Folklore is oral folk art. Features of folklore. What is folklore

Folklore and literature are two types of verbal art. However, folklore is not only the art of words, but also an integral part folk life, closely intertwined with its other elements, and this is a significant difference between folklore and literature. But also as an art of words, folklore differs from literature. These differences do not remain unshakable at various stages of historical development, and yet the main, stable features of each of the types of verbal art can be noted. Literature is an individual art, folklore is a collective art. In literature there is innovation, and in folklore tradition comes to the fore. Literature exists in written form, a means of storing and transmitting an artistic text, a book serves as an intermediary between the author and his addressee, while a work of folklore is reproduced orally and stored in the memory of the people. A work of folklore lives in many variants; with each performance it is reproduced as if anew, with direct contact between the performer-improviser and the audience, which not only directly influences the performer (feedback), but sometimes also joins in the performance.

Anika the warrior and death. Splint.

Publications of Russian folklore.

The term “folklore,” which was introduced into science by the English scientist W. J. Toms in 1846, translated means “folk wisdom.” Unlike many Western European scientists who classify folklore as the most diverse aspects of folk life (even culinary recipes), including elements of material culture (housing, clothing), domestic scientists and their like-minded people in other countries consider oral folk art- poetic works created by the people and existing among the broad masses, along with musical and dance folklore. This approach takes into account the artistic nature of folklore as the art of words. Folkloristics is the study of folklore.

The history of folklore goes back to the deep past of humanity. M. Gorky defined folklore as the oral creativity of the working people. Indeed, folklore arose in the process of labor, always expressed the views and interests of mainly working people, and in it, in the most varied forms, a person’s desire to make his work easier, to make it joyful and free was manifested.

Primitive man spent all his time on work or preparing for it. The actions through which he sought to influence the forces of nature were accompanied by words: spells and conspiracies were pronounced, the forces of nature were addressed with a request, threat or gratitude. This indivisibility of different species is essentially already artistic activity(although the creators-performers themselves set purely practical goals) - the unity of words, music, dance, decorative art - is known in science as “primitive syncretism”, traces of it are still noticeable in folklore. As a person accumulated more and more significant life experience, which needed to be passed on to subsequent generations, the role of verbal information increased: after all, it was the word that could most successfully communicate not only about what was happening Here And Now, but also about what happened or will happen somewhere And once upon a time or some day. Selection verbal creativity into an independent form of art - the most important step in the prehistory of folklore, in its independent, although associated with mythological consciousness, state. The decisive event that paved the line between mythology and folklore proper was the appearance of the fairy tale. It was in the fairy tale that imagination - this, according to K. Marx, a great gift that contributed so much to the development of mankind - was first recognized as an aesthetic category.

With the formation of nations, and then states, a heroic epic took shape: the Indian Mahabharata, Irish sagas, Kyrgyz Manas, Russian epics. Lyrics not related to ritual arose even later: it showed interest in the human personality, in the experiences common man. Folk songs from the period of feudalism tell about serfdom, about the hard lot of women, about people's defenders, such as Karmelyuk in Ukraine, Janosik in Slovakia, Stepan Razin in Rus'.

When studying folk art, one should constantly keep in mind that people are not a homogeneous concept and are historically changeable. The ruling classes sought by all means to introduce into the masses thoughts, moods, works that were contrary to the interests of the working people - songs loyal to tsarism, “spiritual poems”, etc. Moreover, in the people themselves, centuries of oppression accumulated not only hatred for exploiters, but also ignorance and downtroddenness. The history of folklore is both a process of constant growth in the self-awareness of the people and an overcoming of what their prejudices were expressed in.

Based on the nature of the connection with folk life, folklore is distinguished between ritual and non-ritual. The folklore performers themselves adhere to a different classification. For them, it is important that some works are sung, others are spoken. Philological scholars classify all works of folklore into one of three categories - epic, lyric or drama, as is customary in literary criticism.

Some folklore genres are interconnected by a common sphere of existence. If pre-revolutionary folklore was very clearly distinguished by the social class of its speakers (peasant, worker), now age differences are more significant. A special section of folk poetry is children's folklore - playful (drawing lots, counting rhymes, various play songs) and non-fictional (tongue twisters, horror stories, changelings). The main genre of modern youth folklore has become the amateur, so-called bard song.

The folklore of every nation is unique, as is its history, customs, and culture. Epics and ditties are inherent only in Russian folklore, dumas - in Ukrainian, etc. The lyrical songs of every nation are original. Even the shortest works of folklore - proverbs and sayings - express the same idea in each nation in its own way, and where we say: “Silence is golden,” the Japanese, with their cult of flowers, will say: “Silence is flowers.”

However, already the first folklorists were struck by the similarity of fairy tales, songs, and legends belonging to different peoples. At first this was explained by the common origin of related (for example, Indo-European) peoples, then by borrowing: one people adopted plots, motifs, and images from another.

A consistent and convincing explanation of all phenomena of similarity can only be provided by historical materialism. Based on a wealth of factual material, Marxist scientists explained that similar plots, motifs, and images arose among peoples who were at the same stages of socio-cultural development, even if these peoples lived on different continents and did not meet each other. Thus, a fairy tale is a utopia, a dream of justice, which developed among various peoples as private property appeared in them, and with it social inequality. Primitive society did not know fairy tales on any of the continents.

