mother.

And now a young man

Great timelessness.

Well done sits on a good horse and rides to the "alien side", located beyond the Smorodina River. He overcomes the water barrier without any difficulty, which, apparently, indicates the successful completion of that phase of the rite, which involves bathing and cleansing. But at the last stage - returning home - the hero is unable to cross the river and dies in it:

He stepped on the first step -

The horse drowned up to its neck,

Another stage with (that) drank -

Circassian saddle,

The third step the horse stepped -

You don't see the mane anymore.

Drowned good fellow

In the Moscow River, Smorodina.

Based on the analysis of this epic, we come to the conclusion that accidents could also occur during initiations, and the deceased did not return to the house during the ceremony, remaining forever in the literal and figurative sense in the “other world”.

Thus, the considered fairy tales and epics allow us to conclude that in the folklore of the Eastern Slavs, all stages of the initiation rite are clearly visible, and there are 2 types of fairy tale plot - for young children, the story of the upcoming initiation as a whole, with the allocation of its three main stages, and for older adolescents, when individual stages of the rite are considered in detail. In epics, as in more complex works, the first form characteristic of a fairy tale is absent, but the second is traditionally presented brightly and colorfully.

Chapter 3

Slavic folklore knows a considerable number of stories about wedding ceremonies and family relationships in Ancient Rus'. Such close attention can indicate the high social and spiritual significance of marriage and the family, as well as a wide range of problems associated with these issues.

Marriage - like the birth of a person, like initiation in men - is a turning point on the life path of an individual. For a man, this is already the third transition from one physical and spiritual state to another (in this case, from youthful to masculine), for a woman it is the second, since her initiation rite coincides with the wedding ceremony. Therefore, as with any initiation, there must be a ritual death and resurrection in marriage. A.V. Nikitina, exploring the symbolism of the image of the cuckoo in various rituals, notes that “marriage and death merge and are identified in their sacred and ritual meanings and are opposed to ordinary life. Therefore, the symbolism of marriage in a certain sense correlates with the symbolism of death. Confirmation of this we meet more than once in fairy tales:

“Then a week later, these very same matchmakers [to woo] come. ... She took a muslin dress, put it on, as she coped with death. ("Groom-robber" .) Or a fairy tale where the old stepmother says to the heroine: “Put on my ring. She put it on and died. ... They misinterpreted between themselves what to marry you. As they married, it was a feast for the whole world. ("The Self-Looking Mirror". )

On the other hand, although the “death” of the spouses (and especially the bride) took place according to all the laws of the funeral rite, those around, as A.K. Baiburin, sought to control the situation (to prevent the complete departure of the heroes of the ritual from the world of people). Therefore, special precautions were taken, in particular flaxseed was poured into the bride's shoes, an onion was put in her pocket, and a fishing net was put on her body. This remark allows us to suggest that when the heroine of the well-known fairy tale “The Seven Years”, having received the task to come to visit “in clothes and without clothes”, arrives wrapped in a net, she may be fulfilling precisely these protective instructions, especially since further along According to the plot of the tale, the wedding of the Seven-Year Plan and the gentleman who invited her takes place.

In a man's life, marriage is a way to occupy a certain place in the social system. This state of affairs persisted even in the 16th century, when on the days of the wedding the power of the ruler was manifested, who acquired the status of an “adult”, “independent” man, when they believed that a sovereign who was able to create a family, maintain harmony and deanery in his own house, also will govern the country fairly.

As we already know, the young men who returned after the initiation rite were considered to have entered the marriageable age, that is, to the phase of social maturity. It is especially necessary to note that this is not about the physiological readiness for procreation, which could have come long before the ceremony, but about the recognition by society of this person as its full-fledged component. A.K. Baiburin emphasizes that from a ritual point of view, physiological maturity in itself is not sufficient either for the transition to a new status, or even for (official - I. M.) procreation. An individual acquires such an opportunity only with the help of measures aimed at transforming both social and physiological characteristics, ultimately - at creating “new people” (that is, as a result of an initiation rite - I.M.) On the other hand, this is not at all means that the rite of initiation was immediately followed by an official marriage. Folklore gives us many examples of the fact that the facts of premarital sexual activity in ancient Rus' were widespread and did not cause a particularly strong negative reaction, if public attention was not focused on this, and if, of course, it was not violence. This feature is characteristic of the pagan society and the time of pre-Mongol Rus', when pagan traditions were still very strong. That is why we can note that the hero, after spending the night in a tent with a girl, did not officially marry her in all cases.

Often in fairy tales, the girls themselves came to the tents of young people, and they hardly knew how such a visit would end: “And she [the king's daughter] came to those tents with twenty-nine maidens; … Take the red girls by the hand, lead them to your tents, and do what you know! ". ("Baldak Borisevich")

Sometimes, according to V.G. Balushok, young men married girls captured during ritual raids. These raids are associated with a kind of "hunting", which later was reflected in fairy tales, where the bride, or even sometimes an accomplished wife who needs to be won again, appears in the form of game. The most frequent images are swans and ducks, less often geese, even more rarely turtledoves, doves, etc.

According to researchers, the “white swan” means a marriageable girl, and the hunt of a fairy-tale hero is nothing more than a search for a bride. A classic example of all of the above is the tale "Ivan Tsarevich and the White Swan." On the one hand, we find here the very “hunt”, as a result of which Ivan Tsarevich acquired a swan wife, and on the other hand, we find a free marriage, not burdened with unnecessary formalities: “They began to live and live in a white tent, in a clean field, in a wide expanse.

In addition, here we also meet relatives of the “white swan”, which are also swans. Thus, the swan image of the bride is not only a poetic comparison, not only an identification of the concepts of the bride's prey and bird hunting, but a direct indication of her family affiliation. The fact is that representatives of each individual tribe, and even tribal settlement, perceived all other territories as a “other world”, unknown and terrible, and therefore the people who lived there acquired zoomorphic, otherworldly features in their eyes.

Even in the 19th century similar ideas still existed among the population, which A.N. Ostrovsky in his drama "Thunderstorm", where the wanderer Feklusha kept a picture of the world, in the center of which was the described city of Kalinov: "You live in the promised land!", When "there is still a land where all people have dog heads."

So, both the bride and her family have a bird or snake appearance, and, as I.Ya Froyanov and Yu.I. Yudin, “in the fairy tale we are dealing with a woman who, before her transformation into a human being, represents a bird-like inhabitant of another world, not only the otherworldly totemic in origin, but also the ancestral world of the bride.”

Marriage by kidnapping, and its roots go back to the primitive communal system, was widespread, which is confirmed by examples from many different fairy tales: “Well, you managed to see, manage and get it. So that after three months, three weeks and three days, Elena the Beautiful would be before my eyes, ”as well as the fairy tales“ Crystal Mountain ”,“ Ivan Tsarevich and the Gray Wolf ”,“ The Little Humpbacked Horse ”, etc., where either the heroes have to kidnap their brides, or, conversely, to free once abducted women. Of course, as time passed, abduction began to be used more in a ritual sense. On the other hand, it is the ritual, and not the reality, of marriage by abduction that confirms to us the fact that the bride agrees to get married only if the husband fulfills the task, that is, proves his worth. So in the fairy tale “The Little Humpbacked Horse” the princess demands from the prospective groom to bring a wedding dress: “I don’t have a wedding dress. Go, bring it to me, then I will get married. As a result, it was the main character who stole the bride, who passed the ritual test by the task, and became the husband.

In principle, based on folklore material, we can conclude that among the Eastern Slavs, an official wedding differed from an unofficial one only by the consent of the parents of the bride and groom, and any cohabitation in the same house (tent) and implied sexual relations with the consent of both parties were considered a recognized marriage.

As for the wedding ceremony itself (a socially recognized form of marriage), fairy tales mainly feature its Christian form, but sometimes we can find a reflection of a more archaic tradition, when the person conducting the ceremony (in the Christian era, a priest) ties the hands of the bride and groom. So, in the fairy tale "Pig casing" the girl says to her mother: "Bless us, mother, let the priest tie our hands - for our happiness, for your joy!" It is impossible not to note the pagan essence of this action, which clearly demonstrates the unity of two people in marriage. In addition, I would like to note that the very word "wedding" comes from the word "wreath", because. during the church ceremony, special crowns are used (they can also be called wreaths), which are placed on the head of the newlyweds. Marriage crowns ... resemble the bride's wedding headdress, for example, a wreath woven from flowers or branches with decorations. It is likely that the ancient wedding ceremony also included the exchange of wreaths, and it seems to us that this tradition, although in a rather distorted form, has come down almost to recent times: “the bridegroom redeems the removed wreath of the bride, (or - I.M.) the bride rolls on the table ... to the groom, who takes him away. This form of ritual union of the bride and groom is mentioned by A.N. Ostrovsky in the play "The Snow Maiden", when Kupava tells the Snow Maiden about Mezgir:

... and he already swore so

On Yarilin day, at sunrise,

To exchange wreaths in the eyes of the king

And take me as your wife.

Nevertheless, fairy tales give a fairly clear distinction - first a ceremony, and only then a feast with many guests. However, a feature of the Slavic wedding ceremony is that the marriage itself actually entered into force not after the symbolic union of the bride and groom, not after the binding of hands, but after the completion of the feast.

This is confirmed by examples from many fairy tales in which the hero returned from his wanderings precisely at the time of the wedding of his bride and another person. Moreover, fairy tales emphasize that the rite was in progress, and, therefore, interrupted before the end of the feast, it no longer had strength. So, in the fairy tale “Ivan Tsarevich and the Gray Wolf”, the hero who returned to his native kingdom, “having come to the palace, found that his brother Vasily Tsarevich was marrying the beautiful princess Elena: he returned from the crown with her and sits at the table.”

There is not a single fairy tale where the verb “married” would be used in the same situation, they only “marry”, the arrival of the hero breaks the feast, and the rite remains incomplete. As a result, the hero at the same moment marries himself. And in some fairy tales, the trip of the bride and groom to the church is not even mentioned, but it is only about the feast, which once again emphasizes its exceptional significance: "today the king has a great feast - an honest wedding."

N.L. Pushkareva explains the vitality of the wedding feast as a tradition by the fact that in Rus' great importance was attached to the public recognition of marriage. However, such a view of this element of the wedding action seems to us somewhat superficial. Death and food as a symbol and as an action are indispensable components of all rites of passage. interesting remark O.M. Freidenberg on the wedding ritual: “It is identified with death because the woman is identified with the earth; it is equated with the act of eating, because eating is also represented as the death-birth of the deity of fertility, dying and resurrecting. This remark explains the reason for the high significance of the ritual feast, as well as why the marriage remained incomplete without it.

Also in fairy tales there are non-standard, from a modern point of view, forms of creating a family. On the one hand, this is polygamy, which involves the relationship of a man and several women, sealed with rituals, but at the same time there is nothing in common between the wives, they often do not even know about the existence of each other. For example, in the fairy tale "Ivan Bykovich", an old man in a dungeon, in the presence of one wife-witch, sends a hero to get him a second one - a princess.

On the other hand, one of the most common motifs in folklore is the abduction of someone else's wife and the subsequent marriage to her. This moment is easily explained by the peculiarity of the pagan worldview of the Slavs. We are talking, first of all, about the indisputable rights of the winner, about which I.Ya. Froyanov writes: "By killing the ruler, the opponent receives not only power, but also the property, wife and children of the vanquished." This situation is clearly demonstrated by the dialogue between two princes in the fairy tale “The Princess is a Gray Duck”:

“- What do you want to do?

I want to kill you!

Why, Ivan Tsarevich?

After all, this is a portrait of your bride ... "

Here we see that one of the princes decided to kill another in order to marry the latter's bride. So, the surest way to get someone else's bride (wife) is to kill the groom or husband. You can also kidnap a girl or a woman: "A strong whirlwind rose, picked up the queen and carried her away to no one knows where." There is no doubt that the kidnapped woman became the wife of the kidnapper: “Everything shook around, the Whirlwind flew in ... rushed to hug and kiss her.”

However, not every woman was so easy to kidnap and marry her. There are often moments in fairy tales when a man has to enter into a fight with a woman and prove to her his right to be a husband: her out of hand. … Well, Ivan the Bogatyr, now I surrender to your will!

But women could protect themselves not only by werewolves. The image of heroes, warriors is equally characteristic of both epics and fairy tales. The names of fairy-tale heroines - “Viflievna the Bogatyr”, “Bogatyrka-Sineglazka”, and the description of their appearance speak of these qualities, which would seem unusual for a woman, and the description of their appearance: “the princess galloped on a stately horse, with a golden spear, a quiver full of arrows.” Finally, women could go to war, leaving their husbands to take care of the household: “And the princess decided to go to war; she leaves the whole household for Ivan Tsarevich.

But if the epic is characterized by plots where the warrior heroine, who surpassed her husband in military skill or disobeyed him, is killed by her own husband (epics about Mikhail Potyk, Svyatogor, Danube Ivanovich (Vladimir’s marriage), Nepre-royalevichna, etc.), then in fairy tales, these same motives are not something out of the ordinary. The reason for this, it seems to us, is that the fairy-tale material is more archaic, and therefore, unlike epics, it has not undergone a strong change due to the impact of Christian morality on it.

However, the study of epics reveals to us some other aspects of wedding rituals and ideas associated with this event. As mentioned above, the young men who returned after the initiation rite were considered to be of marriageable age, and sometimes they could marry girls captured during ritual raids. But in our opinion, Polonyanki were considered, first of all, as prey - slaves, they hardly had the legal rights of a wife. Moreover, we see that these girls were bought and sold:

And it was actually cheap - female:

The old women were half-assed,

And the young women, two half-shells,

And red girls for money.

Nevertheless, in epics, as in fairy tales, the rite of marriage by abduction is widespread - for example, the epic prince Vladimir punished his matchmakers:

If you give it with honor, then take it with honor,

Bude will not give honor - take without honor.

And Vladimir assisted Alyosha Popovich when he wanted to marry Natalya (Nastasya) Mikulichna, Dobrynya's wife:

I do not go for the brave Olesha Popovich

Here they say:

You do not go kindly, we will take it by force!

And they took her by the white hands

They took me to the church in the cathedral.

The same motif is reflected in the epic about King Salman:

How can a wife be taken away from a living husband?

And with cunning we will take with cunning,

With great will take away with wisdom.

However, judging by some epics, the picture may be diametrically opposite, i.e. When choosing a husband, a woman was guided solely by her own opinion:

And if he is a young hero,

I will take the hero in full,

And if the hero comes to love me,

Now I'm going to marry a hero.

("Dobrynya is getting married")

and sometimes simply imposed on her future spouse:

There is me and the red girl,

Marya Lebed is white and royal,

Royal yes I'm a podyanka.

Do not kill me, but you are a non-polyanka,

You take me non in marriage.

(Potyk Mikhail Ivanovich)

And, of course, it is no coincidence that Marya appeared before Potyk in the form of a swan, and he himself "went to walk around the backwaters, shoot and shoot white swans." As we have already mentioned, the “white swan” in the folk tradition means a girl of marriageable age, and the hunt of an epic hero is the search for a bride. This once again confirms the epic about the marriage of Duke Stepanovich, whose main character is called the White Swan.

As for the wedding ceremony itself, in epics, as well as in fairy tales, its Christian form mainly appears, but sometimes we can find a reflection of a more archaic tradition, when a pagan symbol, most often a certain tree, becomes the center of any ceremony:

They got married in an open field,

The circle of the willow bush got married.

(Dobrynya and Marinka)

Based on the information gleaned from the folk epic, it can be concluded that in pre-Christian Rus', the marriage ceremony was a purely personal matter, only two people took part in it, the bride and groom themselves. N.L. Pushkareva notes on this occasion that "in the early stages of the development of the ancient Russian state, marital relations ... developed under the influence of personal inclination." And if in fairy tales we can still find the fact of the leading role of parents in the issue of marriage (“Father and mother agree to give her that the goras arrived very well. . Well, she’s not unlocked.”), then in the epics this issue is already decided only by the spouses themselves. In most folklore stories about parents, there is not even a mention, and in those cases where they were present, the last word still remained with the children. So, in the epic “Khoten Bludovich”, Ofimya’s mother refused to marry Khoten’s mother, insulting her along the way (she poured a spell of green wine on her), but when Khoten himself suggested Ofimya to marry him, she agreed:

For three years I prayed to the Lord,

What would I get married to Khotinushka,

For that Hotinushka, for Bludovich.

As a result, the wedding took place. Thus, we see that the transition from premarital life to marriage in the ancient ideas of the Eastern Slavs is primarily the work of the bride and groom themselves.

True, the epics sometimes mention a third person who took part in the ceremony - a priest, but we believe that this is already the result of a Christian rethinking of the epics. Perhaps later, with the advent of written law in Rus', two “vidoks” were required to confirm the legality of marriage, which are called “witnesses” in our modern rite.

Nevertheless, the epics give a fairly clear distinction - first a ceremony, and only then a feast with many guests, which is not the main part of the wedding, but the final act, without which, in the popular understanding, the wedding is considered legal, but still incomplete:

And here in the cathedral for vespers the bell was struck,

The flow of Mikhail Ivanovich went to vespers,

On the other side - Avdotyushka Lekhovidievna,

Soon vtapores were cut and cleaned,

Having removed, she went to the evening.

To that wide yard to Prince Vladimir.

Comes to bright gridni,

And then the prince became merry-joyful to them,

He sat them at cleared tables.

Another necessary detail of the rite, according to I.Ya. Froyanova and Yu.I. Yudina, is the newlyweds exchange a drink. So, Mikhaila Potyk and Tsar Salman took a drink from the hands of their unfaithful wives, apparently in the hope of "restoring the marriage relations that were interrupted, strengthening them with ritual magic":

The king and the politician took me away,

What if he took me away from Kyiv by force.

Brings him a spell of green wine:

Have another glass of green wine.

(Potyk Mikhail Ivanovich)

And she fed the king to his full,

And she got him drunk,

And poured a beer bowl and a half buckets,

Offered to King Salman.

(About King Salman)

However, it should be noted that in fairy tales, a drink at a wedding also performs a special function - the hero or heroine, who has forgotten their beloved, remembers them after offering the drink (some identifying object is added to the drink, for example, a ring, but it seems to us that this is already more later additions by the narrators themselves): “Ivanushka took a golden cup, poured sweet honey into it ... Princess Marya drank to the very bottom. A golden ring rolled up to her lips. So the groom was recognized, and a legal wedding was played. Sometimes the drink also allows you to find the groom: the princess “looked behind the pipe and saw Ivan the Fool there; his dress is thin, covered in soot, his hair on end. She poured a glass of beer, brings it to him ... and says: “Father! Here is my fiancé." Evidence that in the XVI century. there was a ritual exchange of drink during the wedding ceremony, can be found in the writings of foreigners who visited Muscovy. So, the diplomat D. Fletcher notes that "first the groom takes a full glass, or a small cup, and drinks it for the health of the bride, and then the bride herself." In our opinion, different plot interpretations do not interfere with the main conclusion - the drink brought to the bride or groom by the other half (and most likely in the rite itself there was a mutual exchange of a drink), one way or another, sealed the marriage bond. The same view was held by A. Gennep, who refers the tradition of exchanging a drink to the rites of unity.