Fairy tales, heroic epics, ballads, proverbs, sayings, riddles, lyrical songs of different peoples, differing in national identity both in form and content, are at the same time created on the basis of laws common to a certain level of artistic thinking and established by tradition. Here is one of the “natural experiments” that confirms this position. The French poet P. J. Beranger wrote the poem “The Old Corporal”, using as a basis (and at the same time significantly reworking it) a “complaint” - a special kind of French folk ballad. The poet V. S. Kurochkin translated the poem into Russian, and thanks to the music of A. S. Dargomyzhsky, the song penetrated the Russian folklore repertoire. And when, many years later, it was recorded on the Don, it was discovered that the folk singers had made significant changes to the text (and, by the way, to the music), as if essentially restoring the original form of the French “complaint,” which the Don Cossacks, of course, had never heard. This is reflected in the general laws of folk song creativity.

Literature appeared later than folklore and has always, although in different ways, used its experience. At the same time, literary works have long penetrated folklore and influenced its development.

The nature of the interaction between the two poetic systems is historically determined and therefore varies at different stages of artistic development. On this path, the process of redistribution of the social spheres of action of literature and folklore, which takes place at sharp turns in history, is extremely important, which, based on the material of Russian XVII culture V. noted by Academician D.S. Likhachev. If back in the 16th century. storytellers were kept even at the royal court, then a century and a half later, folklore disappears from the life and everyday life of the ruling classes, now oral poetry is the property of almost exclusively the masses, and literature - of the ruling classes. Thus, later developments can sometimes change the emerging trends in the interaction of literature and folklore, and sometimes in the most significant way. However, the completed stages are not forgotten. What began in the folk art of the time of Columbus and Afanasy Nikitin echoed uniquely in the quests of M. Cervantes and G. Lorca, A. S. Pushkin and A. T. Tvardovsky.

The interaction of folk art with realistic literature reveals more fully than ever before the inexhaustibility of folklore as an eternal source of continuously developing art. The literature of socialist realism, like no other, relies not only on the experience of its immediate predecessors, but also on all the best that characterizes the literary process throughout its entire length, and on folklore in all its inexhaustible richness.

The law “On the Protection and Use of Cultural Historical Monuments”, adopted in 1976, also includes “recordings of folklore and music” among national treasures. However, recording is only an auxiliary means of recording folklore text. But even the most accurate recording cannot replace the living spring of folk poetry.

The development of society is based on the ability of each new generation to perceive the experience accumulated by the people who lived before them. This applies to all spheres of life. What is folklore? This is exactly the kind of creative experience passed on to descendants for preservation and further development.

Artistic traditions are strong in the visual arts, folk crafts, music, and dance. But the basis that largely determines the national character has always been oral folk art.

Folk wisdom

The term “folklore” (Old English folc lore - “folk wisdom”) was coined in the mid-nineteenth century by William John Toms, an English historian and archaeologist. Scientists from different countries have different understandings of what folklore is. Its definition as folk literature and word-related forms of folk art is accepted by our art critics. In the West, folklore includes traditions in various aspects of everyday and cultural life: in housing, clothing, cooking, etc.

The general essence of these definitions is artistic creative experience, transmitted and preserved by many generations. This experience is based on the realities of life and is closely related to the working conditions and everyday life of people. Both epic tales and short proverbs are a reflection of folk concepts about the surrounding nature, historical events, spiritual and material things. A close connection with work and everyday life is the main feature of folk art, its difference from classical types of artistic activity.

Literature and folklore - the art of words

There are differences in the understanding of what folklore is and what traditional literature is. One of the types of verbal creativity exists in the memory of the people and is transmitted mainly orally, and the means of storing and transmitting literary text is the book. In literature, the author of a work has a specific first and last name. And folk poetry is anonymous. A writer mainly works alone; a fairy tale or epic is the result of collective creativity. The narrator is in direct contact and interaction with the audience, the influence on the reader is indirect and individual.

The novelty of ideas and innovation in views on reality is what is valued in the book. Traditions born of previous generations are what folklore is in literature. For each word in a story, tale, novel, the writer found a unique and exact location. Each new narrator makes his own changes to a fairy tale or anecdote, and this looks like an element of creativity.

The connection between folk and traditional word creation is also obvious and significant. The most ancient monuments of literature were born from recorded oral traditions. Many forms of poetic and prose writings are borrowed from folklore. From the collective art of words come the fairy tales of Pushkin and Ershov, Tolstoy and Gorky, and the tales of Bazhov. What is folklore in literature today? Characters from folk art are present in Vysotsky’s songs. “The Tale of Fedot the Archer” by Filatov is folk in form and language. This is an example of the mutual influence of traditional literature and folklore. It was disassembled into quotes and “went to the people.”

Genre wealth

Like traditional literature, there are three types of folklore prose and poetry: epic (epics, tales, fairy tales, legends, traditions, etc.), lyrics (poems and songs of various types) and drama (nativity scenes, games, weddings and funeral rites etc.).

It is customary to divide folklore genres according to their affiliation with calendar and family rituals. The first includes poetic accompaniment of New Year, Christmas, Maslenitsa festivities, welcoming spring, harvest festivals, etc. These are carols, fortune telling, round dances, games, etc. The second includes wedding poems and songs, toasts and congratulations on important dates and events, funeral laments, etc.

A large group of folk poetry is associated with a functional environment. Songs, sentences, sayings, ditties help in work (crafts, workers, peasants), with them it is easier to endure hardships (soldiers, prison camps, emigrants). Narrative prose is associated with this group: fairy and everyday tales, short stories, narratives, fables, etc.

Children's folklore is composed by adults for children (lullabies, nursery rhymes, nurseries) and by children for games and communication (counting books, teasers, peace books, horror stories, etc.). What is folklore in small forms? Who doesn’t know proverbs, sayings, tongue twisters? Who hasn't heard or told jokes? They have always been the most active and relevant forms of folk art.

Word and music

The origins of folk art go back to the times of prehistoric rituals. Then music, songs, and dances formed a single action that had a mystical or utilitarian meaning. Together with elements of decorative and applied art: costumes, musical instruments, such rituals had a great influence on the development of art. And also on the formation of national identity.

Music performed on folk instruments takes great place in performing arts. But what is folklore in music if not the accompaniment of poetic works of various kinds? Russian guslars, French troubadours, oriental ashugs and akyns accompanied epics and tales, legends and stories by playing musical instruments.

Folk song is a phenomenon of world culture. In every language, in sorrow and in joy, songs are sung, composed in ancient times and understandable to our contemporaries. In processing classical composers, at grandiose rock concerts, folklore motifs are loved and relevant.

Soul of the people

In our global world, folk art is one of the most important ways to preserve national character, the soul of the nation. Russian folk art born from Slavic mythology, Byzantine Orthodoxy. It is a reflection of national traits that developed during turbulent historical cataclysms. Nature and climate also undoubtedly left their mark on the Russian mentality. The dependence of the common man in big and small things on the lordly or royal will accompanied him for many centuries. But this dependence did not kill his love for small homeland and awareness of the greatness of Russia.

Hence the main features of the Russian character. Taking them into account, you can understand what Russian folklore is. Patience in work and perseverance in war, faith in goodness and hope for the best, grief without boundaries and joy without restraint - all this is inherent in the Russian people and is reflected in folk poetry and music.

Until the spring runs dry

The art of the people is alive as long as the people are alive. It changes with him. They wrote epics about heroes, and now they make cartoons. But knowing what folklore is, how it influences national and world art, and preserving and developing traditions is important for any generation.