Epics often reflect not only the ritual, but also the everyday side of family relations. So, the problems of the marriage life of a woman in Ancient Rus', probably, did not differ much from our modern ones. One of them was a failed relationship with her husband's parents:

The father-in-law scolds, scolds,

And the mother-in-law orders to beat.

You can often find images of epic husbands who abandoned their family (“Ilya Muromets and his son”, “Ilya Muromets and his daughter”), husbands on a spree (“About a good fellow and an unfortunate wife”), drunkard husbands (“Potyk Mikhail Ivanovich” ).

But there were also significant differences related to the worldview of the pagan Slavs. First of all, we are talking about the indisputable rights of the winner, about which I.Ya. Froyanov wrote: “By killing the ruler, the opponent receives not only power, but also the property, wife and children of the vanquished. Thus, the intention of the Drevlyans to marry the widowed Olga Mala and dispose of Svyatoslav at their own discretion is a manifestation of the pagan customs that flourished among the Eastern Slavs of the 10th century. A similar situation is reflected by the epic about Ilya Muromets and Kalin Tsar:

And let's go to the city of capital, to Kyiv,

And for that glory for the great,

And to the affectionate prince to Vladimir,

And they want to take the princess and Opraxia,

And to conquer the city of Kyiv.

He wants to take his wife away from her husband,

At that prince at Vladimir

Young Queen Oprax.

In our opinion, the traditional description of the feast at the epic prince Vladimir can be considered in connection with these rights of the winner. Here:

The smart one boasts of the old father,

The madman boasts of his young wife.

(Alyosha Popovich and Tugarin Zmeevich)

It is the word "crazy" that draws attention to itself. It is possible that a certain person is insane precisely because he draws everyone's attention to his main asset, and, therefore, risks losing it.

Here it is necessary to pay attention to such an important milestone in a person’s life (the third for a woman) as pregnancy and the birth of the first child, that is, the spiritual and social transition from the state of “wife” to the state of “wife and mother”. A.K. Baiburin notes that “the actual ritual actions associated with the birth of a child begin as part of the wedding ritual, and from this point of view, the wedding not only precedes the homelands, but can also be considered as the initial stage of the maternity ritual.”

In fairy tales and epics, we will not find such an abundance of material on this issue as, for example, on initiation or wedding rituals, however, some fairy tales tell about this transition precisely in the context of the death and resurrection of the mother. Over a long period of reworking this plot by the people, the moment of the resurrection of the woman in labor either fell out of the fairy tale altogether, or was rethought as the introduction of the deceased mother to the host of ancestors, but we consider it possible to assert that this is precisely the rethinking of the original chain of “death-resurrection”. So, in many fairy tales we will meet the same features: Once upon a time there were spouses and took root "only one daughter", and often the mother dies immediately after the birth of the child. Further, there are three options for the development of the storyline - either the mother is no longer mentioned at all, or the child gets from the mother some kind of helping talisman - a cow (for example, “Tiny-havroshechka”) or a doll (for example, “Vasilisa the Wise”), or the mother herself helps advice to the child (for example, “Pig casing”).

The dead mothers are always invisibly present next to the children, give advice from the grave, through an intermediary talisman or come to the child: “the deceased mother in the very dress in which she was buried, kneels, leaning towards the cradle, and feeds the child with a dead breast . As soon as the hut was lit up, she immediately got up, looked sadly at her baby and quietly left, without saying a single word to anyone.

The weak reflection in the East Slavic folklore of this particular rite of passage from one life cycle to another in no way detracts from its significance and is most likely the result of an unspoken taboo, since childbirth took place in an atmosphere of strict secrecy from everyone not initiated into this sacrament, at a remote distance .

The social position of a woman who has given birth, after completing all the purification rituals after childbirth, changes very much. T.B. Shchepanskakya, who studied family relations from the point of view of the headship in the house of one of the spouses, writes that the first pregnancy had the meaning of female “initiation”, it was a time of preparation for gaining maternal status and entering a women’s society, which in turn gave them the right to exercise leadership in the family. With the birth of her first child, a woman was recognized as an "adult", therefore, she acquired some new rights, noticed by a military engineer in the Polish service and the author of notes on contemporary Russia in the 16th century. Alexander Gvagnini, who wrote: “In the church they (wives - I.M.) are rarely released, for friendly conversations even less often, and for feasts only those who are beyond all suspicion, that is, those who have already given birth.” The name of the woman herself is also changing, if before pregnancy she is a “young woman”, then after childbirth she is already a “woman”. All this allows us to conclude that the homeland is no less significant rite of passage than, for example, initiation or marriage, although East Slavic folklore provides us with very little factual material relating to this issue.

Thus, we can conclude that the wedding, as a rite of passage of a person from the previous psychological and social state to a new one, is fully reflected in folklore. The wedding ceremony was extended in time and began with the search for a bride, which in fairy tales and epics was symbolized by the hero's hunting for birds, and the bride girl appeared in the guise of a swan, duck, dove, etc. For the ancient Slavs, marriages by abduction were characteristic, but marriage was also quite possible at the initiative of a woman. Quite clearly in the epics, one can also trace the archaic tradition of the indisputable rights of the winner to the property, wife and children of the vanquished.

Much less folklore plots are devoted to the transition of a woman from the status of a “young woman” wife to the status of an officially adult “woman” mother. This issue is touched upon by the narrators very carefully, which allowed us to assume that there is an unspoken ban on public discussion of this rite.

Although Christian layers, both in fairy tales and epics, modify the plot lines and actions of the characters, they are more than superficial for the researcher’s eye, so the difficulty for the folklorist is not to free the plot from these layers, but in the fact that to unravel the true meaning of the pagan symbols that overwhelm the epic. The meaning, which is often not guessed even by the narrators themselves.

Chapter 4. Pagan ideas about death and immortality in fairy tales and epics of the Russian people

In our thesis work, we have already considered such stages of a person's life cycle as the conception and birth of a child, his transition from childhood to adulthood, marriage, family life, and now we need to study the reflection of pagan ideas about the final stage of the circle of being - death - in folk heritage.

First of all, let's pay attention to the easiest form of "death" in the understanding of the ancient Slavs - sleep. In fairy tales, these two concepts are interchanged, intertwined and, as a result, become practically inseparable from each other. This feature is noted by A.A. Potebnya. The researcher writes that “sleep is akin to death, and therefore, according to Serbian belief, one should not sleep when the sun sets ... so that it does not take the sleeping person for the dead and does not take the soul with it.” Such a close relationship of these concepts is a reflection of one of the cosmogonic ideas of the Slavs, which will be considered by us below.

Like ethnographic material, the tale claims that sleep is death. A fairy-tale death is not at all like a real one: “in the coffin lies a dead maiden of indescribable beauty: a blush on her cheeks, a smile on her lips, exactly the living one is sleeping.” Resurrecting, but not realizing it, the heroes of fairy tales exclaimed: “Ah, dear svasha, I slept for a long time!” To which they answered: “You should sleep from now on and forever! My villainous son killed you to death." On the other hand, a harmless dream also resembles death: “I won’t turn from side to side for nine days, but if you wake me up, you won’t wake me up.”

In most cases, the hero, stumbling upon a sleeping potential enemy, did not kill him, but uttered a meaningful phrase: “A sleepy person is like a dead one” and went to bed next to him. The last action, apparently, was performed in order to be in the same world with the person they met, in addition, after this dream, the heroes went out into the field to measure their strength. What is the meaning of this particular form of sleep? Considering the notion that sleep is tantamount to death, the logic of such an act is quite understandable: the hero slept before the battle, which means he died, and since he just died, it means that this should not happen in battle. (“Bely Polyanin”, “Alyosha Popovich, Dobrynya Nikitich and Idol Idolovich”, etc.)

We observe a similar picture when the hero returns from other lands (= another world). Before you get home, you need to sleep - to die for one world in order to be reborn in your own. These moments are found in the fairy tales "Koschei the Immortal", "Ivan Tsarevich and the Gray Wolf" and others with similar plots. All this corresponds to magical ideas about astral travel between worlds.

But in fairy tales, death is not always identical with sleep. In other plots, death is a very real end to a person’s life, and is used not to move to another world or ritual actions before a battle, but as a clear example of the transition of the soul from an earthly state to a sacred one - a deceased father or mother becomes patron ancestors.

Mythologists tend to identify the cult of the dead with the cult of dead ancestors. Meanwhile, as D.K. Zelenin, such identification of all the dead with their ancestors is erroneous. The dead ancestors are only one of the categories of dead people. The second category is made up of the dead who died prematurely unnatural death - regardless of whether their sudden death was an accident, whether it was violent, that is, murder, or, finally, it was suicide.

B.A. Rybakov also makes a clear distinction between the concepts of “Navi” and “ancestral spirits,” which some researchers tie together: “Ancestral spirits are always kind to their descendants, always patronize and help them; they are prayed either in the house or at the graves in the cemetery in the rainbow. Navi, on the other hand, look vicious, hostile to man; Navi - not just the dead, but those who died unbaptized, i.e. strangers, as if infidel spirits. We observe the same distinction in fairy tales, where there are “good” spirits of deceased household members and terrible dead that crawl out of their graves at night.

Plots related to the spirits of ancestors have a number of features. Firstly, this is a command to the dying father to perform the funeral rites at the grave: "When I die, come to my grave - sleep for one night." In addition, there is also an obligatory sacrifice, when the hero “teared off the mare, took it, stabbed it, took off the skin, and threw the meat”, and not just threw it, but called sacred birds to the memorial meal: “Eat magpies, crows, remember my father ". To the question "why does a dead man need sacrifices?" V.Ya. Propp answers as follows: "If you do not make sacrifices, that is, do not satisfy the hunger of the deceased, he will not have peace and will return to the world as a living ghost." However, it seems to us that the motif of "feeding" the deceased refers to the rites of the cult of the "foreign" dead, "navei". A sacrifice to “one’s own”, members of the genus, is a kind of “package” on the road. The same considerations are defended by A.V. Nikitin, who believes that "sacrifice to the gods and deified ancestors are mediators between the world of the living and the world of the dead." Thus, the positive influence of the ancestors extended only to the descendant who performed all the necessary rituals.

V.Ya. Propp writes: “The tale obviously does not tell something here, some link has fallen out here. … The matter, of course, is not just in the "seat". This is too colorless an act of a funeral cult to be primordial. The fairy tale here discarded the rituals of sacrifices and libations that once existed. And he also writes about sacrifices: “Why does a dead man need sacrifices? If you do not make sacrifices, that is, do not satisfy the hunger of the deceased, he will not have peace and will return to the world as a living ghost. So, in the fairy tale “Ivan the merchant’s son reprimands the princess,” we even meet human sacrifices to the deceased princess: “In that state, the king’s daughter died; they carried her to the church and every night they sent her one person to eat. This means that the deceased, in order not to bring evil to the people remaining on earth, must be Rightburied - with observance of all ceremonies.

The same idea is confirmed by the fairy tale "About a brave young man, rejuvenating apples and living water." Here, the dead hero on the mountain is "lying around instead of a dog", apparently just as useless and as embittered as a dog. But after Ivan Tsarevich appropriately buried the hero, “collected a memorial table and bought all kinds of supplies,” the hero’s soul gave his savior a horse and weapons.

No less characteristic is the set of stories about the stepdaughter and the doll of the late mother who helped her. Let us pay attention to the fact that the doll (possibly a wooden image) belonged to the deceased, that is, it served as a “deputy” for the deceased mother, who could not help but help her child. The doll had to be fed: "doll, eat, listen to my grief." This feeding of the doll, in our opinion, is nothing more than a sacrifice of food to the spirits of the ancestors, as a result of which the latter helped those living on earth.

On the other hand, "foreign" or "incorrectly" buried people in fairy tales harmed people. The same type of dead includes people who died "not by their own death." As A.K. Baiburin, they were perceived " impure the dead, the treatment of which required special techniques, since the unused vitality (remaining in the deceased as a result of premature death - I.M.) could be dangerous for the living. D.K. Zelenin wrote that the attitude of the mortgaged dead to living people is unreasonably hostile. Mortgage dead in every possible way frighten people, as well as cattle; they bring diseases to people, in particular - plagues; finally, they kill people in various ways. Similar villains, in our opinion, operate in folklore.

So, in the fairy tale “The Martyr” we read: “The coffin opened, that dead man got out of it, realized that there was someone on the grave, and asked:

Who is there? ... Respond, otherwise I will suffocate!

“- Give (the lid of the coffin - I.M.), good man! the dead man asks.

Then I'll give it back when you say: where were you and what did you do?

And I was in the village; killed two young guys there. ("Tales of the Dead")

But, nevertheless, even the restless dead do not forget the debt of blood and help their living relatives. So, in one of the "Stories about the Dead" in the collection of A.N. Afanasiev, we meet the following plot: one of the brothers died. He was cursed by his mother, and therefore "the earth does not accept" him. Therefore, he asked his brother to help beg for forgiveness from his mother, and also helped him marry happily.

For a comprehensive understanding of the place of death in the ideas of the Slavs, it is necessary to pay attention to some vestiges of funeral rites reflected in folklore. As A.K. Baiburin, ethnographic materials "give reason to believe that physical cleanliness ("washed out") is a stable sign of death." We find confirmation of this in folklore plots dedicated to the rite of initiation, as well as in those works, according to which the hero needs to cross over to another world (that is, to die in his own). Usually, actions of this kind are performed in the hut of Baba Yaga standing on the border of the worlds, she “fed him (Ivan Tsarevich - I.M.), gave him a drink, evaporated in a bathhouse; and the prince told her that he was looking for his wife, Vasilisa the Wise.

L.G. Nevskaya notes that in the Slavic tradition, the funeral rite is recognized and carried out as a link between two spheres - life and death. This character of the rite is especially clearly manifested in the diversely expressed idea of ​​the road. A.A. also mentioned this. Potebnya: “According to a very common idea among the Slavs, a dying person sets off on a long journey; to depart means to die, the waste is a canon read over the dying. That is why, to overcome this road, the deceased might need some kind of vehicle. So, one of the items that the soul might need on a journey to another world was a sleigh. With their help, the deceased was taken to the place of burial, wrote D.N. Anuchin, and left the sleigh on the grave so that the deceased could continue his journey. N.N. Veletskaya, on the other hand, claims that different forms coexisted in the ritual of departure to the “other world”. We are interested in two of them, when people waiting for death:

put on a sled or on a bast and taken out in the cold in a field or steppe

taken to a dense forest and left there under a tree.

It is this ritual, as it seems to us, that is reflected in the fairy tale "Morozko", when the stepmother told the old man: "Take your stepdaughter, take it even to a dark forest, even to the road on the way." And the father took the heroine on a sleigh to the forest, leaving it under a pine tree.

We find equally eloquent descriptions of the funeral rite in the epic epic. Sledges were also used here at the funeral:

He went, Potok, to give the cathedral priests a message,

That his young wife died.

The cathedral priests ordered him

Immediately bring on a sleigh

To that cathedral church,

Put the body on the porch.

An interesting idea is D.N. Anuchin about that word « sleighmeant a snake, and therefore it can be assumed that the name of the sleigh was given to the runners by their resemblance to snakes, tk. later in the epic, a snake is also mentioned:

And the underground snake sailed,

And she pierced the white-dub deck,

And got along sucking a dead body.

We should leave the study of this relationship for another study, and turn to the “white-oak deck” mentioned in the epic, which, being the location of the heroes, performed the function of a coffin. This question is important for us in connection with another remark by D.N. Anuchin, who, studying the place of the boat in the funeral rite of the Slavs, writes that “hollowed decks can also be varieties of the boat.” The boat performed the same task with the soul of the deceased as the sleigh - that is, it served as a vehicle, because, according to the ideas of the Slavs, the world of the dead was behind water or a river - and a boat is needed to overcome this obstacle.

Given the above quotes, it is not surprising that it is in the epic "Potuk Mikhail Ivanovich" that we find another vehicle that the ancient Slavs could put in the grave of the deceased - his horse:

They dug a grave deep and great,

Depth and width of twenty fathoms,

And then Potok Mikhail Ivanovich

With a horse and harness

He sank into the same deep grave.

And they turned the oak ceiling,

And covered with yellow sands.

Summarizing all of the above, we come to the conclusion that folklore stories contain a reflection of some rudiments of the rite of seeing off the deceased to the “other world”.

However, as already mentioned, according to the ideas of the ancient Slavs, there was a stable connection between “this” and “the other world”, therefore, on the one hand, as M.D. Alekseevsky, with the help of funeral lamentation, which should be considered as the “language of sacred communication” with the dead, the living conveyed greetings to their ancestors with the deceased. On the other hand, A.V. Nikitina concludes that the source of knowledge about the future is the "other" world. Thus, the ability to predict implies the possibility of being both in the world of the living and in the world of the dead. So, for example, in the epic "Vasily Buslaevich" the death of a bone was predicted to the hero, which, being part of a deceased person, became a link between the two worlds:

Speak the bone of Sukhoyalov

Yang's human voice:

Would you at least, Vasily son Buslaevich,

Wouldn't kick my bones

I would not be poked by bones

You lie with me in comrades.

Vasilyushka spat and went away:

- She slept, herself a dream lookla.

In the same passage, we find references to sleep, which brings us back to the sleep-death parallel. The epic, to the same extent as the fairy tale, emphasizes that a wandering person could return home only after sleep:

And Dobrynushka went to his home,

And in his house Dobrynya to his mother.

(...) [the night has come - I. M.]

He tore apart the white-lined tent,

And then Dobrynya was holding him up.

("Dobrynya and the Serpent")

However, the onset of night and sleep are not interconnected things, Dobrynya could drive around the clock:

pagan folklore East Slavic epic

Jens ride a day on the red sun,

The Jens ride into the night through the bright moon,

but there was a boundary between the worlds:

They came to the oak, to Nevin,

Yes, to the glorious stone Olatyr,

which can only be overcome through sleep:

They pulled back and white tents,

They ate salt bread,

And they went to bed and lay down.

("Dobrynya and Vasily Kazimirov")

And sleep in the epic is also equal to death:

Dak lay down Svyatogor in this coffin to sleep.