Folklore

Folklore

FOLKLORE - artistic creativity of the broad masses, mainly oral and poetic creativity. The term was first introduced into scientific use in 1846 by the English scientist William Toms.
Literally translated, Folk-lore means: folk wisdom, folk knowledge. This term at first denoted only the subject of science itself, but sometimes it also began to be used to refer to the scientific discipline that studies this material; however, the latter is more correctly called folkloristics.
In addition to the term “folklore” in scientific use different countries There are also other terms: German - Volkskunde, in a narrower sense of the word - Volksdichtung; French - Traditions populaires. In the 19th century In our country, the somewhat broadly interpreted term “folk literature” or “folk poetry” prevailed.
The artistic and historical significance of folklore was deeply revealed by A. M. Gorky, whose statements are of guiding importance in the development of the main problems of folkloristics. In his report at the First Congress of Soviet Writers, Gorky said:
“I again draw your attention, comrades, to the fact that the most profound and vibrant, artistically perfect types of heroes were created by folklore, the oral creativity of the working people. The perfection of such images as Hercules, Prometheus, Mikula Selyaninovich, Svyatogor, then Doctor Faust, Vasilisa the Wise, the ironic successor Ivan the Fool and, finally, Petrushka defeating the doctor, the priest, the policeman, the devil and even death - all these are images , in the creation of which rationality and intuition, thought and feeling were harmoniously combined. Such a combination is possible only with the direct participation of the creator in the work of creating reality, in the struggle for the renewal of life" (M. Gorky, Soviet literature, report at I All-Union Congress Soviet writers, M., 1935, p. 12).
F. is poetic creativity that grows on the basis of the labor activity of mankind, reflecting the experience of thousands of years. F., being older than written literature and passed on from mouth to mouth, from generation to generation, is the most valuable source for knowledge of the history of every nation, no matter what stage of social development it stands at. At the same congress of writers, A. M. Gorky addressed the writers of the Caucasus and Central Asia: “The beginning of the art of words is in folklore. Collect your folklore, learn from it, process it. He gives a lot of material to both you and us, the poets and prose writers of the Union. The better we know the past, the easier, the more deeply and joyfully we will understand the great significance of the present we are creating.” M. Gorky emphasizes in F. its labor and collective principles, its materialistic and realistic basis, and its artistic power. While highlighting the specific features inherent in oral folk poetry, M. Gorky at the same time does not contrast F. with written fiction as phenomena isolated from each other. In folk art he sees that deep and fertile soil on which essentially all the greatest works of literature rested.
Poetic poetry cannot be considered in isolation from other manifestations of spiritual culture. Oral folk poetry is closely connected with the areas of folk performing arts (facial expressions, gestures, dramatic action - when performed not only by the so-called " folk drama"and dramatized rituals - wedding, funeral, agricultural, round dances and games, but also when telling epics, fairy tales, when performing songs), choreographic art ( folk dances, dancing, round dances), musical and vocal art. Consequently, folklore studies includes some sections of such disciplines as theater studies, choreography, and musicology (a section of it called “musical ethnography” or “musical philosophy”). At the same time, poetry cannot be studied without the help of linguistics, without studying the dialect in which these oral poetic works are created. However, folkloristics is, first of all, a part of literary criticism, and f. is a part of verbal art. F., like written fiction, is verbal and figurative knowledge, a reflection of social reality. But the creation of f. by the masses, the conditions of f.’s existence, the nature of artistic creativity in the pre-capitalist era, when a significant part of the old f. that has come down to us was formed, determined known features F. compared to written fiction. The collective principle in f., the anonymity of most folklore monuments, the significant role of tradition in f. - all this leaves its mark on f. and determines certain features of its study.
Folkloristics as a science has existed for almost a hundred years. Its emergence was not as a random and amateur collection of oral poetic materials and their literary processing (such characteristic phenomena for Europe late XVIII century, and for Russia in the first decades of the 19th century), and as a scientific study of Ph. refers to the first decade of the last century. The origin of folkloristics is closely connected with that broad trend in the field of philosophy, science and art of the early 19th century, which was called romanticism. In the idealistic romantic philosophy of that time, the assertion was very popular that the history of a people is determined not by the will of individuals, but is a manifestation of its “spirit”, the expression of which is all areas of collective creativity, where the creator is the people themselves (language, mythology, .).
The special sciences also reflected these trends. The linguistics of that time reflected them especially clearly; It was at that time that comparative linguistics was born (see Linguistics).
In the publication of F.'s first romantic publications, specific political goals clearly shine through. To understand them, one only has to take into account that these first publications coincide in time with the Napoleonic wars. Such is the famous collection of German folk songs compiled by the poets Arnim and Brentano, “Des Knaben Wunderhorn” (3 Tle, Heidelberg, 1806-1808), “Die deutschen Volksbucher” by Görres (Heidelberg, 1807) and finally “Kinder und Hausmarchen” by the brothers Grimm ( 2 Bde, B., 1812-1814).
The leading role in the actual scientific development of philosophy in the era of romanticism was played by the brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm (especially Jacob). In his general theoretical reasoning and in his work on specific issues of the history of law, language, and folklore literature, Jacob Grimm was guided, by his own admission, by “patriotic goals.” When studying folklore, Grimm used the same comparative method as he used in his work on language. Jacob Grimm and all his followers explained similar phenomena in the poetry of European peoples by the inheritance of a common poetic wealth from a single “proto-Indo-European” ancestor. In an effort to reveal the most ancient features in fairy tales and legends, Grimm and his followers in works of oral poetry paid main attention to the remains religious ideas; interest in myths especially increases when Sanskritologists (A. Kuhn, M. Müller) are followers of Grimm, who tried to find the origins of European folklore in Vedic hymns and spells; hence the Grimm school itself received the name “mythological” school in the history of science. With the greatest completeness, Grimm’s views on the nature of oral poetry and the history of its development since ancient times are presented by him in the book “German Mythology” (1835). Grimm's views were further developed in the mid-19th century. in the works of his followers - German scientists Kuhn, Schwartz, Mannhardt, English scientist Max Muller, French scientist Pictet and Russian scientists F. I. Buslaev, A. N. Afanasyev and O. F. Miller.