("Svyatogor")

Thus, in the view of the ancient Slavs, death was not the final (highest) point in the evolution of the human soul. In Christianity, the soul, leaving the body, went to the "God's court", where its further fate was clarified - either eternal torment or eternal bliss. Hence, a person developed a fear of death, as a point after which nothing could be changed. In the pagan worldview, as noted by A.N. Sobolev, there was "an ancestor's idea of ​​the afterlife as a continuation of earthly life." In addition, the researcher explains the departure of the soul to the area of ​​the “red sun”, to the upper world, by the view of the pagan ancestors on the essence of the soul. Referring to ethnographic information, A.K. Baiburin writes that “work unfinished by the dead was placed in the coffin (untied stockings, unwoven bast shoes) in the belief that the work would be finished in the next world.” The researcher interprets this incompleteness in connection with the idea of ​​continuing life both in one's own and in another world.

N.N. Veletskaya notes that the idea of ​​the "other world" among the ancients was firmly associated with the sky and space, which is confirmed by numerous references in the funeral lamentations of the sun, moon, stars. B.A. Rybakov, summarizing these ideas, established their reason, which lies in the fact that as a result of ritual burning, the highest and good result for the soul of the deceased was achieved - he remained on earth and ascended to Iriy.

Consequently, the Slavs had no reason to be afraid of the transition from one form of life to another, especially, according to their ideas, such a transition happened every day, every year and at every socially and spiritually significant moment (initiation, wedding, birth of the first child).

We have already mentioned that the tale made no distinction between sleep and death. The reasons for this phenomenon lie in observing the daily movement of the sun, in which the ancestor saw the whole life of a living being, a semblance of his own: it was born, quickly became a youth, then a man full of strength, gradually grew old, and finally died, hiding in the west. Sleeping in the evening was associated with death, and waking up the next morning with resurrection, and in a year a person died and was resurrected 365 times.

From the same point of view, another natural cycle was considered - a year where spring was associated with childhood (from birth to initiation), summer - with youth (from initiation to marriage or the first child), autumn - with maturity (from marriage or the first child to loss of the opportunity to have children) and, finally, winter - with old age (from the loss of the opportunity to have children to death). In connection with these ideas, the main rites of commemoration of the dead fell on the transitional period between autumn and winter (the parent Dimitriev Saturday, known in the northeast and in the western regions of Russia as grandfather'sor grandfather'sSaturday) and in the spring (from the end of winter until the Navi day and Radunitsa, when funeral rites reached their climax).

So, in fairy tales, folk ideas about the most important change of seasons - the transition between winter and spring are very clearly reflected.

That is why, in an excerpt from the fairy tale "The Magic Mirror", we must pay attention to the material from which the coffin of the princess is made - namely, crystal. V.Ya. Propp writes about the great role that crystal and quartz, and later glass, played in religious ideas. Crystal was attributed to special magical properties, it played a certain role in the rites of initiation. But, as it seems to us, the completely non-magical properties of crystal are the criterion for choosing this particular material for the coffin.

Here, first of all, the parallel crystal = ice = winter is important. The fact that the narrators directly associated crystal with ice is evidenced by the fairy tale "Crystal Mountain", in which there is such a phrase: "He took a seed, lit it and brought it to the crystal mountain - the mountain soon melted." In this regard, it seems doubtful to us that quartz will begin to melt from fire. Rather, crystal in this and in many other cases symbolizes winter, fire - the return of the sun, a seed - initially the appearance of greenery, later the beginning of field work, the liberation of the girl - the final onset of spring.

Here it should be noted that the parallel crystal - ice - winter must be continued with two more concepts. Firstly, the concept of "sleep", about which A.A. Potebnya writes: “Sleep, as a phenomenon opposite to light and life, like darkness, approaches winter and frost. Sleep is frost." And, secondly, the word "death", because. the crystal (glass) mountain in fairy tales was strongly associated with the world of the dead (Whirlwind lived there, the hero climbed there to get his kidnapped mother, the future bride of the hero lived there), which is also confirmed by the ethnographic information cited by A.N. Sobolev: "In the Podolsk province they say that the souls of the dead will "drape" on a steep glass mountain."

The spring season in the life of the Slavs occupied a special place - the cold and often hungry winter ended, and then followed the day of the vernal equinox - Maslenitsa. The rebirth of nature after winter sleep was identified with the rebirth of man after the end of the earthly journey. Therefore, the princesses always wake up and get married, and the princes come to life with the help of living water and get married.

In many fairy tales, winter (= sleep = death) is melted not by fire, but by rain, which is personified in tears in the fairy tale. In one of them, the heroine could not wake her bewitched fiancé for a long time, then “she leaned over him and wept, and her tears, clear as crystal water, fell on his cheek. He jumps up like he's been burned."

The personification of the world of the underground and death was Koschei. 19th century explorer A.S. Kaisarov wrote about this fairy-tale character: “Kashchei is the deity of the underworld. It symbolizes ossification, numbness from frost in the winter season of all nature. The tale even emphasizes the influence of Koshchei on young people trying to save the girl (the personification of the spring sun): “he froze everyone and turned them into stone pillars.” In addition, we come across a plot in the fairy tale when the hero had to “gild the death” of Koshchei, which is probably due to the gradual appearance of the sun and the lengthening of the day. Associating in the views of the Slavs with the winter season, Koschey, of course, had to be burned, like a stuffed Shrovetide, to mark the complete victory of the sun and heat. This is what we find in a number of tales: “the prince laid a pile of firewood, lit a fire, burned Koshchei the Deathless at the stake” or “Koshchei fell right into the fire and burned down.”

On the other hand, in the fairy tale, Koshchei's death is often found in an egg (sometimes at the end of a needle in an egg), which must be broken without fail. This plot is very versatile and symbolic, so it is necessary to consider it in more detail. The location of Koshcheev’s death in the fairy tale is as follows: “There is an oak in the forest, a chest is buried under this oak, a hare sits in the chest, a duck is in the hare, an egg is in the duck, a needle is in the egg. On the ears of a needle, my death, ”or without mentioning the needle:“ my death is far away: there is an island in the sea on the ocean, on that island there is an oak, a chest is buried under the oak, a hare is in the chest, a duck is in the hare, an egg is in the duck, and in the egg is my death.”

According to A.K. Baiburin, the principle of “matryoshka” is typical for depicting death (its visual illustration is a coffin in a house (a house in a house) during a funeral rite, or Koshcheev’s death in a fairy tale). B.A. Rybakov wrote that the location of Koshchei's death is correlated with the model of the universe - an egg - and emphasized that representatives of all sections of the world are its guardians: water (ocean), land (island), plants (oak), animals (hare), birds (duck) . This opinion is shared by L.M. Alekseev, who believes that this plot "is based on very ancient mythological ideas - on the image of the Universe in the form of an egg." In the light of the foregoing, it is not surprising that in the list of dishes on the memorial table, as V.Ya. Propp, among other things, also included eggs, which are associated with ideas about the ability to recreate, resurrect life.

Let us pay special attention to the fact that eggs appearing in Slavic folklore can be unbroken (egg-world, life) and broken (egg-death, "Ivan Tsarevich ... crushed the testicle - and Kosh the Immortal died"). In this regard, we cannot ignore the fairy tale "Ryaba the Hen", in the plot of which the egg occupies a central place. Considering this tale, the researcher invariably asks the question, why does a broken egg bring so much misfortune? (“The old man cries, the old woman sobs, burns in the oven, the top of the hut staggers, the granddaughter girl strangled herself with grief”, “The system began to cry about this testicle, the woman sobbed, the faiths laughed, the chickens flew, the gates creaked.”) V.N. . Toporov notes that "usually the beginning of creation is associated with the fact that the Yam [World Egg - M.I.] splits, explodes." Nevertheless, it seems to us that such a development of events is hardly characteristic of the Slavic worldview, and, consequently, of mythology. The reasons for this are, on the one hand, that the religion of the Slavs is highly connected with nature, and therefore harmonious. At the same time, the concept of harmony implies that pure destruction cannot be good. On the other hand, this event, for some reason, brings grief to both the grandfather and the woman and other inhabitants of the village. Turning again to V. N. Toporov, we find the following thought: “Sometimes, various incarnations of evil forces are born from Ya. m., in particular snakes, death.” Therefore, we should pay closer attention to the culprit of the tragic incident. At first glance, it will seem that our mouse is an unremarkable inhabitant of the middle world, but as soon as we remember the traditional nickname of this animal - “norushka”, “burrow”, that is, a hole mouse, underground - and everything immediately falls into place. So S. V. Aplatov notes that "trouble in the world of people comes from outside, from the other world." On the other hand, in the fairy tales “Three Kingdoms - Copper, Silver, Gold”, “Egg-Paradise”, we find whole independent worlds in unbroken eggs. In another egg, which should not be broken, but eaten, lies the love of the princess: “Go, Ivan Tsarevich, across the sea; there lies a stone, in this stone sits a duck, in this duck there is an egg; take this testicle and bring it to me ”... he took it and went to the old woman in the hut, gave her the testicle. She kneaded and baked a bun out of it; ... She (the princess) ate this little donut and says: “Where is my Ivan Tsarevich? I missed him."

Summarizing all of the above, we can conclude that the egg is both a symbol of life and a symbol of death, which once again emphasizes the idea of ​​the infinity of rebirth of all things. In this regard, let's pay attention to the nickname of Koshchei - the Immortal. Why can't he be killed in any other way than by breaking an egg? We will find the answer to this question if we compare the facts given by the researchers A.K. Baiburin and N.V. Novikov. So, the reason why a person dies is the depletion of vital forces. "Expression get rid of your age … meant completely use up the released life energy ", therefore, "age" is not a time period, but a certain amount of power. At the same time, in the work of N.V. Novikov “Images of an East Slavic Fairy Tale”, a reference is found to a fairy tale in which Koschey offers the hero an extension of life in exchange for his release: “The old man (Koschey the Immortal) said: If, well done, you let me down from the board, I will add two more centuries to you! (you will live three centuries) ". Analyzing this passage, we can conclude that Koschey is able to add vitality to any person, and therefore to himself too, i.e. his immortality is nothing but a constant replenishment of energy. Where is its source? In the understanding of the Eastern Slavs, a person "dead before the deadline dangerous for the living with its unused energy, and healed dangerous because eats someone else's eyelid . The latter implies the presence of ideas not only about individual century , but also about the general, collective stock of vitality, ”and this stock is scattered throughout the world. Thus, each egg, as a separate small world, is the desired unlimited source of energy, and Koschey (the owner of the egg) is its owner and consumer.

Based on the foregoing, let us turn once again to the facts mentioned earlier. So, the presence of eggs in the list of dishes at the memorial meal and the related ideas about the resurrection can be considered as adding a share of the strength of the deceased to the total share. The love of the princess, enclosed in an egg, is another version of the same power, only at the micro level, in the world of two people who love each other. He also finds an explanation for the fact that in a fairy tale, heroes are born from eggs. These are people with extraordinary (double) vitality. When they are born, they break eggs from the inside, i.e. come from another world, having stocked up with its energy. On the other hand, when Koshchei's egg breaks, the latter inevitably dies due to the fact that he has nowhere else to take a new "age" for himself.

Returning to the associative understanding of the annual cycle, we note that it was reflected in human destiny to the same extent as the daily cycle, that is, it was perceived by the Slavs from the position of "death and subsequent resurrection."

The issue of turning points in a person's life has already been considered by us from the point of view of its reflection in folklore. Now we note its great importance in the worldview of the ancient Slavs.

As already mentioned, the rite of initiation in its culminating part was precisely death, albeit a ritual one, after which the young man forgot his past life, and the people around him (primarily his parents), who were informed about the death of his son, also forgot him.

The wedding ceremony, which was also an initiation rite for girls, also bore the features of ritual death. It is precisely because of this connection that the preparation of the bride for the wedding always looks like a funeral rite, and the funeral - like preparation for the wedding. So, for example, a ritual object - a sleigh - was used in both rituals. In addition, unmarried girls had their own peculiarity of burial - they were buried as brides, in wedding attire. The Slavs saw something wrong in the fact that the girl died without getting married, so it was understood that after death she becomes a bride, and she will become a wife in the upper world - in heaven. This tradition, which has survived even to this day, is also reflected in folklore: “they dressed the merchant’s daughter in a brilliant dress, like a bride to the crown, and put her in a crystal coffin.”

Thus, in the life of our ancestors there were so many deaths (transitions from one world to another) that one more such transition did not seem to them something unusual or frightening. The consciousness that death is a birthing principle was characteristic not only of the Slavs, but also, as O.M. Freudenberg, "for primitive society as a whole. The image of birth-producing death evokes the image of a cycle in which that which perishes is reborn; birth, and even death, serve as forms of eternal life, immortality, return from the new state to the old and from the old to the new… there is no death as something irrevocable.” In addition, there was nothing unknown in the future afterlife - as we mentioned above, according to the ideas of the Slavs, the afterlife was a continuation of the earthly one - in the “that” world, as A.N. wrote. Sobolev, they, like nature, will experience various states: in winter they come to a state similar to sleep and death, they are numb, waking up only in spring, and they will also endure grief and need, as they endured on earth.

Conclusion

Folklore, due to its high artistry, is a rather difficult source to study. But unlike other sources of studying the archaic beliefs of the ancient Slavs - chronicles, ancient Russian works of art, writings of travelers to Rus', missionary reports, as well as archaeological and ethnographic information - oral folk art reflects not the subjective opinion of an individual author, but the age-old ideals and aspirations of the Russian people.

As a result of the work done, which considers fairy tales and epics as one of the sources for the study of the pagan beliefs of the Eastern Slavs, we tried to solve the problems that consisted in highlighting the surviving particles of paganism among the later layers caused by the gradual penetration and rooting of Orthodoxy in the minds of the ancient Slavs. worldview.

For the convenience of work, we classified the fairy tale material, which allowed us to divide the fairy tales into 3 groups according to the age principle: everyday fairy tales, which carry primary knowledge about the world, fairy tales about animals, affecting ideas about totems and public morality, and fairy tales, as the final stage of socialization child.

And we fully agree with the opinion of S.V. Alpatov that “the fairy tale describes the uniform laws of the ideal universe. Fairy tales show how these norms work in the lives of heroes, how the original order is restored after a violation of the daily course of events. This universalism of a fairy tale is the basis for the interaction of everyday folk ethics with Christian ethics, behind the “lie” of fairy tale plots there are hints at the spiritual orientation of the individual.

In the main part of the work, we examined four turning points in human life, and the rituals that mark them, the purpose of which is the ritual “remaking of the main character, the creation of his new option ". The first chapter of this thesis is devoted to the conception and birth of a baby, as well as the rituals associated with these events. This allowed us to conclude that the arrival of a child in the world is always a change, an expectation of his future deeds. Not only the parents themselves, but also all four natural elements participate in the creation of the body of the child (the receptacle of the soul, which will gain full self-consciousness during initiation). Consequently, the so-called "miraculous birth" is in fact the most common, but it is presented in the form of folklore meaningful views of the Slavs on this issue.

Vivid reflection in folklore was found by two stadial rites - initiation and marriage.

The initiation was divided into three stages: separation from the team, rebirth, return to the team. The rebirth of the individual consisted in acquiring the skills of survival, familiarizing with higher powers, obtaining an adult name and already the final consolidation of the learned abilities. If the subject did not have the ability to survive, the initiation could end in his death, that is, the rite to some extent played the role of natural selection. As a result, the neophyte became a full-fledged member of the tribal community and officially entered the age of marriage.

The search for a bride in folklore was usually symbolized by bird hunting, and the bride-maiden appeared in the form of a swan, duck, dove, etc. The wedding ceremony was divided into 2 parts: the ritual union of the bride and groom and the wedding feast, until the end of which the ceremony was considered invalid. For the ancient Slavs, marriages by abduction were characteristic, which is repeatedly confirmed by the texts of fairy tales and epics. Nevertheless, marriage at the initiative of a woman was quite possible, and only in one rather late epic (about Solovyov Budimirovich) such a form is condemned. Quite clearly in the epics, an archaic tradition of the undeniable rights of the winner to the property, wife and children of the vanquished is traced, therefore, descriptive deviations from the epic plot strongly advise listeners not to brag about a young wife with a large crowd of people.

A.K. Baiburin notes that “traditionally, in studies on East Slavic rituals, it is customary to distinguish three transitional rites that mark the beginning of the life path (birth), the middle (wedding) and the end (funeral). In fact, this scheme does not cover all significant transitions. The researcher also mentions the rite of initiation and introduces the concept of "rite of division" (separation of a small family from a large one). In our opinion, this statement is certainly true only in the part that there is one more rite of passage, in addition to the three listed, but this is not the separation of the newlyweds from a large patriarchal family, but the birth of the first child in a small family. This event plays an important role, first of all, in the life of a woman who, having become a mother, is officially recognized as finally adult and enters the appropriate age circle of friends.

At the end of the study, we examined the Slavic ideas about death reflected in folklore, after which a new rebirth always follows, which allowed the ancient Slavs to see the life of the soul as a spiral from the past to the future, consisting of a chain of deaths and resurrections.

Each of these transitional moments, one way or another, is reflected in folklore. Sometimes it is not difficult to single them out, sometimes it is necessary to carry out deep analytical work, since the storytellers, passing a fairy tale or an epic from mouth to mouth, forget some motives over time or, not understanding their archaic meaning, change them almost beyond recognition. Therefore, the researcher's task is to "understand in folklore the original foundations that have undergone changes over time, but have not disappeared."

Folklore provides answers to many questions of both researchers and non-specialists who are interested in the roots of one or another of our current life postulates. So according to I. A. Ilyin: “The fairy tale is the first, pre-religious philosophy of the people, its philosophy of life, set forth in free mythical images and in artistic form. These philosophical answers are hatched by each nation independently, in its own way, in its unconscious national-spiritual laboratory.

The theme of reflecting the most ancient beliefs of our ancestors in Slavic folklore has not yet been fully disclosed, researchers still have many questions, and the answers to them are a matter of time - “A person asks a fairy tale, and she answers him about the meaning of earthly life ...”

The adoption of Christianity first caused a negative reaction of the population of Rus', because. their whole existence was based on pagan ideas. But gradually, paganism, by replacing holidays, rituals, and higher patrons with Christian ones, mixed with Orthodoxy and eventually formed the Russian Orthodox Church, unique, original and practically based on the original ideas of the East Slavic tribes.

List of used sources and literature

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Folklore and its main forms. Orthodox literature

Slavs in the XI-XVI centuries. Modern Slavic Literature

The topic of folklore and Slavic literatures is touched upon in our manual only in connection with the Slavic verbal culture in general, and we do not delve into the details of this topic (in particular, into the discussion of the current state of folklore). There are many valuable manuals specifically devoted to folklore as such (Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, etc. folk art), as well as similar manuals related to Russian and other Slavic literatures. We refer readers to them who are interested in an in-depth acquaintance with this topic.

The Slavic peoples created such an important folklore genre as fairy tales, and the richest set of fairy tale plots (magic, everyday, social, etc.). The most colorful human characters, endowed with folk ingenuity, appear in fairy tales - Ivan the Fool among the Russians, cunning Peter among the Bulgarians, etc.

According to the witty observation of F.I. Buslaeva, “The tale sings mostly of heroes, heroes and knights; the princess, who usually appears in it, is very often not called by name, and, having married a hero or knight, leaves the scene of action. But, yielding to men in heroism and glory won by military exploits, a woman in the era of paganism ... was a demigoddess, a sorceress ...

Quite naturally, a folk tale could add physical strength to a woman's spiritual strength. So, Stavrov's young wife, dressed up as an ambassador, defeated the wrestlers Vladimirovs " 175 .

Eastern Slavs developed epics. Among them are the Kiev cycle (epics about the peasant Mikul Selyaninovich, the heroes Svyatogora, Ilya Muromets, Dobrynya Nikitich, Alyosha Popovich, etc.) and the Novgorod cycle (epics about Vasily Buslaev, Sadko, etc.). A unique genre of the heroic epic, Russian epics are one of the most important accessories of the national verbal art. Among the Serbs, the heroic epos is represented by stories about Milos Obilich, Korolevich Marko, and others. There are similar characters in the epic of the Bulgarians - Sekula Detence, Daichin-voivode, Yankul and Momgil, and others. 176 Among the Western Slavs, the heroic epic, for a number of complex reasons, did not show itself so impressively.

The epic is not a historical chronicle, but an artistic phenomenon. Russians usually well feel the distance between the real person of the Monk Elijah of Muromets and the epic image of the hero Ilya of Muromets. About the Serbian epic, its researcher Ilya Nikolaevich Golenishchev-Kutuzov(1904-1969), for example, wrote:

“Except for events that do not violate the boundaries of reliable,<...>in the songs about King Marko there are stories about winged horses speaking with a human voice, about snakes and mountain sorceresses-forks" 177 .

How expressively characterized the oral folk art of F.I. Buslaev, “The people do not remember the beginning of their songs and fairy tales. They are conducted from time immemorial and are passed from generation to generation, according to legend, like old times. Although the singer Igor knows some Boyan, he already calls the ancient folk legends “old words”. In "Ancient Russian Poems" a song, or a legend, is called "old times": "the old times ended with that," says the singer... Otherwise, the song of the narrative content is called "epic", that is, the story that was.<...> Therefore, ending the song, sometimes the singer adds the following words in conclusion: “either “old”, then “deed”, expressing with this verse the idea that his epic was not only old, legend, but precisely the legend about the “deed” that actually happened. » 178 .

The Slavic peoples have preserved traditions related to their origin. Both Western and Eastern Slavs know the legend about the brothers Czech, Lech and Rus. Among the Eastern Slavs, the foundation of Kyiv is associated with the legendary Kiy, Shchek, Khoriv and their sister Lybid. The Poles, according to legend, in the name of Warsaw imprinted the names of the children of the forester who lived here: a boy named Var and a girl named Sava. Very interesting are the legends, stories and legends that carry a variety of information about prehistoric times about Libush and Přemysl, about the Maiden War, about the Blanic knights among the Czechs, about Piast and Popel, Krak and Wanda among the Poles, etc.

For example, the plot of the story about the Maiden's War brings to mind the struggle between matriarchal and patriarchal principles in the Slavic society of ancient times.

According to him, after the death of the legendary Czech ruler Libushi, who relied on girls and women and even kept a female squad, her husband Premysl began to rule. However, the girls, accustomed to rule, rebelled against the men, built the Devin fortress and settled in it. Then they defeated a detachment of men who thoughtlessly tried to capture the fortress - moreover, three hundred knights died, and seven were personally slaughtered by the leader of the female army, Vlasta (formerly the first warrior in the Libushi squad). After this victory, the women treacherously captured the young knight Tstirad, who rushed to save the beauty tied to the oak, and wheeled him. In response, the men united in an army and completely defeated the women, killing Vlasta in battle and capturing Devin. 179 .

The poetic genres of folklore among the Slavs are extremely diverse. In addition to epics and myths, this includes various songs - youthful and haidutsky among the southern Slavs, robbers among the Eastern Slavs, etc., historical songs and ballads, Ukrainian thoughts, etc. 180 The Slovaks are very interested in the cycle of folklore works about the noble robber Juraj Janoshik.

Many poetic works were performed to the accompaniment of various musical instruments (Russian gusli, Ukrainian bandura, etc.).

Small genres of folklore (proverb, saying, riddle, etc.) are of particular interest to philologists involved in semasiological problems. So, for example, A.A. Potebnya devoted in his work " From lectures on the theory of literature"A special section on "methods of turning a complex poetic work into a proverb", emphasizing: "The whole process of compressing a longer story into a proverb belongs to the number of phenomena of great importance for human thought" (Potebnya called these phenomena "thickening of thought") 181 .

Among the collections of Russian proverbs stand out " Russian folk proverbs and parables» (1848) I.M. Snegirev, " Russian proverbs and sayings» (1855) F.I. Buslaeva and " Proverbs of the Russian people» (1862) V.I. Dahl.

Among the collectors of Slavic folklore are the largest cultural figures (for example, A.I. Afanasiev And IN AND. Dal the Russians, Vuk Karadzic the Serbs). In Russia, talented enthusiasts like Kirsha Danilov and professional philologists were engaged in this business. P.N. Rybnikov, A.F. Gilferding, I.V. Kireevsky and others. Ukrainian folklore was collected, for example, ON THE. Tsertelev, M. Maksimovich, Ya. Golovatsky and others. The brothers did a great job among the southern Slavs Miladinovs, P.R. Slaveykov and others, the Poles Vaclav Zaleski, Zegota Pauli, Z. Dolenga-Khodakovsky etc., among Czechs and Slovaks F. Chelakovsky, K. Erben, P. Dobshinsky and other philologists.

Slavic literature is very diverse. Old Russian literature, a characteristic manifestation of the literatures of the so-called "medieval type", existed from the 11th century. Let us recall a few important points related to it.

Academician Dmitry Sergeevich Likhachev(1906-1999) reasonably wrote: “Ancient Russian literature was not only not isolated from the literature of neighboring - Western and southern countries, in particular - from the same Byzantium, but within the limits until the 17th century. we can talk about the exact opposite - about the absence of clear national boundaries in it. We can justifiably speak of the commonality in the development of the literatures of the Eastern and Southern Slavs. There were unified literature(emphasis mine. - Yu.M.), a single script and a single (Church Slavonic) language among the Eastern Slavs (Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians), among the Bulgarians, among the Serbs among the Romanians ”(as mentioned above, the Romanians, as Orthodox, actively used the Church Slavonic language until the second half of the 19th century) 182 .

Expression D.S. Likhachev's "single literature" should not be absolutized. Further, he explains his idea: “The main fund of church-literary monuments was common. Liturgical, preaching, church edifying, hagiographic, partly world-historical (chronographic), partly narrative literature was the same for the entire Orthodox south and east of Europe. Common were such huge literary monuments as prologues, menaias, ceremonials, triodies, partly chronicles, palea of ​​various types, "Alexandria", "The Tale of Barlaam and Joasaph", "The Tale of Akira the Wise", "Bee", cosmographies, physiologists, six days, apocrypha, individual lives, etc., etc. ” 183 .

Understandably, were not common " A word about Igor's regiment», « teaching» Vladimir Monomakh, "A word about the destruction of the Russian land», « Zadonshchina», « Prayer of Daniel the Sharpener”and some other works, perhaps the most interesting in ancient Russian literature to our contemporaries. However, for the medieval reader, whose heart turned primarily to God, and not to earthly human problems, they were not “the most important” among literary texts. No matter how difficult it may be to comprehend this fact for a person of the 21st century, but the Gospel, the lives of the saints, psalms, akathists, etc., and by no means “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” and similar masterpieces of fiction were in the center of attention of ancient Russian readers (precisely that is why the “Word” was so easily lost and was only accidentally discovered at the end of the 18th century).

After the explanations made above, it is impossible not to join the thesis of D.S. Likhachev that “Old Russian literature up to the 16th century. was one with the literature of other Orthodox countries" 184 . As a result, if one turns to manuals such as "Old Serbian Literature", "Old Bulgarian Literature", etc., the reader will immediately find in them many works known to him in the course of Old Russian literature.

For example, in the "History of Slavic Literature" academician Alexander Nikolaevich Pypin(1833-1904) and Vladimir Danilovich Spasovich(1829-1906) as Old Bulgarian (and not Old Russian!) appear mentioned above by academician Likhachev " Prologue», « Paley», « Alexandria" and etc. 185 Moreover, according to the authors, it was the Bulgarians who created in the Old Church Slavonic language "an extensive literature, which completely passed to the Russians and Serbs"; “Church relations between the Russians and the Bulgarians and with Athos, the close proximity of the Serbs to the Bulgarians established an exchange of manuscripts between them”; “as a result, the Serbian writer represents the general type that we see in the Bulgarian and ancient Russian writers of this kind” 186 .

In turn, I.V. Jagich in his "History of Serbo-Croatian Literature" stated the same trend: "Old Serbian original(emphasis mine. - Yu.M.) works constitute a very small part of the rest of literature" 187 .

I.V. Yagich admitted that "from our current point of view" "a thin notebook of medieval folk songs and the like" seems more important than "the whole huge stock of biblical-theological-liturgical works" translated by the Orthodox Slavs. However, he immediately emphasized that one should “lively imagine the views of those times, according to which there was no occupation more sacred than this” 188 .

Unfortunately, the real find of "thin notebooks" of this kind is an extremely rare thing. As a result, in the era of romanticism, some West Slavic patriots (in the Czech Republic) could not resist compiling such artistic hoaxes, How Kraledvor manuscript(1817, "discovered" in the town of Kralevodvor) 189 .

This "notebook" of "the latest works of ancient Czech literature", as V.I. Lamansky, is a collection of masterful stylizations for Slavic antiquity. The Kraledvorskaya manuscript includes, for example, epic songs about knightly tournaments and feasts, about the victory of the Czechs over the Saxons, about the expulsion of the Poles from Prague, about the victory over the Tatars, etc. The lyrical poems present the usual love theme, and the influence of Russian folklore is noticeable.

The author of the texts was Vaclav Ganka(1791-1861), famous Czech cultural figure and educator. And soon the student Joseph Linda"found" a manuscript with "The Love Song of King Wenceslas I" (Zelenogorsk manuscript). Thinking in terms of romanticism, they both clearly wanted to elevate the historical past of their people, after the defeat of the Czechs in the Battle of White Mountain (1620), they were actually enslaved by the Austrian feudal lords.

Many people believed in the authenticity of the Kraledvor manuscript almost until the beginning of the 20th century. This beautiful hoax was exposed by philologists - linguists and paleographers, who found errors in verb tenses, endings, forms of letters that were impossible in ancient times, etc., as well as historians who pointed out actual inconsistencies. At the same time, it is undoubted that the stylizations of Ganka and Linda had a great positive impact on contemporary literature, bringing to life many bright artistic variations, images and plots revealed in them.

Approximately in the middle of the XVII century. Old Russian literature was replaced and surprisingly quickly - over the course of two generations - the literature of the new time was entrenched in society. Literature is meant in the narrow strict sense of the word - fiction, which has a system of genres familiar to us to this day (poem, poem, ode, novel, story, tragedy, comedy, etc.). Of course, such a rapid spread of new literature is due to the fact that the prerequisites for its appearance in Rus' gradually took shape and invisibly accumulated over the course of several previous centuries.

It is not difficult to feel the difference between the literature of modern times and ancient Russian, comparing, for example, "The Life of Sergius of Radonezh" (written in the era of Dmitry Donskoy by Epiphanius the Wise) with Leo Tolstoy's novel (or even with "The Life of Archpriest Avvakum") or comparing the old Orthodox Christian akathist and spiritual ode to Derzhavin. In addition to clearly manifested specific genre and style differences, there were also global mutual differences.

The author of the life of the saint and the compiler of the chronicle, the author of the church akathist were engaged in the sacred craft - the aesthetic principle, to the extent of personal talent, of course, entered into their works, but still as a side effect. In ancient Russian writing there were separate creations, where, just like in the literature of modern times, the artistic side prevails (the aforementioned "The Tale of Igor's Campaign", "Instruction" by Vladimir Monomakh, "The Tale of the Destruction of the Russian Land", "The Prayer of Daniil Zatochnik", etc. ). However, they are not numerous and stand apart (although, we repeat, for the reader of the 21st century, it is precisely these works of art in the narrow sense of the word that are perhaps the most interesting and internally close).

The creative tasks of the chronicler, the author of a historical legend, the author of a pateriform life, a solemn church sermon, an akathist, etc., corresponded to a special (hard-to-understand to a person of our time without special philological training) "aesthetics of the canons" (or "aesthetics of identity").

Such an aesthetic professed fidelity to "divinely inspired" authoritative models and a sophisticated reproduction of their main features in one's own work (with subtle innovations in details, but not in general). Thus, the Old Russian reader of hagiography knew in advance how the author would describe the life of the saint - the genre of hagiography included a system of canonically strict rules, and hagiographic works resembled each other, like brothers, their content was predictable in a number of ways.

This feature of Old Russian literature, reflecting the socio-psychological characteristics of the people of the Russian Orthodox Middle Ages, as well as the essence of that complex cultural and historical phenomenon, which is now called "Old Russian literature", was replaced in the 17th century. alive to this day "aesthetics of novelty".

The writers of modern times are engaged not in the "sacred craft", but in art as such; aesthetic beginning - the first condition of their creativity; they care about fixing their authorship, strive to ensure that their works do not resemble the works of their predecessors, are “artistically original”, and the reader appreciates and considers the unpredictability of the development of artistic content, the uniqueness of the plot, as a natural condition.

New Russian literature at the initial stage was literature baroque. Baroque came to us through Poland and Belarus. The actual ancestor of the poetry of the Moscow Baroque Simeon Polotsky(1629-1680) was a Belarusian invited to Moscow by Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. Among the other most prominent representatives of baroque poetry, a Kyivian can be named Ivan Velichkovsky, and at the beginning of the XVIII century. - St. Dimitri Rostovsky(1651 - 1709), Feofan Prokopovich(1681 - 1736), satirist poet Antioch Cantemir(1708-1744) and others. At the origins of the prose of the Baroque era is the powerful figure of the archpriest Avvakum Petrova(1620-1682).

It is necessary to take into account the special status in the cultural consciousness of the Baroque era of grammatical teachings. “Grammar,” according to F.I. Buslaev, - they considered the first step ... the ladder of sciences and arts. About the grammar of Smotrytsky, he recalls that “they studied it in the time of Peter the Great; she was also the gate of wisdom for Lomonosov himself. In addition to its literary and educational significance, it is still sacredly revered among schismatic Old Believers (Buslaev means its Moscow edition of 1648 - Yu.M.), because in the verses or poems attached to this book for example, the form Jesus is used - obviously, for verse and measure, vm. Jesus. This explains the extreme high cost of the 1648 edition. Further, Buslaev frankly laughs at such a religious honoring of grammar by the Old Believers, recalling that Smotrytsky "obeyed the pope and was a Uniate" 190 .

M. Smotrytsky, a graduate of the Jesuit Vilna Academy, in the future, indeed, a supporter of union with the Roman Catholic Church, from an early age came into contact with circles that cultivated typically Baroque ideas, ideas and theories (Baroque in Catholic countries originated much earlier than in Rus', and "Jesuit Baroque" was its real offshoot).

It should be noted that our baroque was closely connected, sometimes merged, with other arts. In other words, he was distinguished by a complex artistic synthesis. For example, the literary image is often closely intertwined in the works of this time with the pictorial image.

In the field of painting of the XVII century. literary changes took place. Here, secular painting is quickly taking shape - a portrait, a genre scene, a landscape (previously religious painting dominated here - an icon, a fresco, etc.). Iconography itself is evolving - authors appear who create the so-called "living-like" icons, and a sharp struggle flares up between them and supporters of the old style. 191 .

Verbal and text manuals for icon painters, the so-called "Originals", which existed earlier, acquire new qualities of real works of literature. Speaking about this phenomenon, F.I. Buslaev wrote:

“Thus, expanding its limits more and more, and drawing closer and closer to literary interests, the Russian artistic Original insensibly merges with the Alphabet, which for our ancestors was not only a dictionary and grammar, but also a whole encyclopedia. A more friendly, more harmonious harmony of purely artistic and literary interests is hard to imagine after this, so to speak, organic fusion of such opposites as painting and grammar with a dictionary. 192 .

Buslaev further analyzes an example of the pictorial “symbolism of letters” in the Original of the “epoch of syllabic verses” (that is, the Baroque era. - Yu.M.), where “on each page, in cinnabar, one of the letters is written in sequential order” of the name “Jesus Christ”, “and under the letter is an explanation in syllabic verses, namely:

І (the first letter of the name in the old orthography. - Yu.M.) in the form of a pillar with a rooster on top:

To the pillar Jesus Christ is our tied,

Always scourged from the torment of evil velmi.

WITH with the image inside his pieces of silver:

They bought Jesus for thirty pieces of silver.

To be condemned to a wicked death.

At Church Slavonic, in the form of pincers:

Nails from hands, from legs were taken out with tongs,

They were always removed from the cross with their hands.

WITH with the image inside of his four nails.<...>

X with the image of a cane and a spear arranged in a cross.<...>

R bowl shaped...<...>

AND like stairs...<...>

T in the shape of a cross...<...>

ABOUT in the shape of a crown of thorns...<...>

WITH with a hammer and instruments of punishment...<...>» 193 .

The picturesque beginning penetrated into literature and more deeply than in similar syllabic couplets. So, Simeon Polotsky, Ivan Velichkovsky and other authors created a number of poems-drawings (in the form of a star, heart, cross, bowl and other figures), they wrote such special semantically structured texts as palindromons, crayfish, labyrinths, etc. , they used letters of different colors for figurative and expressive purposes.

Here is an example of "cancer oblique" from Ivan Velichkovsky - in his words, a verse, "whose words, as you read it, are nasty (opposite in meaning. - Yu.M.) text express ":

Btsa With me, life is not the fear of death, Єvva

Do not die for me to live.

That is: “Life is with me, not the fear of death, Do not die by me to live” (Virgin Mary); “Death fear, not life with me, Die, undead by me” (Eve).