In Russia, as in Germany, the “mythological” school was also the first stage in the development of scientific folklore. As in Germany, scientific research was preceded by a period of romantic collection of “folk poetry” and its use for artistic purposes (folklore themes in Zhukovsky, Pushkin, early Gogol, etc.). P. V. Kireevsky’s passion for collecting folk songs yielded enormous results. Kireevsky, like other representatives of Slavophilism, in his hobbies was guided by sentiments close to German nationalist romanticism. Kireyevsky and other Slavophiles were not so much scientists as primarily publicists. In Russia, the first truly scientific folklorists were F. I. Buslaev and A. N. Afanasyev. The volume and nature of Buslaev’s activities are very reminiscent of the activities of Jacob Grimm. He was both a linguist and a historian of national literature and folk literature. Buslaev, basically, applied methodological techniques and theoretical guidelines of the mythological school to Russian and generally Slavic material. Buslaev’s views on folk poetry were presented with all clarity in his books: “ Historical essays Russian folk literature and art" (2 vols., St. Petersburg, 1861) and "Folk poetry" (St. Petersburg, 1887). The most extreme and ardent supporter of the mythological school in Russia was A. N. Afanasyev. To a much greater extent than Buslaev, he was characterized by all those passions for linguistic and mythological convergences that led to the fantastic constructions of many European mythologists. Afanasyev combined his numerous articles on mythology in a systematized and processed form in the famous three-volume work “Poetic Views of the Slavs on Nature” (M., 1865-1869). Afanasyev also deserves credit for compiling the first scientific collection of Russian fairy tales, “Russian Folk Tales” (1st ed. in 8 issues, M., from 1855-1863). Major representative There was also Orest Fedorovich Miller of the mythological school in Russia. In his huge book “Comparative and critical observations on the layer composition of the Russian folk epic. Ilya Muromets and the Kiev heroism" (St. Petersburg, 1869) Orest Miller applied the principles of the mythological school to the interpretation of the Russian epic epic, but with such straightforwardness and lack of critical tact that not only its opponents, but even its supporters had to point out the author’s excessive hobbies. Many works of the Kharkov scientist A. A. Potebnya were also written in the spirit of mythological theory, who devoted a number of his works to revealing specific poetic images in folk songs.
With the change in socio-economic life in Europe by the 60s. In the 19th century, with the development of industry, intensified by the expansion of European capital, and with the deployment of the colonial policy of European states, issues of trade, financial, political and cultural relations with non-European countries began to gain increasing importance. New worlds opened up, and it became necessary to explain the newly discovered facts, in particular in F. For example. It turned out to be completely impossible to explain the similarity of plots in fairy tales of different peoples by their origin from a common ancestor. should have appeared new try explain this similarity. Such an attempt was made by the German scientist Benfey. In 1859, with a German translation, he published a collection of Hindu stories “Panchatantra” (VI century AD), providing the publication with a long preface, which was destined to become a turning point in the development of folklore. Benfey pointed out the striking similarity of Sanskrit fairy tales with European ones and with fairy tales of other, non-European peoples. The similarity of the plots, according to Benfey, is caused not by the kinship of peoples, but by cultural and historical connections between them, borrowing; hence the names of Benfey’s theory - “comparative theory”, “borrowing theory”, “migration theory”, “the theory of wandering plots”, “wandering plots”.
The main reservoir from which European peoples drew materials for poetic creativity, according to representatives of the Benfey school, was ancient india.
For several decades this theory enjoyed great success. A number of supporters of the mythological school also joined the Benfeist camp, for example. Max Müller, in Russia - Buslaev, who wrote a vivid essay in the spirit of a new direction: “Passing stories and stories” (collection “My Leisure”, part II, M., 1886). The famous art critic V.V. Stasov passionately, with great exaggeration, defended Benfey’s point of view in his article “The Origin of Russian Epics” (“Bulletin of Europe”, 1868, Nos. 1-4, 6 and 7, reprinted in Vol. III Collection .. works by Stasov, St. Petersburg, 1894).
The famous academician A. N. Veselovsky also worked in the spirit of the theory of borrowing for a long time. This is for example his work “From the history of literary communication between East and West. Slavic legends about Solomon and Kitovras and Western legends about Morolf and Merlin" (St. Petersburg, 1872). In the spirit of the same school of borrowing, academician V. F. Miller wrote his first major work on Russian poetry (“Excursions into the field of Russian folk epic,” M., 1892). A. I. Kirpichnikov (“Experience in the comparative study of Western and Russian epics.” Poems of the Lombard cycle, M., 1873), academician I. N. Zhdanov (“On the literary history of Russian epic poetry,” Kiev, worked in the direction of the same school. 1881, “Russian epic epic”, St. Petersburg, 1895, etc.), M. G. Khalansky (“South Slavic legends about Kralevich Mark in connection with the works of the Russian epic epic”, Warsaw, 1893-1895), A. M. Loboda (“Russian epics about matchmaking”, Kyiv, 1904) and many others. etc.
Persistently, but without due methodological caution, he defended the Eastern origin of the European heroic and fairy-tale epic famous traveler in Siberia G. N. Potanin (“Oriental motifs in medieval European epic”, M., 1899).
Despite the enormous influence of the theory of borrowing on folklore studies in all countries, its weaknesses were gradually revealed: superficial, insufficiently careful use of plot comparison techniques and a tendency to talk about borrowing only on the basis of general plot similarities in legends, fairy tales, and epics. At the same time, it was lost sight of that the essence of the matter is not only in the plot scheme, but in work of art, taken as a whole, with all the features of its ideology and artistic form.
Some researchers, for example the French scientist Joseph Bedier, author of the monumental study “Fablio” (Paris, 1893), expressed a general skepticism about the futility of research on the migration of subjects. However, not all folklorists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. shared this pessimism.
So eg. the famous Russian Orientalist academician S. F. Oldenburg strongly objected to Bedier’s categorical statements and argued that in some cases it was possible to quite accurately establish borrowings and the path of migration of subjects.
When F. researchers encountered numerous cases of striking coincidences in the creativity of peoples not only unrelated to each other, but also far removed from each other geographically and historically, it turned out to be completely impossible to explain these coincidences by borrowing. Ethnographic, linguistic, and folklore studies acquired exceptional importance in Great Britain and the United States due to the enormous colonial conquests carried out by these states. As a result of accumulated observations by the English scientist Taylor (author of the famous book “ Primitive culture") and his follower, the Scottish scientist Lang, put forward a new theory to explain the similarity of plots and motifs among a wide variety of peoples. This theory is called the “anthropological” theory. It was based on the position that all peoples generally go through the same paths of development and their poetic creativity is accomplished according to the same laws of psychology, therefore, it is completely natural to allow the independent emergence of poetic subjects among the most diverse peoples in the most remote geographical locations. Therefore, this theory is also called the “theory of spontaneous generation.” Great importance gave the anthropological school the so-called. “survivals” or “relics,” i.e., remnants in poetry of elements of earlier cultures.