On its historical path, Russian literature from the second half of the XIX century. managed to take the position of one of the world leaders. Already I.S. Turgenev, without saying a word, was named the best writer in Europe by the Goncourt brothers, George Sand, Flaubert. Soon he won colossal prestige all over the world as an artist and thinker L.N. Tolstoy. Later, readers around the world discovered F.M. Dostoevsky, A.P. Chekhov, A.M. Gorky, M.A. Sholokhov, M.A. Bulgakov...

The contribution of other Slavic literatures to the world literary process was not so global. So, writers of Little Russian (Ukrainian) origin in the XVIII - XIX centuries. most often they wrote in the Great Russian (Moscow) dialect, that is, they became figures Russian literature. It refers to Vasily Vasilyevich Kapnist(1757-1823), Vasily Trofimovich Narezhny(1780-1825), Nikolai Ivanovich Gnedich(1784-1833), Alexey Alekseevich Perovsky(1787-1836, pseudonym Anthony Pogorelsky), Orest Mikhailovich Somov(1793-1833), Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol(1809-1852), Nestor Vasilyevich Kukolnik(1809-1868), Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy(1817-1875), Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko(1853-1921) and others. 194

N.S. Trubetskoy noted: “Kotlyarevsky is considered the founder of the new Ukrainian literary language. The works of this writer (“Aeneid”, “Natalka-Poltavka”, “Moskal-Charіvnik”, “Ode to Prince Kurakin”) are written in the common Little Russian dialect of the Poltava region and, in their content, belong to the same genre of poetry, in which the deliberate use of the common language is quite relevant and motivated by the content itself. The poems of the greatest Ukrainian poet, Taras Shevchenko, are written for the most part in the spirit and style of Little Russian folk poetry and, therefore, again, by their very content, motivate the use of the common language. In all these works, just as in the stories from the folk life of good Ukrainian prose writers, the language is deliberately folksy, that is, as if deliberately unliterary. In this genre of works, the writer deliberately limits himself to the sphere of such concepts and ideas for which ready-made words already exist in an artless folk language, and chooses a topic that gives him the opportunity to use only those words that really exist - and, moreover, precisely in this meaning - in live folk speech" 195 .

The Balkan Slavs, and in the west the Czechs and Slovaks, were under foreign oppression for several centuries.

The Bulgarians and Serbs did not undergo processes parallel to the Russians to replace medieval literature with a new type of literature. The case was quite different. Bulgarian and Serbian literature experienced more than four centuries of interruption in their development. This unfortunate cultural and historical phenomenon directly follows from the occupation of the Balkans by the Turkish Ottoman Empire in the Middle Ages.

Bulgarians are a Slavic people, but the name of this people comes from the name of a Turkic nomadic tribe Bulgar, in the 7th century n. e. under the leadership of Khan Asparuh, who occupied the lands of seven Slavic tribes on the Danube. On these lands Asparuh founded his Bulgarian kingdom with its capital in the city Pliska. Soon the conquerors were assimilated by the incomparably more numerous Slavic environment. 196 .

In 1371, the Bulgarian Tsar Ivan Shishman, after decades of increasingly weakening resistance, recognized himself as a vassal of the Turkish Sultan Murad I. Then in 1393 the Turks took the then Bulgarian capital of Veliko Tarnovo. Three years later, the last pillar of Bulgarian statehood, the city of Vidin, was taken by storm (1396). A Turkish governor settled in Sofia.

Serbia fell under the Turkish yoke after its defeat in the battle with the Turks on Kosovo Field(1389), that is, approximately in the same years (in Rus', a battle with the Tatars on the Kulikovo field took place nine years earlier, which had a completely different outcome for the Russians).

The indigenous Bulgarian and Serbian population was engaged in peasant labor, paid excessive taxes to the Turks, but stubbornly resisted Islamization. However, the real picture of the subsequent vicissitudes of the history of both peoples was very ambiguous and complex. Feudal strife led to the fact that part of the Slavs from time to time found themselves in various military clashes against Catholic Christians on the side of the Muslim Turks. In relation to Serbian history, a number of facts of this kind were cited in his monograph "The Epic of the Peoples of Yugoslavia" by I.N. Golenishchev-Kutuzov, who wrote:

“Thus, from the end of the 15th to the end of the 18th century. Serbs were in both camps, fighting for the cause of Christian sovereigns and Turkish sultans ... there was no period in which the Serbian people would not have weapons. The idea of ​​an amorphous Serbian peasant mass ... does not correspond to historical reality.<...>

In the XV - XVII centuries in Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro and Dalmatia there was not a single area in which haiduks would not operate. 197 .

Some Serbs and Croats were still forcibly converted to Islam. Their descendants now make up a special ethnic group called " Muslims" (i.e. "Muslim") 198 . Some Orthodox monasteries survived among the Bulgarians and Serbs, where the rewriting and reproduction of literary texts continued (the Bulgarians did not yet know printing even in the 17th century) - on Athos, the Bulgarian Zograph and Serbian Hilendar monasteries, as well as Troyan, Rylsky (it was destroyed several times, but recovered) “The last center of national culture of the Serbs in the Middle Ages arose in the monastery of Manassia”: “There were workshops where they copied and decorated manuscripts in Church Slavonic, which was also a literary language. Serbian scribes were under the strongest influence of the destroyed Bulgarian school of the Old Slavonic language in Tarnovo. 199 .

The oppressed people gradually began to look at the old handwritten book as a national shrine.

Bulgarian and Serbian priests were in fact the only bookish (and generally literate) people in this difficult era for the cultures of the southern Slavs. They often left to study in Russia and then wrote in a language in which, in addition to the Church Slavonic basis, there were not only words from the folk language, but also Russianisms. 200 .

In 1791, the first Serbian newspaper " Serbian News". In 1806 the first printed Bulgarian work “ Weekly» Sophrony of Vrachansky.

Bulgarian monk Paisios in 1762 he wrote a history of the Bulgarians imbued with a desire for national independence, which was distributed for decades in manuscript, and was published only in 1844. In Serbia and Montenegro, the Montenegrin prince (and metropolitan) woke the people with his fiery sermons Petr Petrovich Iegosh(1813-1851). Montenegrin by origin and the greatest Romantic poet, he wrote the dramatic poem " mountain crown» ( Gorsky Vienac, 1847), which called the Slavs to unity and depicted the life of the Montenegrin people.

In the era of romanticism, fiction began to take shape among the Bulgarians and Serbs. Its origins in Bulgaria are poets Petko Slaveykov(1827-1895), Lyuben Karavelov(1835-1879) and Hristo Botev(1848-1876). These are revolutionary romantics, whose bright talent was objectively prevented from manifesting in full force only by the absence of the necessary national literary and artistic tradition behind them.

The great Bulgarian poet, prose writer and playwright worked under the great fruitful influence of Russian literature. Ivan Vazov(1850-1921), author of the historical novel " under the yoke» (1890) 201 .

Serbian poetic romanticism is represented by such poets as Jura Jaksic(1832-1878) and Laza Kostic(1841 - 1910), Montenegrins - for example, the work of the king Nikola I Petrovich(1841-1921). In the region of Vojvodina in the city of Novi Sad, a center of Slavic culture developed. There was a great educator here. Dositej Obradovic from Vojvodina (1739-1811), the actual founder of modern literature.

Later, a playwright with a sparkling satirical gift appeared in Serbian literature. Branislav Nusic(1864-1938), writer of comedies " Suspicious person"(Based on Gogol's "Inspector") (1887), " patronage"(1888)," Madam Minister"(1929)," Mister Dollar"(1932)," Saddened relatives"(1935)," Dr."(1936)," Deceased"(1937) and others, as well as full of self-irony" Autobiographies».

Bosnian Serb won the Nobel Prize in 1961 Ivo Andric(1892-1975). Among his historical novels it should be noted first of all " Bridge on the Drina"(1945)," Travnik chronicle"(1945)," Cursed Yard"(1954) and others.

Czech and Slovak literature, the literature of the Balkan Slavs (Bulgarians, Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, Macedonians, etc.), as well as the cultures of these Slavic peoples as a whole, in essence, survived centuries break in development.

If we keep in mind the Czechs, this truly tragic collision is a consequence of the seizure of Czech lands by the Austrian feudal lords (that is, the Catholic Germans) after the defeat of the Czechs in the battle of Belaya Gora in the 17th century.

Medieval Czechs were a courageous and freedom-loving people. A century and a half before the reform movement of the Calvinists, Lutherans, etc. split the Catholic world, it was the Czechs who fought against Catholicism.

Great figure of Czech culture, preacher and church reformer Jan Hus(1371-1415), rector of the Bethlehem Chapel in the old part of Prague, and later rector of the University of Prague, in 1412 sharply opposed the Catholic practice of trading indulgences. Earlier, Hus had begun to read sermons in Czech, and not in Latin. He also criticized some other Catholic institutions concerning church property, the power of the pope, etc. Hus also wrote in Latin, using his knowledge to expose the vices nesting in the Catholic Church (“ About the six fornications»).

Acting as a people's educator, Jan Hus gave his strength to philological work. In his essay " About Czech spelling"He proposed superscripts for the Latin alphabet, which made it possible to convey the sounds characteristic of the Czech language.

The Catholics lured Hus to the cathedral in Constance. He received a safe-conduct, which, after his arrest, was brazenly disavowed on the grounds that the promises made to the "heretic" were invalid. Jan Hus was burned at the stake (he has not been "rehabilitated" by the Catholic Church to this day). The Czech people responded to this atrocity with a national uprising.

At the head of the Hussites stood a nobleman Jan Zizka(1360-1424), who turned out to be a remarkable commander. He fought at Grunwald, where he lost an eye. Zizka's army fought off several crusades organized by the Catholic knights against the Hussites. Jan Zizka created a new type of troops, moving on armored carts and having artillery. Wagons lined up in a row or in a circle and fastened with chains turned into a fortress on wheels. More than once the Hussites lowered heavily loaded wagons down the mountain, crushing and putting to flight the knights, who many times outnumbered them.

Having lost his second eye in battle, Zizka and the blind man continued to command the troops. Only when he died of the plague during the siege of Příbysław did the united Catholic forces succeed in curbing the Hussite movement, which had terrorized all of Europe for more than 20 years.

In the next 16th century, the Austrians infiltrated the throne in Prague. Of these, Archduke Rudolf II of Habsburg remained in history as a philanthropist and ruler prone to religious tolerance. Under him, the astronomers Tycho Brahe and Kepler worked in Prague, Giordano Bruno was hiding from the Inquisition. Protestantism spread in the Czech Republic.

In 1618 the Protestant Bohemia revolted against the power of the Austrian Catholics. This uprising ended in defeat at the Battle of Belaya Gora (1620).

Entering Prague, the victors staged a brutal massacre. The Slavic aristocracy was carefully destroyed. The Austrians made it their task now and forever to suppress the people's ability to resist. Even the tomb of Jan Zizka in 1623 (199 years after the death of the commander) was devastated by order of the Austrian emperor, and his remains were thrown away.

The era of the 300-year domination of the Austrian Habsburg dynasty in the Czech Republic has begun (it ended in 1918 after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the creation of independent Czechoslovakia). The Austrian feudal lords and their henchmen systematically suppressed the national culture in the Czech Republic.

In the Czech Republic already in the XIV century. there was a developed medieval literature in the native language (chronicles, lives of saints, chivalric novels, dramatic works, etc.). The writings (sermons, epistles and other philosophical and theological works) of the great reformer Jan Hus were written in Czech. Bishop with great artistic talent Jan Amos Comenius(1592-1670), teacher and theologian, used Czech along with Latin. In Czech, for example, his allegory, distinguished by high literary merit, is written “ The labyrinth of the world and the paradise of the heart» (1631). However, J. Comenius died in exile in Holland. The Germans ruled at home.

In 1620, the written tradition itself was interrupted. From now on, Czechs began to write in German, and this was controlled by the winners with truly German punctuality. The victors were especially zealous in the destruction of the Slavic culture of the vanquished in the first century and a half. The counter-reformation, forced Germanization were carried out; The Jesuits burned Czech books at the stake. As a result, in the past, independent Czechs were reduced to the status of German serfs (serfdom was abolished here in 1848). The national nobility was destroyed (the surviving Slavic nobles mostly tried to mimic the "Germans").

In the peasant Slavic environment in the centuries of Austrian dominance, oral folk art continued to develop latently. But the writers of Slavic nationality, when they appeared, created their works in German. Baroque art in the conquered lands was cultivated by the Catholic clergy, did not produce significant works and was not directly related to the culture of the Slavs as such.

Only at the end of the XVIII century. patriotic philologist Joseph Dobrovsky(1753-1829) took up the grammatical description of the Czech language and issues of Czech literature, writing (in German) its history, scientifically substantiating the rules of syllabo-tonic versification for Czech poetry. The literary language had to be re-created. N.S. Trubetskoy describes this situation as follows:

“Thanks to the activities of Jan Hus and the so-called Czech brothers, the Czech language by the 16th century. took on a perfect shape. But unfavorable circumstances interrupted its further development, and the Czech literary tradition for a long time almost completely dried up. Only at the end of the XVIII and at the beginning of the XIX century. the revival of the Czech literary language began. At the same time, the figures of the Czech revival turned not to modern folk dialects, but to the interrupted tradition of the old Czech language of the late 16th century. Of course, this language had to be updated somewhat, but nevertheless, thanks to this adjoining to the interrupted tradition, the New Czech language received a completely peculiar look: it is archaic, but artificially archaic, so that elements of completely different epochs of linguistic development in it coexist with each other in artificial cohabitation. 202 .

The practical consequence of this is that the literary Czech language differs sharply from the spoken language. Having learned to fluently read works of Czech literature, a foreigner suddenly encounters the fact that he does not understand the living speech of the Czechs, and they do not understand him when trying to communicate.

Creativity in Czech began with romantic poets Frantisek Celakovsky(1799-1852), Vaclav Ganka(1791-1861), Karel Jaromir Erben(1811-1870) and others. Old Czech literary monuments began to be reprinted.

In the second half of the XIX century. the brightest poet and prose writer of the period of national revival appeared in the Czech Republic Svatopluk Czech(1846-1908). His defiantly bold " Slave songs» ( Pisne otroka) called the Czech people to fight for freedom. Historical poems from the glorious Czech past were rich in plot and also enjoyed great readership. satirical novels The true journey of Mr Brouchek to the moon» (« Pravy vylet pana Broucka do Měsice", 1888) and " Brouchek's new epochal journey, this time in the fifteenth century» (« Novy epochalni vylet pana Broučka, tentokrat do patnacteho stoleti» , 1888) anticipated the satirical prose of J. Hasek and K. Čapek 203 .

Contemporary of S. Cech Alois Irasek(1851 - 1930) started out as a poet, but, switching to prose with plots from Czech history, he became a classic of national literature (he also wrote historical dramas). He created a cycle of novels about the Hussites " Between currents» ( mezi proudy, 1887-1890), " Against all» ( Proti vsem, 1893), " Brotherhood» ( brotherhood, 1898-1908); plays about Jan Hus and Jan Zizka.

In Czechoslovakia, formed after the end of the First World War, the satirist and humorist were popular Yaroslav Gashek(1883-1923) With his anti-war novel The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik» ( Osudy dobreho vojaka Švejka za svetove valky, 1921-1923). Hasek was a communist and a participant in the Russian Civil War, which contributed to his fame in the USSR.

Karel Capek(1890-1938), playwright and prose writer, famous for his plays " Makropulos remedy» ( Vec macropulos, 1922), " Mother» ( matka, 1938), " R.U .R» ( Rossumovi Univerzalni Roboti, 1920) and others, novels " Absolute Factory» ( Tovarna na absolutno, 1922), " Krakatite» ( Krakatit, 1922), " Gordubal» ( Hordubal, 1937), " Meteor», « The Salamander War"(Valka's mloky, 1936) and others. Along with the Pole S. Lem Czapek can be recognized as a classic of philosophical fiction. Karel Capek died having survived the Munich agreement, which gave his homeland to the power of the Germans.

Centuries of slavish dependence on the Germans, apparently, did not pass without a trace for the Czechs as a nation, accustoming them to meekly accept the vicissitudes of fate. As you know, Hitler in 1939 in Poland met with desperate resistance. A year earlier, fascist troops had invaded the Czech Republic almost without firing a shot. The Czech Republic, at that time a powerful industrial country with an excellent defense industry and a strong army with the most modern weapons (much stronger than the Polish army), surrendered to the Germans. (Subsequently, Czech tanks fought during the Great Patriotic War against the USSR, and Czech soldiers abounded in Hitler's army.)

In 1938, some in the Czech Republic felt doomed that their usual owners, the Germans, had returned ... These dramatic days are reminiscent of a poem by Marina Tsvetaeva, who loved Czechoslovakia with all her heart " One officer". The Russian poetess prefaced this work with the following epigraph:

“In the Sudetes, on the forested Czech border, an officer with twenty soldiers, leaving the soldiers in the forest, went out onto the road and began to shoot at the approaching Germans. Its end is unknown From the September newspapers of 1938)».

Tsvetaeva writes:

Czech forest -

The most forest.

Year - nine hundred

Thirty-eighth.

Day and month? - peaks, echo:

The day the Germans entered the Czechs!

The forest is reddish

Day - blue-gray.

twenty soldiers,

One officer.

Rough and chubby

The officer guards the border.

My forest, all around,

My bush, all around,

My house around

Mine is this house.

I won't sell the woods

I won't let you at home

I won't give up the edge

I won't give up!

Leaf darkness.

Hearts fright:

Is it a Prussian move?

Is it a heartbeat?

My forest, farewell!

My age, farewell!

My end, goodbye!

Mine is this land!

Let the whole region

To the enemy's feet!

I - under the foot -

I won't sell the stone!

The stomp of boots.

Germans! - sheet.

The roar of glands.

Germans! - the whole forest.

Germans! - peal

Mountains and caves.

Threw a soldier

One is an officer.

From the forest - in a lively manner

On the bulk - yes with a revolver!

suffered

Good news,

What is saved

Czech honor!

So the country

So not given up

Means war

Yet - it was!

My end, viva!

Eat it, Herr!

Twenty soldiers.

One officer.

Consequences of a break in cultural and historical development during the XVII-XVIII centuries. can already be seen from the obvious fact that Czech literature, unfortunately, has not shown itself very well at the international level. However, writers like A. Irasek and K. Čapek and other authors translated into foreign languages ​​worthily carry its ideas and themes to various countries. Russian readers treat Czech literature with great sympathy.