Over the past decades, the principles of the anthropological school in England have been carried out in the works of the famous ethnologist and historian James Fraser (author of the fundamental work on primitive religion “The Golden Bough”, in English (1890, the same, 3rd ed., in 12 vols., 1911-1915 ); its abridged edition was translated into Russian, M., 1928, 4 issues). In his works, James Fraser attaches exceptionally great importance to magic, which, in his opinion, played an extremely large role in primitive ritual actions and in the songs and other types of magic associated with them. In the 20th century. On German soil, anthropological theory received some revision in the works of the famous psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (especially in his multi-volume “Psychology of Nations”), as well as in the German folklorists Leistner and von der Leyen.
Among the latter, this theory was modified into a “psychological” theory. Representatives of this school assigned great importance to the states of sleep and hallucinations in the process of creating poetic images and plots. One of the varieties of psychological school was the so-called. "Freudianism".
In Russia, the anthropological and psychological schools did not receive any noticeable development, except that many of the results of the anthropological school were used in the original teaching of Academician A. N. Veselovsky.
A. N. Veselovsky, who began his scientific activity in the spirit of the Benfey school of borrowing, and then mastered the provisions of the anthropological school, combining them with the principles of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, with Spencer’s theory, made an attempt to draw big picture development of poetic types. In his theoretical (unfinished) work: “Three chapters from historical poetics”, written by him in 1898-1899 (“ZhMNP”, 1899, Nos. 3-5, and separate ot., St. Petersburg, 1899, reprinted in Collected Works A. N. Veselovsky, series 1, vol. I, St. Petersburg, 1913), Veselovsky used the grandiose material of world poetry and made an attempt to establish the pattern of development of poetry in the first stages of human culture, when different types of art were not yet separated from each other and when art itself was closely merged with the production and practical activities of man and religious and magical moments. He traced how poetry in its development moves from syncretism to separate, independent types of art, and within poetry there is a gradual differentiation of genera (epic, lyric, drama) and their types, through their gradual release from the ritual-magical complex. In parallel with the disclosure of the process from syncretism to differentiated types of poetry, Veselovsky established the development of poetic creativity along the line “from singer to poet.” With all the wealth of specific observations made by Veselovsky, his theory as a whole cannot be considered correct, since the evolution of poetic forms was revealed by him immanently, although in some cases the material itself led him to pose problems about the connection between literature and social development.
Veselovsky's scientific theory is one of the most valuable elements of the legacy that remains from the bourgeois science of F. Unfortunately, Veselovsky's works have still been little studied by Marxist literary criticism.
Another major phenomenon of bourgeois folkloristics should be considered the so-called. “historical school” led by academician V. F. Miller. This school has occupied a dominant position in Russian folklore scholarship since the mid-90s. right up to the Great October Socialist Revolution and even in the first years after it. The historical school did not strive, like the mythological one, to look for the origins of folklore phenomena in the ancestral home or in the ancestral language. The basis of historical theory was the establishment of specific connections between folklore and the history of the Russian people. The starting point of any folklore work, according to representatives of this school, is some historical fact. According to V. Miller’s formulation, counter processes are observed in poetry: the poeticization of a historical fact and the historicization of a poetic plot. The first attempts at historical explanation of Russian F. were made long before Miller’s main works, for example. L. N. Maikov (“On the epics of the Vladimir cycle,” St. Petersburg, 1863), N. P. Dashkevich (“On the question of the origin of Russian epics. Epics about Alyosha Popovich and how the heroes died out in Holy Rus',” Kyiv, 1883) and M. G. Khalansky (“Great Russian epics of the Kyiv cycle”, Warsaw, 1885). V. Miller, as already indicated, worked for many years in the direction of the borrowing school, but since the mid-90s. began to publish articles based on the principles of the “historical school.” These articles were combined by him into three large volumes of “Essays on Russian Folk Literature” (vol. I, Moscow, 1897, volume II, Moscow, 1910, volume III (posthumous), Moscow - Leningrad, 1924). In his “Essays” devoted to the study of the history of individual epics, he went from the present to the depths of history, trying, with such a retrospective examination, to successively “remove” individual rows of “layers” or “layers” of the epic and hypothetically restore its original appearance.
Evidence, as well as some of its comparisons with the facts of historical and literary order, were strained and not always convincing. The same should be said about the method in the works of his students and followers: A. V. Markov (“From the history of the Russian epic epic,” issue I, Moscow, 1905, and issue II, Moscow, 1907), S. K. Shambinago (“Songs of the time of Tsar Ivan the Terrible”, Sergiev Posad, 1914, etc.), B. M. Sokolova (“Historical element in the epics about Danil Lovchanin”, “Russian Philological Bulletin”, 1910, “Brother-in-law of the Terrible fighter Mamstruk Temgrukovich" ("ZhMNP", 1913, No. 7), etc.).
The speech of the “historical school” had a certain positive side, since it was directed against the one-sided enthusiasm for the theory of borrowings and set as its task to connect F. with the history of the people.
But the historical constructions of Miller and his students were based on an erroneous, unscientific understanding historical process; Subsequently, the school’s mistakes were aggravated by attempts at a vulgar sociological interpretation of F.’s history.
V. A. Keltuyala used the results of the work of Miller and the historical school for his “Course on the History of Russian Literature” (Part I, Book 1, St. Petersburg, 1906; Part I, Book 2, St. Petersburg, 1911).
In this course (especially in its second edition), Keltuyala, relying partly on individual statements of Miller, put forward in categorical form the deeply incorrect position that the Russian epic epic, as well as all other types of Russian fiction, were not created by the people (i.e. . by the working masses), and by the dominant classes in the era of feudalism. With these statements of his, Keltuyala, as he thought, took a materialistic point of view and challenged the romantic-Slavophile and populist tendencies in folklore studies.