In the early Middle Ages, the lands of the Slovaks were part of Hungary, whose feudal authorities invariably and cruelly suppressed the Slovak national culture. However, in the XVI century. Hungarians lost their national independence. In Hungary, the German language was introduced, and the local feudal lords themselves had a hard time. Together with their old oppressors, the Hungarians, the Slovaks fell under the scepter of the Austrian Habsburg dynasty, which soon swallowed up the Czechs. The nuance is that for the Slovaks, with this subordination to the Austrians, that is, the Germans, the cruel domination over them weakened Hungarians against which the Slovaks fought for centuries 204 . In addition, unlike the Czechs, the Slovaks were Catholics like the Austrians - that is, there was no religious confrontation here. And today, a noticeable majority of the citizens of the Slovak Republic formed in 1993 are Catholics (almost all the rest are Protestants, as in the Czech Republic).

(For the first time, the Slovak state was created - for political reasons - by Nazi Germany after its capture of Czechoslovakia. After the liberation of the Czechs and Slovaks, the united Czechoslovak Republic was restored (as a socialist) by Soviet troops. In other words, in the period 1918-1993, Slovakia was almost always in composition Czechoslovakia.)

Slovaks were greatly influenced by Czech culture in general and literature in particular. From the 16th century those Slovaks who became Protestants. In this environment, they willingly wrote in Czech - for example, poets Yuraj Palkovich(1769-1850), author of the book of poems The Muse of the Slovak Mountains (1801), and Bohuslav Tables(1769-1832), who published his collections "Poetry and Records" one after another (1806-1812). Tables also published an anthology of Slovak poetry of the 18th century. "Slovak poets" (1804) - also in Czech.

IN Catholic Slovak circles at the end of the 18th century. a philologically interesting attempt was made to create a Slovak spelling system (the so-called "Bernolacchyna" - after the name of its creator, a Slovak Catholic priest Antonina Bernolaka(1762-1813). A number of books were published at the "Bernolacchyna". Although this unwieldy system never caught on later, Bernolak enlisted the efforts of national cultural figures in the creation of the Slovak literary language. However, N.S. Trubetskoy made a sharp and succinct observation:

“Despite the desire of the founders and main figures of Slovak literature to dissociate themselves from the Czech language, adherence to the Czech literary and linguistic tradition is so natural for Slovaks that it is impossible to resist it. The differences between the Slovak and Czech literary languages ​​are mainly grammatical and phonetic, while the vocabulary of both languages ​​is almost the same, especially in the field of concepts and ideas of higher mental culture. 205 .

Slovak began to write poetry Jan Kollar(1793-1852), who created odes, elegies, wrote a patriotic poem " Daughter of Glory» (1824).

Slovak by nationality was one of the largest philologists of the Slavic world Pavel Joseph Safarik(1795-1861). Living in Prague for many years, he wrote mainly in Czech. His most famous work is Slavic antiquities» (1837).

Philologist and Hegelian philosopher Ljudevit Stuhr(1815-1856) in the 30s of the XIX century. headed the department of Czechoslovak literature at the Bratislava Lyceum. He promoted the writer's fidelity to the spirit of the people, which is refracted in oral folk art.

Under the influence of Stuhr's ideas, a romantic poet was created Janko Kralj(1822-1876), which is characterized by rebellious motifs (for example, a cycle of his poems about the "Slovak Robin Hood" robber Janoshik) and prose writer Jan Kalinchak(1822-1871), who wrote historical stories about the struggle of the Slavs for independence - " Bozcovici"(1842)," Milko's grave"(1845)," Prince Liptovsky"(1847) and others.

In fact, these authors and some of their contemporaries played the role of the founders of the young (historically, and a century and a half later still quite young) Slovak literature. This literature is full of fresh vigor, but its entry into the broad international arena is a matter for the future.

The Polish people have been developing their culture in their own state for centuries. At the end of the XIV century. the Polish queen Jadwiga married the Lithuanian king Jagiello (later the military-political leader of the Battle of Grunwald). At the same time, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania retained its autonomy, but less than a century later (June 28, 1569) Union of Lublin according to which Poland and Lithuania have already become a single state. As a result of this union, Orthodox Belarusians and Ukrainians became dependent on Catholic Poles.

A few years later, a Catholic Hungarian was elected king of Poland. Stefan Batory(1533-1586), who led decisive military operations against Orthodox Rus' Ivan IV. In parallel, Catholicism intensified its confessional offensive against Orthodoxy.

In 1574 a Jesuit Peter Skarga(1536-1612), a major Polish Catholic figure, published his famous book " About jednośći Kośćtioła Bożego”(“On the unity of the Church of God and on the Greek deviation from this unity”), in which he accused Orthodox priests of getting married and therefore immersed in a sinful worldly life, and they also know Latin poorly and therefore do not differ in the necessary theological learning. He especially attacked the Church Slavonic language, arguing that with it "no one can become a scientist." Church Slavonic allegedly has no grammar rules, and it is also poorly understood everywhere. Naturally, Skarga contrasted this depressing picture with Catholicism with its Latin - in which, it must be admitted, various methods of logical scholasticism and intellectual sophistry were subtly developed.

Replying to Peter Skarga, the Ukrainian monk from Athos Ivan Vishensky(1550-1623) pointed to the inspiration of the Church Slavonic language, "the most fruitful of all languages", but precisely because of this hated by the devil, who "has such envy for the Slovenian language." This language is “God’s favorite: it’s better without filthy tricks and guides, yet there is a grammarian, rhetorician, dialectician and their other conceited cunning, the ubiquitous devil” 206 .

In 1596, Catholic church circles, with the support of the Polish authorities, put into practice a religious union. According to this so-called Brest, Orthodox unions living in Poland were subordinate to the Pope, although they retained the right to conduct religious services in Church Slavonic.

The Little Russian and Belarusian masses did not accept the union. In many ways, it was the union that pushed the Ukrainian people to a series of armed uprisings against the rule of the Poles. In the end, this fight was led by Bogdan Mikhailovich Khmelnitsky(1595-1657) - ataman of the Zaporozhye army, later hetman of Ukraine.

The Patriarch of Constantinople, who arrived at his headquarters, called on Khmelnitsky to create an Orthodox state and abolish the union. However, the hetman understood that in his war with the Poles the forces were too unequal, and after major military defeats, on January 8, 1654, he gathered a council in Pereyaslavl, at which the people supported his intention to transfer to the citizenship of the “Tsar of Moscow”. The reunification of Ukrainians and Russians began with the Pereyaslav Rada, which continued until the end of 1991, that is, almost to the present day.

Poland survived in the XVII - XVIII centuries. a series of severe cataclysms. A few years after the Pereyaslav Rada, it was literally flooded with the so-called "flood" - the invasion of the Swedes. The country has not recovered from it. In 1703, the Swedes of Charles XII again occupied Poland, took Warsaw and even planted their protege Stanislav Leshchinsky as king.

In the XVIII century. unfavorable circumstances for the Commonwealth multiplied more and more. With growing aggressiveness, the gentry, defending their "democratic rights", entered into a struggle with King Stanislav Poniatovsky, who was supported by Russia, and formed a "confederation" against him. The king asked Russia for help. As a result of very turbulent events, the so-called first and second partitions of Poland between Russia, Austria and Prussia took place.

In 1794, the Polish confederates, led by an outstanding commander Tadeusz Kosciuszko(1746-1817) were utterly defeated Alexander Vasilievich Suvorov(1730-1800), and the third partition of Poland took place. Poland as a state ceased to exist. For the Poles as an original Slavic nation, this was a tragedy.

In Polish literature there were and are world famous authors (Adam Mickiewicz, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Stanislaw Lem, Czeslaw Miloš, Wisława Szymborska and others).

Polish secular fiction transcended "Catholic Esperanto" (Latin) in the 16th century. N.S. Trubetskoy writes:

“The Old Polish language became literary much later than Czech, and since there was a rather lively cultural communication between Poland and the Czech Republic, and Polish and Czech languages ​​in the XIV century. were phonetically and grammatically much closer to each other than at present, it is not surprising that at the beginning of its literary existence, the Old Polish language experienced an extremely strong Czech influence. Basically, the Old Polish literary language developed from the spoken language of the Polish gentry, and this connection with a certain class, and not with a certain locality, was reflected in the fact that from the very beginning it did not reflect any specifically local, dialectical features and never coincided with with not a single local folk dialect: while, for example, the Russian literary language in terms of pronunciation can definitely be localized in the area of ​​​​Middle Great Russian dialects, the Polish literary language does not at all lend itself to localization on the dialectical map of ethnographic Poland. The literary tradition of the Polish language since the 14th century. never stopped, so that in terms of the duration and continuity of the literary tradition, the Polish language among the Slavic literary languages ​​occupies the next place after the Russian " 207 .

The Polish language was successfully used by the poet Nicholas Ray(1505-1569), author of moralizing poems (collection " Menagerie", 1562) the allegorical poem " A true image of the life of a worthy person, in which, as in a mirror, everyone can easily survey their actions" (1558), a book of short comic poems (" frashek») « funny stories"(1562) and others. Jan Kokhanovsky(1530-1584) was the largest poet of his time, the author of such works, didactic in tone, as " Susanna"(1562)," Chess"(1562-1566)," Agreement"(1564)," Satyr"(1564) and others. Poet who had little time to write Samp Shazhinsky(1550-1581) is considered a kind of predecessor of the Polish Baroque. One of the most famous representatives of the Baroque in Poland - Jan Andrzej Morshtyn(1621-1693), in whose work the Poles see the influence of a major figure in the Italian Baroque G. Marino (1569-1625).

Becoming at the end of the XVIII century. part of the Russian Empire, Slavic Poland experienced a strong and fruitful cultural and historical impact from its Russian brothers. In relation to literature, this fact is undoubtedly captured in the work of the classic of Polish romanticism Adam Mickiewicz(1798-1855), who was a personal friend of A.S. Pushkin and a number of contemporary Russian writers. Comparing the works of Mickiewicz and Pushkin more than once makes it possible to feel that the creative searches of these two great contemporaries (and at the same time the leaders of two Slavic literatures) were in many respects parallel to each other (they even both lived in Odessa, Moscow and St. Petersburg, both loved these cities).

« Crimean sonnets” (“Sonety krymskie”, 1826) by A. Mickiewicz are in tune with Pushkin's poems of the southern period. In turn, A.S. Pushkin brilliantly translated some of Mickiewicz's poems (" Budrys and his sons», « Governor"). Magnificent are the epic poems of Mickiewicz Konrad Wallenrod" (1828) and " Pan Tadeusz» (1834). In 1834, the poet also completed the dramatic poem " Dzyady”(its artistically the most powerful 3rd part), imbued with mystical-fictional motives and motives of Polish paganism, after which, unfortunately, almost ceasing to compose poetry. A. Mickiewicz wrote many sonnets, romances, lyrical poems and ballads. He also wrote a kind of romantic prose.

Among the Polish poets of the next generations, the most prominent are Juliusz Slovak(1809-1849), who also acted as a playwright and tragic Cyprian Norwid(1821-1883), who published little during his lifetime as a lyric poet and poet-philosopher.

In the second half of the XIX century. a whole galaxy of remarkable prose writers has matured in Poland.

Józef Ignacy Kraszewski(1812-1887) wrote prose, poetry and plays, leaving more than 500 volumes of writings (one of the most prolific European writers), but most of all he was glorified by 88 historical novels. Among them stand out " Countess Kozel"(1873)," Bruhl"(1874)," old legend"(1876) and others. Among the largest Polish prose writers of the 19th century. it was Kraszewski who first began to systematically poetize the historical past of Poland, at the end of the 18th century. lost state independence and dismembered.

Krashevsky lived in that (main) part of the former Commonwealth, which went to Russia, and was a contemporary of I.S. Turgenev, F.M. Dostoevsky, N.S. Leskov and other major Russian prose writers. Since 1868, thinking mankind has become more and more widely acquainted with the great novel by L.N. Tolstoy's "War and Peace", which influenced the work of historical novelists in various countries (as the romantic Walter Scott managed to do with his work earlier in the early 19th century). Kraszewski's novels established a powerful tradition of historical prose in Polish literature.

Alexander Glovatsky(1847-1912), writing under a pseudonym Boleslav Prus, he liked to joke that he used a pseudonym, as he was embarrassed by the nonsense coming out from under his pen. Despite such ironic self-criticism, Prus was a master of the pen. Starting as a humorist, he then became famous for realistic novels and short stories. outpost"(1885), "Doll" (1890), " emancipants"(1894) and others, as well as a wonderful historical novel" Pharaoh» (1895).

Classical prose writer, Nobel Prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz(1846-1916) was also focused primarily on depicting Poland's great past. Novels " With fire and sword"(1883-1884)," Flood"(1884-1886)," Pan Volodyevsky"(1887-1888) make up a trilogy dedicated to the military exploits of the Polish gentry of bygone times (in the novel "With Fire and Sword" the Poles fight the Ukrainian brothers, led by hetman Bohdan Khmelnitsky). Historical novel " Camo coming” (“Quo vadis”), written in 1894-1896, transfers the action to the first centuries of Christianity (the reign of Emperor Nero).

The best novel by Sienkiewicz crusaders"(1900) depicts Poland on the verge of the XIV-XV centuries. The plot action is resolved by the Battle of Grunwald, in which the combined forces of the Slavs inflicted a crushing defeat on the Teutonic Order.

Stefan Zeromsky(1864-1925), who wrote prose and plays, became famous primarily for his historical novel from the era of the Napoleonic Wars " Ash» (Popioły, 1904). Among his other works (usually permeated with pessimistic intonations), the novel " History of sin"(Dzieje grzechu, 1908) and the trilogy" Fight with Satan"(Walka z szatanem, 1916-1919).

Creativity of the prose writer and playwright Stanislav Pshibyshevsky(1868-1927), the de facto leader of Polish modernism at the beginning of the 20th century, was valued by Russian symbolists. He created novels, plays, poems in prose, essays, etc. Przybyszewski wrote many works in German (he grew up in the Prussian part of Poland), then translating himself into Polish. These include " Homo sapiens», « children of satan», « Deprofundis» and etc.

In the first decades of the XX century. in Poland there was also a bright poetic galaxy. Poets belonged to her Boleslav Lesmyan(1877-1937), Leopold Staff(1878-1957), as well as younger authors who formed the Scamander group - Julian Tuwim(1894-1953), Yaroslav Ivashkevich(1894-1980), Kazimierz Wierzyński(1894-1969) and others. A revolutionary romantic poet joined this group Vladislav Bronevsky(1897-1962).

Remarkably talented was one of the greatest Polish poets of the 20th century. Constants Ildefons Galczynski(1905-1953) - a wonderful lyricist, but moreover, the author is ironic, prone to fantasy and the grotesque, on occasion a bright and strong satirist. Galczynski's pre-war lyrics are mostly combined into " Utwory poetyckie» (1937). Taken prisoner by the Germans, the poet spent the years of World War II in a prisoner of war camp, where he undermined his health. After the war, Galczynski published a book of poems Enchanted droshky"("Zaczarowana dorożka", 1948), " Wedding rings"("Ślubne obrączki", 1949), " Lyric poetry"(" Wiersze liryczne ", 1952), the poem " Niobe"(Niobe, 1951) and a poem about a medieval Polish sculptor" Wit Stwosh» («Wit Stwosz», 1952). In the post-war years, the poet worked a lot as a satirist - he created the poetic cycle " Letters with violet"("Listy z fiołkiem", 1948).

There is reason to believe that K.I. Galchinsky, whose work is marked by features of genius, was generally the last in chronology great Polish poet. Among the authors of subsequent generations, modernist mindsets generally prevailed, creativity acquired a rather rationalistic character. 208 .

This has to be attributed even to such major figures as the Nobel Prize (1980) Polish-Lithuanian poet Cheslav Milos(1911-2004), who has been in exile since 1951, and Tadeusz Ruzewicz(1921) with his strict program of saving figurative means (rejection of rhyme, poetic rhythm, etc., that is, the transition to vers libre, rejection of metaphor, etc.). Even more indicative in this regard is the work of famous poets of later generations - for example, Stanislav Baranchak(1946), acting in parallel with writing poetry as a literary theorist, and Waldemar Zelazny(1959).

In 1996, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to a Polish poet Wislava Szymborska(1923). This act of somewhat belated official recognition prompts us to point to this poetess as a woman classic of modern Polish literature.

The true pride of modern Polish culture is multifaceted creativity Stanislav Lem(1921-2006). Since 1961, when his fantasy novels were published one after another Solaris», « Return from the stars», « Diary found in the bath" And " Book of Robots”, it became clear what kind of writer (prose writer, philosopher-essayist, critic) appeared in one of the Slavic countries. S. Lem was an innovator who updated the system of genres of his native literature. Known throughout the world and widely influenced by world literary fiction, Lem's work is of great artistic significance.

To summarize all of the above, it is deeply obvious that the Slavic world has made a powerful contribution to the world's verbal culture. The Slavs created the most important literary monuments of the Middle Ages. Slavic writers (primarily Russians) confidently occupy leadership positions in a number of areas of world literary development.

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE OF THE REPUBLIC OF TATARSTAN

Almetyevsk State Oil Institute

Department of Humanitarian Education and Sociology

Test

on the course "History of world culture"

on the topic: Pagan ancient Russian pra-culture.

Completed by: student of group 82-12

Makarov Sergey Alexandrovich

Checked by: Ph.D., Associate Professor

Mustafina Elvira Marsilovna

Almetyevsk 2013

Introduction.

Chapter 1. Religious ideas of the ancient Slavs.

Chapter 2. Anthropotheoxism of the ancient Slavs.

Chapter 3. Folklore and writing of the ancient Slavs.

Conclusion.

List of used literature.

Introduction

The word "culture" comes from the word "cult" - faith, customs and traditions of ancestors. Before Christianity and other monotheistic religions, all nations were pagans. Paganism is surrounded, on the one hand, by the mysteries of oblivion and many losses, like an ancient lost and therefore completely unfamiliar world, and on the other hand, an unspoken "taboo" is imposed on it. A kind of taboo on paganism appeared among the Eastern Slavs with the introduction of Christianity, it was not canceled with the advent of atheists in Rus' in 1917. Paganism is a religion, and close to any other religion already in its main essence of faith in God. That is why paganism, at the same time approaching each other in its different channels, also approached other, later ones that came in an evolutionary way (man became more complex, his ideas about the Cosmos, God became more complicated) monotheistic religions, merged with them and largely dissolved in them. Paganism from "languages" (essence: peoples, tribes); this word combines the principle of faith of different peoples. The very faith of these peoples, even within the framework of the union of tribes, could be very different among themselves.

Slavs - pagans worshiped the elements, believed in the relationship of people with various animals, made sacrifices to the deities inhabiting everything around. Each Slavic tribe prayed to their gods. There have never been common ideas about the gods for the entire Slavic world: since the Slavic tribes in pre-Christian times did not have a single state, they were not united in beliefs. Therefore, the Slavic gods are not related by kinship, although some of them are very similar to each other.