V. Miller in his later works, in turn already under the influence of Keltuyala, also put forward the problem of the social genesis of the Russian epic, a problem that had not previously attracted much attention from him. He also began to prove in detail the idea of ​​​​the military-retinue aristocratic and merchant environment, which created in its own interests that epic, which supposedly only later became the property of the “people”.
This view of Miller became generally accepted in Russian pre-October science, ch. arr. in relation to the Russian epic epic. The anti-nationality and incorrectness of this interpretation of F. has been proven recently by our Soviet criticism and folkloristics.
At present, as before, F. is used by the bourgeoisie of all countries for its class purposes. In Western Europe and America, a number of ramified scientific trends are known, which, however, for the most part are epigones of the above-mentioned folklore schools. The most widespread is one of the variants of the theory of borrowing, the so-called. “Finnish school” led by Helsingfors professor K. Krohn, who died in 1933. In 1907, together with the Swedish scientist Sidov and the Danish scientist Axel Olrik, he organized the international federation of folklorists “Folklore Fellows”, which began publishing the research series “Folklore Fellows Communications”, or “FFC” for short. One of the main tasks set for itself by the federation was to study fairy-tale, legendary and heroic stories, to determine the starting points of their origin and the geographical routes of their distribution. Typical examples of monographic works done in the spirit of the Finnish school can be considered the works of the former Kazan professor, now a professor in Tartau, Walter Anderson (“The Emperor and the Abbot. The Story of an Anecdote” - in Russian, vol. I, Kazan, 1916, in German language, Helsingfors, 1923). Of the Russian folklorists, Anderson's student N.P. Andreev worked in the same direction of the Finnish school. The main provisions of the Finnish school were set out in the book by Karl Krohn “Die folkloristische Arbeitsmethode” (Oslo, 1926).
If the theoretical and methodological principles of the Finnish school cannot but cause strong objections from the point of view of Marxist folkloristics as an installation of epigonizing Benfeism, brought to a formalistic exaggeration, then the purely technical side of the work of Scandinavian folklorists should be assessed quite highly.
One of the largest students of K. Krohn, Anti Aarne, compiled in 1911 “Verzeichnis der Marchentypen” (Index of fairy tale plots, 1911), which has now become an international guide to the systematization of plot schemes. It was translated into Russian and revised accordingly, bringing all the main collections of Russian fairy tales under this index, N.P. Andreev (N.P. Andreev, “Index of fairy tale plots according to the Aarne system”, Leningrad, 1929). Following the example of Aarne, the American scientist Thomson compiled a multi-volume index of fairy tale motifs from different peoples of the world (Stith Thompson, Motif Index of Folk-Literature, vol. I-VI, 1932-1936). Currently, the representatives of the Finnish school themselves have admitted that their theory and methodology have reached a dead end. Sidov's proposed transition from comparative analysis international subjects to the analysis of subjects of F. of only one nationality does not pave new paths, but leads only to national self-restraint, in which one cannot help but see some reflection of the nationalist tendencies of the bourgeoisie of a number of European countries.
Bourgeois reaction is also making attempts to use F. for its own purposes. The weapon of grossly tendentious, anti-national distortion of F. for these purposes is the point of view of Hans Naumann, who considers F. to be an exclusively “relict” phenomenon; Nauman denies the creative process among the masses. Nauman's position is entirely imbued with the spirit of caste.
As for Soviet folkloristics, over the 20 years of the existence of Soviet power, it has traveled a long and complex path of development. In the early years, however, the theories of pre-revolutionary bourgeois folkloristics still dominated university teaching and scientific organizations, ch. arr. historical school and migration theory. Being a part of literary studies, folkloristics naturally reflected those trends that existed in the theory and history of literature. This is how “formalism” found its reflection in folkloristics. Here we must take into account not only sporadic statements on folklore by V. Shklovsky and O. Brik, but also more systematic works on folklore by V. Zhirmunsky (in his books “Rhyme, its history and theory” (Pb., 1923) and “Introduction into metrics”, Leningrad, 1925) and especially two books on the formal analysis of fairy tales: R. M. Volkov, “The Fairy Tale” (Odessa, 1924) and V. Propp, “The Morphology of the Fairy Tale” (L., 1928).
Big scientific significance had application to folklore of the methodological principles of the theory of N. Ya. Marr. The “paleontological analysis” of linguistic phenomena in terms of understanding the stages in their development, developed by the Japhetidological new doctrine of language, was applied by Marr himself to the phenomena of philosophy, especially to mythology (the study of “Ishtar”, etc.). A group of students of N. Ya. Marr, who formed the “sector of the semantics of myth and folklore” at the Institute of Language and Thought of the Academy of Sciences, published a collective work (“Tristan and Isolde”, Leningrad, 1932) in the spirit of Marr’s doctrine of language. The works of Academician N. Ya. Marr pose in a new way the problem of the coincidence of plots and images in the folklore of various peoples (for example, the legend of Prometheus with the legend of Amran among the peoples of the North Caucasus, the legend of the founding of Kiev with a similar Armenian legend, etc.), explaining this coincidence not by inheritance from an unprecedented “proto-people” and not by borrowing, but by the unity of the process of development of language and thinking experienced by all peoples, the identity of the stage they are experiencing. It should also be noted that the Japhetidological school pays special attention to the physiology of the peoples of the USSR.
For a long time, largely under the influence of the vulgar sociological school of M. N. Pokrovsky, vulgar sociological trends in literary criticism (Frice and others), folklorists studied ch. arr. “sociological determination” of folklore phenomena. Instead of genuine Marxist analysis, they were usually engaged in detailing the vulgar sociological positions of Keltuyala and Miller, unable to adequately overcome the traditions of bourgeois methodology. The author of this article is also guilty of this.
At the end of 1936, on the initiative of Pravda, in connection with the resolution of the Committee for Arts on the production of Demyan Bedny’s play “Bogatyrs”, the concept of the aristocratic origin of the national epic (shared by the author of these lines) was sharply criticized, and its vulgar sociological nature was revealed the basis. At the same time, the articles in Pravda pointed out the possibility of bringing this vulgar sociological concept closer to the theoretical construction of bourgeois “scientists” like Hans Naumann. This fair criticism of reactionary folkloristic concepts played a decisive role in Soviet folkloristics. The main problem of many Soviet folklorists was the insufficient use of the statements of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin about folklore and the principles of the methodology of Marxism-Leninism in general.