Religious representations of the ancient Slavs

As in other ancient cultures, the earliest forms of religion - magic, fetishism and, especially, totemism - were of great importance in Slavic-Russian paganism.

The most revered totems among the Slavs among the birds were the falcon, the eagle and the rooster, and among the animals - the horse, the bear. The pagan beliefs of the Slavs did not represent some kind of complete system. Modern research allows us to isolate several stages in the development of paganism, which | coexisted with each other for a long time, some of these beliefs have survived almost to this day.

The Slavs worshiped Mother Earth, whose symbol was patterns depicting a large square, | divided into four small squares with dots in the center - a sign of a plowed field. Water cults were quite developed, since water was considered the element from which the world was formed. The water was inhabited by numerous deities - mermaids, mermen, in honor of which special holidays were held - mermaids.

Ducks and geese usually served as symbols of water in art. Forests and groves were revered, which were the dwellings of the gods.

At the beginning of the 1st millennium AD. e. Old Slavic deities take an anthropomorphic form. The main among them are the gods of the Sun, Sky and Fire - Svarog, Dazhdbog and Hora. Winds - Stribog, thunderstorms - Perun, domestic animals and wealth - Veles (Volos), the god of fertility - Yarilo.

The companion of the god Veles was the female deity Mokosh - the patroness of women, the goddess of fertility and the hearth. Slavic-Russian mythology was not recorded in any literary works and therefore a clear distribution of roles between deities and their hierarchy is not known.

These gods also had their own symbols in art. The rooster, which marks the time with amazing accuracy, was recognized as a bird of things, and a rare fairy tale did not mention him. The horse, this proud swift animal, often merging in the view of the ancient Slav either with the god of the sun, or with the image of an equestrian warrior, was a favorite motif of ancient Russian art. And much later, his image continued to appear on the skates of Russian huts and towers. The sun enjoyed special reverence, and the image of the fiery wheel "thunder circle", divided into six parts, firmly entered the fine arts. These images appeared on the platbands of huts and embroidered towels until the beginning of the 20th century.

Honoring and fearing brownies, barns, goblin, mermaids, water and other creatures inhabiting the world around him, the Slav tried to fence himself off from them with dozens of conspiracies and amulets-amulets that have come down to our days.

At a late stage in the development of ancient Slavic paganism, the cult of Rod and Rozhanitsa, the creator of the Universe and the goddesses of fertility, Lada and Lely, takes shape and lasts longer than others. It was a cult of ancestors, family and home. Images of Lada and Lelya continued to appear on numerous embroideries in the 18th-20th centuries. Their cult aroused particular hostility of the Russian church.

At the same time, a three-level idea of ​​​​the world is taking shape: the lower, underground (symbol - a lizard), the middle - earthly (usually people and animals were depicted) and the upper - heavenly, stellar. The image of this structure of the world could be seen on idols, preserved only in single copies; as well as Russian spinning wheels, made a hundred years ago.

Worship and sacrifice took place in a special cult sanctuary-temple. According to the ideas of the Eastern Slavs, the world and the universe represent a circle of eternal rotation and therefore the temple had the form of a round platform surrounded on all sides by sacrificial fires, in the center of which there was a stone or wooden sculptural image of a god on a pedestal. A roof in the form of a tent was erected over the site. The walls were made of vertical logs, decorated with carvings and brightly painted. The temple got its name from the word "kap", which is translated from the ancient Slavic language as a sculpture, an idol, a blockhead. The ancient Russians respected and feared the gods, so they tried to woo them with magical rites and sacrifices, appeasing the ideols with gifts, as well as human sacrifices.

The most famous monument of paganism was the Zbruch idol (IX-X centuries) - a four-sided stone pillar set on a hill above the Zbruch River. The faces of the pillar are covered with bas-reliefs in several tiers. The top shows gods and goddesses with long hair. Below are three more tiers, revealing the ideas of our ancestors about the cosmos, sky, earth and the underworld.

Anthropotheoxism of the ancient Slavs

The continuous struggle and alternate victory of the light and dark forces of nature was enshrined in the ideas of the Slavs about the cycle of the seasons. Their starting point was the onset of a new year - the birth of a new sun at the end of December. This celebration received a Greco-Roman name from the Slavs - carols (from the Latin calendas - the first day of the new month). There was also a custom to walk with May (a symbol of spring) - a small Christmas tree decorated with ribbons, paper, eggs. The deity of the sun, seen off for the winter, was called Kupala, Yarilo and Kostroma. During the spring festival, the straw effigy of these deities was either burned or drowned in water.

Pagan folk holidays, such as New Year's divination, rampant Shrovetide, "mermaid week" were accompanied by incantatory magical rites and were a kind of prayer to the gods for general well-being, a rich harvest, deliverance from thunder and hail. For New Year's fortune-telling about the harvest, special vessels were used - spells. They often depicted 12 different drawings that make up a vicious circle - a symbol of 12 months.

By the time of the adoption of Christianity, the ancient Slavic religion had not yet managed to develop strict forms of worship, and the priests had not yet emerged as a special class. Representatives of tribal unions made sacrifices to tribal and heavenly gods, and sorcerers, sorcerers, soothsayers took care of contacts with the lower demons of the earth, delivering people from their harmful influence and receiving various services from them.

At the last, final stage in the development of paganism, the cult of Perun, the retinue god of thunder, acquired particular importance. In 980 Kiev Prince Vladimir the Red Sun made an attempt to reform paganism, giving it the appearance of a monotheistic religion. In an effort to raise folk beliefs to the level of a state religion, the prince ordered to erect wooden idols of six gods: Perun with a silver head and golden mustache, Khors, Dazhdbog, Simargl and Mokosh. According to ancient legends, Vladimir established sacrifices to these gods, which should have given their cult a tragic, but at the same time very solemn character. Around the idol of Perun, eight unquenchable fires were supposed to burn.

Folklore and writing of the ancient Slavs

Almost to this day, some conspiracies and spells, proverbs and sayings, riddles, often keeping traces of ancient magical ideas, ritual songs associated with the pagan agricultural calendar, wedding songs and funeral laments have survived. The origin of fairy tales is also connected with the distant pagan past, because fairy tales are echoes of myths, where, for example, numerous obligatory trials of heroes are traces of ancient initiation rites. And such a famous image of Russian fairy tales as Baba Yaga is a character of ancient beliefs in the natural feminine, which, on the one hand, is a good helper in earthly affairs of fairy-tale heroes (hence the help that fairy-tale characters receive from Baba Yaga), and on the other hand, an evil sorceress trying to harm people.

A special place in folklore was occupied by epics created by all the people. Passing from mouth to mouth, they were subjected to interpretations, often understood differently by different people. The most famous are the epics of the Kyiv cycle, associated with Kiev, with Prince Vladimir the Red Sun, three heroes. They began to take shape in the 10th-11th centuries, and they reflected very well the phenomenon of dual faith, the combination of old pagan ideas with new Christian forms. Images and plots of epics continued to nourish Russian literature for many subsequent centuries.

By the end of the pagan period, the level of development of ancient Russian culture was so high that it could no longer exist without writing. Until now, it was believed that the Slavs did not know writing before the appearance of the Cyrillic alphabet. However, today some historians and linguists believe that in addition to Greek, the Slavs had their own original writing system: the so-called nodular writing. Her signs were not written down, but transmitted using knots tied on threads, which were wrapped in balls of books. The memory of this knot writing has been preserved in our language and folklore. We are still tying “memory knots”, talking about the “thread of the story”, “the intricacies of the plot”.

In the ancient cultures of other peoples, knot writing was quite widespread. Knot writing was used by the ancient Incas and Iroquois, it was also known in ancient China. Finns, Ugrians, Karelians, who since ancient times lived together with the Slavs in the northern territories of Rus', had a nodular script, the mention of which was preserved in the Karelian-Finnish epic Kalevala. In ancient Slavic culture, traces of knot writing can be found on the walls of temples of the “dual faith” era, when Christian sanctuaries were decorated not only with the faces of saints, but also with ornamental patterns.

If nodular pagan writing existed among the ancient Slavs, then it was very complex. Accessible only to the elite - the priests and the highest nobility, it was a sacred letter. With the spread of Christianity and the extinction of the ancient culture of the Slavs, together with the priests-magi, the nodular letter also perished. Obviously, knot writing could not compete with a simpler and more logically perfect writing system based on Cyrillic.

Conclusion

In the evolution of the culture of Ancient Rus', historically, the first was the pagan, or pre-Christian period, which originates in the period of the formation of the Old Russian ethnos and ends in the 10th century. baptism of Kievan Rus. However, even before the formation of the Kievan state, the Slavs had a significant history and notable achievements in both material and spiritual culture.

The central place in the culture of this period was occupied by paganism, which arose among the Slavs in ancient times, in primitive society, long before the appearance of the Old Russian state.

The initial religious ideas of the ancient Slavs were associated with the deification of the forces of nature, which seemed to be inhabited by many spirits, which was also reflected in the symbolism of ancient Slavic art.

The worldview of the ancient Slavs was characterized by anthropotheocosmism, that is, the perception of the human, divine and

natural as a single undivided whole, the feeling of the world as not created by anyone.

Pagan beliefs and traditions found their expression in applied art and folklore.

Despite the millennial domination of the state Orthodox Church, pagan beliefs were the people's faith and until the 20th century. manifested in rituals, dance games, songs, fairy tales and folk art.

List of used literature

1. Belyakova G.S. "Slavic Mythology" Enlightenment. 2005.

2. Darnitsky E. V. "Ancient Rus'" The origins of antiquity. 2006.

3. Grushevitskaya T.G., Sadokhin A.P. Culturology / T.G. Grushevitskaya, A.P.

Sadokhin. - M.: Unity, 2007, p. 457-485.

4. Culturology: textbook / Ed. G.V. Fight. - Rostov-on-Don:

"Phoenix", 2007. - p.216 -274.

5. Rybakov B. A. "Paganism of the ancient Slavs" Science. 2001.

6. Famintsyn A.S. "Deities of the ancient Slavs" Science. 2005.

Art of ancient Rus'.

Writing and education Socio-political thought and literature.

Acceptance of Christianity.

Slavic paganism. Folklore.

The first mention of the Slavs in Greek, Roman, Arabic and Byzantine sources date back to the turn of the 1st millennium AD. e. By the VI century there was a separation of the eastern branch of the Slavs. In the VI-VIII centuries. in the face of growing external danger, the process of political consolidation of the East Slavic (Polyane, Drevlyans, Severyans, Krivichi, Vyatichi, etc.) and some non-Slavic tribes (Ves, Merya, Muroma, Chud) proceeded, culminating in the formation of the Old Russian state - Kievan Rus (IX century) . Being one of the largest states of medieval Europe, it stretched from north to south from the coast of the Arctic Ocean to the shores of the Black Sea, from west to east - from the Baltic and the Carpathians to the Volga. Thus, Rus' historically was a contact zone between Scandinavia and Byzantium, Western Europe and the Arab East. But the interaction of cultures for Russia was not limited to slavish imitation or mechanical combination of heterogeneous elements. Having its own cultural potential, pre-Christian Russia creatively assimilated influence from outside, which ensured its organic entry into the pan-European historical and cultural landscape and gave rise to "universality" as a characteristic feature of Russian culture. After the unification of the East Slavic tribes, the Old Russian nationality gradually developed, which had a certain common territory, language, culture and was the cradle of three fraternal peoples - Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian.

A high level of figurative-poetic, irrational worldview developed among the Eastern Slavs in the "pre-literate" period, in the era of paganism. Slavic paganism was an integral part of the complex of primitive views, beliefs and rituals of primitive man for many millennia. The term "paganism" is conditional, it is used to refer to the diverse range of phenomena (animism, magic, pandemonism, totemism, etc.) that are included in the concept of early forms of religion. The specificity of paganism is the nature of its evolution, in which the new does not displace the old, but is layered on it. The unknown Russian author of The Lay on Idols (XII century) singled out three main stages in the development of Slavic paganism. At the first stage, they "laid trebs (sacrifices) to ghouls and shorelines", that is, they worshiped the evil and good spirits that controlled the elements (water sources, forests, etc.). This is the dualistic animism of ancient times, when people believed that a deity in the form of a spirit lives in various objects and phenomena, and animals, plants and even rocks have an immortal soul. At the second stage, the Slavs worshiped Rod and women in childbirth. According to B. A. Rybakov, Rod is the ancient agricultural deity of the Universe, and women in childbirth are the deities of prosperity and fertility. According to the ideas of the ancients, Rod, being in heaven, controlled rain and thunderstorms, water sources on earth, as well as underground fire, are associated with it. The harvest depended on the Sort, not without reason in the East Slavic languages ​​the word freak was used in the meaning of the harvest. The holiday of the Family and women in childbirth is a harvest festival. According to the ideas of the Slavs, Rod gave life to all living things, hence a number of concepts: people, nature, relatives, etc. Noting the special significance of the cult of the Family, the author of the "Word of the Idols" compared it with the cults of Osiris and Artemis. Obviously, Rod personifies the actual Slavic trend of transition to monotheism. With the foundation in Kyiv of a single pantheon of pagan gods, as well as in times of dual faith, the significance of the Family decreased - he became the patron of the family, at home. At the third stage, the Slavs prayed to Perun, i.e., the state cult of the princely retinue god of war, which was originally revered as the god of thunder, developed.

In addition to those mentioned, at different stages of paganism among the Slavs there were many other deities. The most important in pre-Perun times were Svarog (the god of heaven and heavenly fire), his sons - Svarozhich (the god of earthly fire) and Dazhdbog (the god of the sun and light, the giver of all blessings), as well as other solar gods, who had other names among different tribes - Yarilo, Khors. The names of some gods are associated with the veneration of the sun at different times of the year (Kolyada, Kupalo, Yarilo). Stribog was considered the god of the air elements (wind, storms, etc.). Veles (Volos) was the patron of cattle and the god of wealth, probably because in those days cattle was the main wealth. And the retinue environment Veles was considered the god of music and songs, the patron of art, not without reason in the "Lay of Igor's Campaign" the legendary singer Boyan is called Veles' grandson. In general, the cult of Veles was unusually widespread in all Slavic lands: judging by the chronicle, all of Rus' swore by his name. According to folk beliefs, the goddess Mokosh (Makosh, Mokosha, Moksha), who was somehow connected with sheep breeding, and was also the goddess of fertility, the patroness of women, the hearth and the economy, was the companion of Veles. For a long time after the adoption of Christianity, Russian women revered their pagan patroness. This is evidenced by one of the questionnaires of the 16th century, according to which the priest at confession had to ask the parishioners "Have you gone to Mokosha?"

Temples, tremies, temples served as the place of worship, in which the Magi - priests of the pagan religion - prayed, performed various rites, made sacrifices to the gods (the first harvest, the first offspring of livestock, herbs and wreaths of fragrant flowers, and in some cases living people and even children).

Realizing the importance of religion for strengthening princely power and statehood, in 980 Vladimir Svyatoslavich tried to reform paganism, giving it the features of a monotheistic religion. The most revered by different tribes gods were included in the single pantheon for all of Rus', including, in addition to the Slavic, the Persian - Khors, the Finno-Ugric (?) - Mokosh. The primacy in the hierarchy of the gods was given, of course, to the princely retinue god of war Perun, to increase the authority of which Vladimir even ordered the resumption of human sacrifice. The composition of the Kyiv pantheon reveals the goals of the reform - the strengthening of the central government, the consolidation of the ruling class, the unification of the tribes, the establishment of new relations of social inequality. But the attempt to create a unified religious system, preserving the old pagan beliefs, was not successful. The reformed paganism retained the remnants of primitive equality, did not eliminate the possibility of traditional worship only of one's tribal deity, did not contribute to the formation of new norms of morality and law that corresponded to the changes taking place in the socio-political sphere.

The pagan worldview found its artistic expression in folk art even in the pre-Christian era. Later, during the period of dual faith, the pagan tradition, persecuted in the sphere of official ideology and art, found refuge precisely in folklore, applied art, etc. Despite the official rejection of pre-Christian culture, it was the mutual influence of pagan and Christian traditions in the pre-Mongol period that contributed to "Russification" Byzantine artistic norms and, thus, the creation of an original culture of medieval Russia.

From time immemorial, oral folk poetry of the ancient Slavs developed. Conspiracies and spells (hunting, shepherd, agricultural); proverbs and sayings reflecting ancient life; riddles, often containing traces of ancient magical ideas; ritual songs associated with the pagan agricultural calendar; wedding songs and funeral laments, songs at feasts and banquets. The origin of fairy tales is also connected with the pagan past.

A special place in oral folk art was occupied by the "old" - the epic epic. Epics of the Kyiv cycle, associated with Kiev, with the Dnieper Slavutich, with Prince Vladimir Krasno Solnyshko, heroes, began to take shape in the X-XI centuries. They expressed in their own way the social consciousness of an entire historical era, reflected the moral ideals of the people, preserved the features of ancient life, the events of everyday life. Oral folk art has been an inexhaustible source of images and plots that have nourished Russian literature, fine arts, and music for centuries.

In 1971, the Nauka Publishing House went out of print, without suggesting any continuation, a small collection of articles Slavic and Balkan Folklore, the executive editor of which was I.M. at that time, the Group for the Study of the Folklore of the Peoples of Central and South-Eastern Europe at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Among the authors of this first collection of "Slavic and Balkan folklore" were folklorists: B. N. Putilov, S. N. Azbelev, Yu. I. Smirnov, L. N. Vinogradova, L. G. Barag and others. In 1978, already as the first issue of a future series, a volume was published under the title “Slavic and Balkan Folklore: Genesis. Archaic. Traditions”, the executive editor of which was again I. M. Sheptunov, who, before his death (which happened in the same year), managed to attract a wonderful team of well-known and only novice scientists to participate in this publication, such as E. V. Pomerantseva V. K. Sokolova, N. I. Tolstoy, S. M. Tolstaya, A. F. Zhuravlev, Yu. I. Smirnov, V. V. Usacheva, A. V. Gura, L. N. Vinogradova.

From 1981 to 1995 Nikita Ilyich Tolstoy, a well-known Slavist, founder of the Moscow Ethnolinguistic School, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, became the editor-in-chief and one of the leading authors of all issues of this series. During this period, six volumes of "Slavic and Balkan folklore" were published, which received wide recognition from specialists - folklorists, ethnolinguists and ethnologists. The focus of attention of the existing team of authors (mainly employees of the Department of Ethnolinguistics and Folklore of the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, headed by N. I. Tolstoy: S. M. Tolstaya, L. N. Vinogradova, V. V. Usacheva, A. V. Gura , O. A. Ternovskaya, T. A. Agapkina, A. A. Plotnikova, O. V. Belova, E. S. Uzeneva, M. M. Valentsova) - the tasks of a comprehensive study of the spiritual culture of the Slavs and, above all, such forms of it which preserve the pan-Slavic mythopoetic traditions, manifested in different ways in language, rituals, beliefs and folklore. On the initiative of N. I. and S. M. Tolstykh, two issues of the series (1986, 1995) were specially devoted to the problems of the ethnolinguistic study of Polissya. They present the results of mapping individual fragments of the traditional culture of this unique region: folk terminology, rituals, folklore motifs, demonological beliefs.

After the death of N. I. Tolstoy in 1996, the editorial board of the series was headed by S. M. Tolstaya. She edited two volumes of the series: "Slavic and Balkan folklore: Folk demonology" (M., 2000) and "Slavic and Balkan folklore: Semantics and pragmatics of the text" (M., 2006).

Over the 30 years of the existence of the series, among its authors were such famous domestic and foreign Slavists as B. N. Putilov, V. E. Gusev, E. V. Pomerantseva, V. K. Sokolova, V. N. Toporov, V. V. Ivanov, T. V. Tsivyan, A. F. Zhuravlev, S. E. Nikitina, O. A. Pashina, I. A. Dzedzelevsky, M. Matichetov, L. Radenkovich, E. Horvatova, M. Wojtyla-Swiezhovska and etc.

/ Rev. ed. I. M. Sheptunov. M.: "Nauka", 1971.

Introduction

South Slavic epic and problems of the Serbian Middle Ages ( E. L. Naumov)

Motives for killing the enemy king in epics and Kosovo songs ( S. N. Azbelev)

Plot closure and the second plot plan in the Slavic epic ( B. N. Putilov)

Similar descriptions in Slavic epic songs and their meaning ( Yu. I. Smirnov)

Compositional analysis of Polish carol ritual songs ( L. N. Vinogradova)

About musical parallels in the songs of South Russia and South-Western Bulgaria ( S. N. Kondratieva)

On the significance of Slavic folklore for the study of the Balkan epic community ( Yu. I. Smirnov)

Plots and motives of Belarusian fairy tales. (Systematic Index) ( L. G. Barag)

Similarity of Slavic proverbs ( A. M. Zhigulev)

Slavic and Balkan folklore: Genesis. Archaic. Traditions / Ans. ed. I. M. Sheptunov. M.: "Nauka", 1978.

Introduction

L. N. Vinogradova. Incantation formulas in the calendar poetry of the Slavs and their ritual origins

V. V. Usacheva. The rite of passage "polaznik" and its folklore elements in the area of ​​the Serbo-Croatian language

V. K. Sokolova. Maslenitsa (its composition, development and specifics)

A. F. Zhuravlev. Protective rites associated with the loss of livestock and their geographical distribution.

N. I. and S. M. Tolstoy. Notes on Slavic paganism. 2. Making rain in Polissya

S. M. Tolstaya. Materials for the description of the Polissya Kupala rite

E. V. Pomerantseva. Interethnic community of beliefs and tales about noon

A. V. Gura. The symbolism of the hare in the Slavic ritual and song folklore

F. D. Klimchuk. Song tradition of the Western Polissya village of Simonovichi

Yu. I. Smirnov. Epika Polissya

Slavic and Balkan folklore: Rite. Text / Rep. ed. N. I. Tolstoy. M.: "Nauka", 1981.

Yu. I. Smirnov. Focus of Comparative Research in Folklore

L. N. Vinogradova. Maiden fortune-telling about marriage in the cycle of Slavic calendar rituals (West-East Slavic parallels)

N. I. and S. M. Tolstoy. Notes on Slavic paganism. 5. Protection from hail in Dragachev and other Serbian zones

A. V. Gura. Weasel (Mustela nivalis) in Slavic folk representations

O. A. Ternovskaya. To the description of some Slavic representations connected with insects. One system of domestic insect extermination rituals

L. G. Barag. The plot of snake fighting on the bridge in the tales of East Slavic and other peoples

N. L. Ruchkina. Genetic links between the Akritian epic and the Clefta songs

Yu. I. Smirnov. Epika Polissya (according to the records of 1975)

Appendix - Indexes to the article by N. I. and S. M. Tolstykh “Notes on Slavic paganism. 5"

Slavic and Balkan folklore: Ethnogenetic commonality and typological parallels / Rev. ed. N. I. Tolstoy . M.: "Nauka", 1984.

Introduction

N. I. Tolstoy. Fragment of Slavic paganism: archaic ritual-dialogue

L. N. Vinogradova. Types of carol refrains and their areal characteristics

T. V. Tsivyan. On the mythological interpretation of the Eastern Romanesque carol text "Plugushor"

O. A. Ternovskaya. Perezhiny in the Kostroma region. (According to the questionnaire "Cult and folk agriculture" 1922-1923)

A. V. Gura. Weasel (Mustela nivalis) in Slavic folk representations. 2

E. N. Razumovskaya. Crying with the cuckoo. Traditional non-ritual baldness of the Russian-Belarusian borderland

Materials and publications

Yu. I. Smirnov. Epika of Polissya according to the records of 1976

F. D. Klimchuk. Songs from the southeastern suburbs

N. L. Ruchkina. Greek Akritian songs about a hero slaying a dragon

I. A. Dzendzelevsky. Prohibitions in the practice of Carpathian sheep breeders

Slavic and Balkan folklore: Spiritual culture of Polissya on a common Slavic background / Ed. ed. N. I. Tolstoy. M.: "Nauka", 1986.

Materials for the Polessye ethnolinguistic atlas. Mapping experience

Foreword ( N. T., S. T.)

The sun is playing S. M. Tolstaya)

Ritual outrages of youth ( S. M. Tolstaya)

Trinity green ( N. I. Tolstoy)

Plowing rivers, roads ( S. M. Tolstaya)

Frog, already and other animals in the rites of calling and stopping the rain ( S. M. Tolstaya)

Sretensky and Thursday candle ( S. M. Tolstaya)

Rain during the wedding A. V. Gura)

Spring Invocation ( T. A. Agapkina)

The daughter-in-law became a poplar in the field ( N. I. Tolstoy)

O. A. Pashina. Calendar songs of the spring-summer cycle of southeastern Belarus

V. I. Kharitonova. Polissya tradition of lamentation in Polissya on the East Slavic background

Articles and research

V. E. Gusev. Driving "arrows" ("suls") in East Polissya

On the problem of the ethnographic context of calendar songs

L. N. Vinogradova. The mythological aspect of the Polissya "rusal" tradition

N. I. Tolstoy. From observations of Polissya conspiracies

Materials and publications

A. V. Gura. From Polissya wedding terminology. Wedding ranks. Vocabulary: N - Svashka

S. M. Tolstaya. Polissya folk calendar. Materials for the ethno-dialect dictionary: K - P

Yu. I. Smirnov. Epika Polissya

Slavic and Balkan folklore: Reconstruction of the ancient Slavic spiritual culture: Sources and methods / Ed. ed. N. I. Tolstoy. M.: "Nauka", 1989.

N. I. Tolstoy. Some considerations on the reconstruction of the Slavic spiritual culture

V. N. Toporov. On the Iranian element in Russian spiritual culture

V. V. Martynov. Sacred world "Words about Igor's Campaign"

V. V. Ivanov. Ritual burning of a horse skull and wheel in Polissya and its Indo-European parallels

M. Matichetov. About mythical creatures among Slovenes and especially about Kurent

L. N. Vinogradova. Folklore as a source for the reconstruction of the ancient Slavic spiritual culture

L. Radenkovich. The symbolism of color in Slavic conspiracies

S. E. Nikitina. On the relationship between oral and written forms in folk culture

E. Horvatova. Traditional youth unions and initiation rites among the Western Slavs

Z. Michael. Ethnolinguistic methods in the study of folk spiritual culture

T. V. Tsivyan. On the Linguistic Foundations of the Model of the World (Based on the Balkan Languages ​​and Traditions)

M. Wojtyla-Swiezhovska. Terminology of agrarian rituals as a source for studying the ancient Slavic spiritual culture

S. M. Tolstaya. Terminology of rituals and beliefs as a source of reconstruction of ancient spiritual culture

T. A. Agapkina, A. L. Toporkov. Sparrow (rowan) night in the language and beliefs of the Eastern Slavs

A. A. Potebnya. On the origin of the names of some Slavic pagan deities ( Preparation of the text V. Yu. Franchuk. Notes by N. E. Afanasyeva and V. Yu. Franchuk)

About the work of A. A. Potebnya, dedicated to the origin and etymology of the names of Slavic pagan deities ( V. Yu. Franchuk)

Slavic and Balkan folklore: Beliefs. Text. Ritual / Rev. ed. N. I. Tolstoy . M.: "Nauka", 1994.

I

N. I. Tolstoy. Once again about the topic "clouds - beef, rain - milk"

L. N. Vinogradova, S. M. Tolstaya. On the problem of identification and comparison of the characters of Slavic mythology

O. V. Sannikova. Polish mythological vocabulary in the structure of folklore text

II

T. A. Agapkina. South Slavic beliefs and rituals associated with fruit trees in a common Slavic perspective

S. M. Tolstaya. Mirror in traditional Slavic beliefs and rituals

I. A. Sedakova. Bread in the traditional rites of the Bulgarians: homelands and the main stages of child development

III

N. I. Tolstoy. Vita herbae et vita rei in the Slavic folk tradition

T. A. Agapkina, L. N. Vinogradova. Wishing: Ritual and Text

G. I. Kabakov. Structure and Geography of the Legend of the March Old Woman

V. V. Usacheva. Vocative formulas in folk medicine of the Slavs

N. A. Ipatova. Werewolves as a property of fairy-tale characters

E. E. Levkievskaya. Materials on Carpathian demonology

Corrective additions to the article by N. I. Tolstoy "Vita herbae et vita rei in the Slavic folk tradition"

Slavic and Balkan Folklore: An Ethnolinguistic Study of Polissya / Rev. ed. N. I. Tolstoy . M.: "Indrik", 1995.

N. I. Tolstoy. Ethnocultural and linguistic study of Polissya (1984–1994)

I. Polissya ethnolinguistic atlas: research and materials

T. A. Agapkina. Essays on the spring rituals of Polissya

A. A. Plotnikova. The first pasture in Polissya

L. N. Vinogradova. Regional features of Polissya beliefs about the brownie

E. E. Levkievskaya, V. V. Usacheva. Polissya water on a common Slavic background

L. N. Vinogradova. Where do babies come from? Polissya formulas about the origin of children

V. L. Svitelskaya. Experience in mapping Polissya funerary rites

M. M. Valentsova. Materials for mapping the types of Polesye Christmas divination

M. Nikonchuk, O. Nikonchuk, G. Orlenko. Deyaki terms of material culture in the villages of the right-bank Poliss

O. A. Parshina. Calendar cycle in the northwestern villages of the Sumy region

II. Ethnolinguistic dictionaries. Publications

S. M. Tolstaya. Polissya folk calendar. Materials for the ethno-dialect dictionary: R - Z

A. V. Gura. From Polissya wedding terminology. Wedding ranks. Dictionary (Candlesticks - Sh)

F. D. Klimchuk. Spiritual culture of the Polissya village Simonovichi

III. Applications

N. P. Antropov, A. A. Plotnikova. Chronicle of Polissya expeditions

List of settlements of the Polesye ethnolinguistic atlas

Abbreviations of the names of regional centers and districts

Slavic and Balkan folklore: Folk demonology / Rev. ed. S. M. Tolstaya . M.: "Indrik", 2000.

Foreword

N. I. Tolstoy.“Without four corners, a hut is not built” (Notes on Slavic paganism. 6)

L. N. Vinogradova. new ideas about the origin of evil spirits: demonologization of the deceased

S. M. Tolstaya. Slavic mythological ideas about the soul

E. E. Levkievskaya. Mythological characters in the Slavic tradition. I. East Slavic brownie

Dagmar Klimova (Prague).Hospodarik in the beliefs of the Czech people

T. V. Tsivyan. About one class of characters of lower mythology: "professionals"

N. A. Mikhailov. To one Balto-South Slavic folklore-ritual formula: lit. laimė lėme, ltsh. laima nolemj, svn. sojenice sodijo

L. R. Khafizova. Buka as a character in children's folklore

T. A. Agapkina. Demons as characters of calendar mythology

A. A. Plotnikova. The mythology of atmospheric and celestial phenomena among the Balkan Slavs

V. V. Usacheva. Mythological ideas of the Slavs about the origin of plants

A. V. Gura. Demonological properties of animals in Slavic mythological representations

V. Ya. Petrukhin."Gods and demons" of the Russian Middle Ages: clan, women in childbirth and the problem of Russian dual faith

O. V. Belova. Judas Iscariot: from the gospel image to the mythological character

M. M. Valentsova. Demon Saints Lucius and Barbara in West Slavic Calendar Mythology

Polissya and Western Russian materials about the brownie

: Semantics and pragmatics of the text / Rev. ed. S. M. Tolstaya . M.: "Indrik", 2006.

Foreword

Text pragmatics

T. A. Agapkina. The plot of East Slavic conspiracies in a comparative aspect

O. V. Belova. Slavic biblical legends: verbal text in the context of the rite

E. E. Levkievskaya. Pragmatics of the mythological text

L. N. Vinogradova. Socioregulatory function of superstitious stories about violators of taboos and customs

S. M. Tolstaya. The motif of posthumous walking in beliefs and ritual

Text and rite

A. V. Gura. Correlation and interaction of actional and verbal codes of the wedding ceremony

V. V. Usacheva. Verbal magic in the agricultural rites of the Slavs

A. A. Plotnikova. Spring incantation formulas for the "expulsion" of reptiles among the southern Slavs (in an areal perspective)

Vocabulary and phraseology and their role in text generation

M. M. Valentsova. Calendar proverbs of the Western Slavs

E. L. Berezovich, K. V. Pyankova. Food code in game text: porridge And kvass

A. V. Gura. Moon spots: ways of constructing a mythological text

O. V. Chokha. Linguistic and cultural image of lunar time in the Polissya tradition ( young And old month)

E. S. Uzeneva. Correlation between chrononym and legend (the feast of St. Tryphon in the areal perspective)

Several folk Christian legends from Transcarpathia ( publication by M. N. Tolstoy)

Vladimir Nikolaevich Toporov and his texts ( S. M. Tolstaya)

Slavic and Balakan folklore: Grapes. To the anniversary of Lyudmila Nikolaevna Vinogradova / Rev. ed. A. V. Gura . M.: "Indrik", 2011. – 376 p.

The eleventh issue of the series "Slavic and Balkan folklore" is dedicated to the anniversary of Lyudmila Nikolaevna Vinogradova.
The articles included in the collection are grouped into five sections, which are related to a wide range of topics of interest to Lyudmila Nikolaevna. The first section is devoted to general issues of ethnolinguistics, semantic categories of the language of culture, cultural semantics and the function of vocabulary and phraseology. The second section contains works on Slavic folk demonology - the area closest to the hero of the day. The third section contains articles analyzing folklore texts of a magical nature (charms, curses) and spiritual verses. The fourth section deals with rituals (wedding, calendar, occasional) and ritual folklore in the context of beliefs and mythology. Finally, the articles of the fifth section analyze mythological motifs in literary works and art. Several publications are devoted to the folk culture of Transcarpathia, with which the early years of Lyudmila Nikolaevna are associated - in Mukachevo she graduated from high school, in Uzhgorod - the philological faculty of the university.
The collection ends with a list of scientific works of the hero of the day.

Foreword

Language and culture

Tolstaya S. M. Subject oppositions, their semantic structure and symbolic functions

Antropov N.P. Axiological motives of ethnolinguistic attraction

Berezovich E. L., Kazakova E. D. The Situation of the "Language Test" in Popular Culture

Kabakova G.I. An invitation to a feast

Gura A.V. On conflict situations in traditional peasant culture

Morozov I. A., Frolova O. E. Living/inanimate in cultural and linguistic contexts

Folk demonology

Radenkovich L. Dangerous places in Slavic folk demonology

Kolosova V. B. Demonology in Slavic ethnobotany

Andryunina M. A."Mock" dead - loci of the body and loci of the soul

Yasinskaya M.V. Visualization of the Invisible: Ways to Contact the Other World

Moroz A. B."Old Man". The experience of describing a mythological character

Dobrovolskaya V. E. Hiccups in traditional culture (on the materials of the Vladimir region)

Plotnikova A. A. Folk mythology in Transcarpathian Verkhovyna

Tolstaya M.N. Potinka And accordion in the Transcarpathian village Synevyr

Valentsova M. M. Demonological representations of Orava

Folklore: themes, motifs, pragmatics

Nikitina S. E. Fire, water and (copper) pipes (based on folklore religious song texts)

Nebrzegowska-Bartmińska S."Posłuchajcie, grzesznicy, o straszlisym sądzie..." Wykonawca, narrator i bohater ludowych piesni dziadowśkich

Neklyudov S. Yu. Naked bride on a tree

Agapkina T. A. On some features of the transmission and functioning of the East Slavic conspiracy tradition

Yudin A.V. Grandmother Solomonia in East Slavic incantations and the sources of her image

Sedakova I. A. Curse in Bulgarian Folk Songs: Ethnolinguistics and Folklore Poetics

Rites and ritual folklore

Pashina O. A. On the criteria for selecting types and versions of wedding-fun (on the example of the Smolensk wedding)

Kurochkin A.V. Elements of Greek Catholic syncretism in the calendar rituals of Ukrainians

Belova O. V."Tyuti-Tyuti, Moshke, let's take a walk troshka ..." (modern Christmas dressing in Galicia)

Chokha O.V. Christmas costume in western Macedonia: ρογκατσάρια And μπουμπουτσιάρια

Bondar N.I. The magic of the moon (from the occasional ritual of the East Slavic population of the North Caucasus: XIX - early XXI century)

Uzeneva E. S. Prohibitions and prescriptions in the traditional culture of Transcarpathia (the village of Kolochava, Mezhhirya district, Transcarpathian region)

Myth - folklore - literature

Petrukhin V. Ya. Eaters of mother's milk at Pseudo-Caesarea: demonological motive or "religious slander"?

Toporkov A.L. Mythological image of a tree growing from a female body

Sofronova L. A."Someone" and "something" in Gogol's early stories

Aidacic D. The Warlock Pan Twardowski and the Pact with the Devil in the Literature of the 19th Century

Tsivyan T.V. Palm Theme in Russian Literature of the 20th Century: Shimmering Mythology (A Few Examples)

Svirida I. I. Own And someone else's name in art

List of scientific works of L. N. Vinogradova