Marx and Engels were very interested in F. Their correspondence indicates that they mostly read and re-read in the original works the works of German, Danish, Norwegian, Scottish, Spanish, Serbian and Russian F. Marx and Engels’ high assessment of F. ancient Greece, the West and The East says its repeated use in scientific and polemical works. The founders of Marxism more than once noted the great importance of folklore as artistic creativity (see, for example, Engels’ letter to Marx about Old Danish ballads dated June 20, 1860). The immediate love of Marx and Engels for works of oral literature is evidenced by the memoirs of Lafargue, W. Liebknecht and others. The statements of Marx and Engels about folklore are extremely diverse thematically.
Of great importance for understanding the phenomena of philosophy and its development was Marx’s famous statement (in the introduction to the “Critique of Political Economy”) about the Greek epic, its mythological basis, its connection with a certain stage of social development and the reasons for the artistic pleasure it provides to present time.
IN literary heritage Marx and Engels made many statements on specific historical and historical-literary issues related to folklore. They were interested in elucidating the sources of certain folklore works, and the problem of the historical and geographical localization of the main images of folklore, the use of folklore by writers, and the meaning of folklore as a historical and historical and everyday document. They always pointed out the enormous political role of folklore, the need to use it as a tool of agitation and propaganda, welcoming each time the publication of one or another text if this text was of interest in terms of the fight against the existing system. More than once they spoke about the revolutionary F., about its political function in the past and present, about class reworkings and distortions of it over the centuries and decades.
The historical significance of f., in particular folk songs, was repeatedly and persistently emphasized by Paul Lafargue. Lafargue even dedicated an entire treatise to F., the article “Wedding Songs and Customs” (in Russian in the collection of Lafargue’s articles: “Essays on the History of Culture”, M. - L., 1926).
G. V. Plekhanov came close to F.’s questions in his “Letters without an address” (“Scientific Review”, 1899, No. 11, and 1900, Nos. 3 and 6; reprinted in Plekhanov’s “Works”, vol. XIV, M. (1925)). One of the main problems that interested him was the problem of the origin of art. Among other Marxists, Vorovsky, Lunacharsky, and others have individual statements on F.
As for V.I. Lenin’s attitude towards folklore, there were no direct statements of his in the press, but the memoirs of N.K. Krupskaya and V.D. Bonch-Bruevich have been preserved, which speak of Lenin’s great interest and attention to folklore. Bonch-Bruevich recalls: “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, while studying Dahl’s dictionary, loved to visit folk holidays, was interested in proverbs, loved revolutionary songs and quickly memorized them. Vladimir Ilyich carefully read the Smolensk ethnographic collection, noting the great value of the materials contained in it. When one day the conversation turned to oral poetry, Vladimir Ilyich asked to let him look through some collections of epics, songs and fairy tales. His request was fulfilled. What interesting material,” he said. - I briefly looked through these books, but I see that, obviously, there is not enough hands or desire to generalize all this, to look at it all from a socio-political angle, because on this material it would be possible to write an excellent study about the aspirations and expectations of the people. Look at Onchukov’s fairy tales, which I looked through - because there are wonderful places here. This is what we need to point out to our literary historians. This is genuine folk art, also necessary and important for the study of folk psychology in our days.”
JV Stalin’s statements about a culture “socialist in content and national in form” are of great guiding importance for Soviet folkloristics. In the light of this teaching, F. cannot but occupy a prominent place in public life. “And if it is a matter of introducing various nationalities to proletarian culture,” says Stalin, “then one can hardly doubt that this integration will take place in forms corresponding to the language and way of life of these nationalities” (Stalin I., “Questions of Leninism” , Sotsekgiz, Moscow - Leningrad, 1931, p. 178). This familiarization proceeds along with other forms, as attested by collectors and researchers of modern Soviet folklore, among all nationalities of the Soviet Union through national songs and tales, through proverbs and sayings, through various other types of national f., growing on the basis of the language and life of these nationalities.
Widespread, especially behind last years, amateur artistic activity of the workers and collective farm masses, in which traditional artistic skills in oral poetry, music, dance, fine arts, opens up for researchers of folklore an immense field of observations that lead to conclusions that leave no stone unturned from the slanderous statements of reactionaries about the creative sterility of workers.
The conditions of social life in the USSR presented folklorist researchers with a whole series of historical and theoretical problems that were not noticed or were deliberately obscured by bourgeois folkloristics.
“We have material both in natural resources and in reserves human strength, and in the wonderful scope that the great revolution gave to folk art - in order to create a truly powerful and abundant Rus'" (Lenin V.I., Works, 3rd ed., vol. XXII, M. - L., 1931, p. 376). “Such a revolution can be successfully carried out only with the independent historical creativity of the majority of the population, especially the majority of the working people” (Lenin V.I., Soch., 3rd ed., vol. XXII, Moscow - Leningrad, 1931, p. 440) . These words of Comrade Lenin also apply to the field of art. The role of F. as the voice of modernity, as a reflection and instrument of the class struggle, as a means of agitation and propaganda, as a method of mass artistic education in the spirit of true internationalism and deep love to the socialist homeland, as a cultural heritage, was clarified in numerous scientific, popularization and pedagogical works of Soviet folklorists. The close connection with practical issues of the political and economic life of the country very clearly distinguishes Soviet folkloristics from the narrow, armchair, often petty work of many folklorists in the bourgeois West.
Disclosure, in connection with the rise of the national culture of many peoples of the USSR, oppressed colonial policy Tsarist Russia, enormous oral and poetic riches, primarily the heroic epic, provides abundant and fresh material for theoretical constructions in the field of folklore.
Guided by the Marxist-Leninist teaching of dialectical materialism, using the achievements of paleontological analysis of the new doctrine of language, Soviet folklorists make, albeit still timid, attempts to reconstruct general history F. and F. of individual nationalities. These attempts still encounter many obstacles, primarily in the insufficient development of specific issues and monuments of folklore, the absence of an exhaustive bibliography of F., insufficient coordination of the work of folklorists throughout the Union, and the still comparatively small number of specialized scientific personnel.
A huge role in raising public interest in folklore was played by the famous speech of A. M. Gorky at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. A. M. Gorky showed the greatest importance of folklore for understanding the history of peoples, the history of their literatures and for the development of Soviet literature.
The main centers of scientific collecting and research work on F. were Moscow and Leningrad. In Moscow, folklore work from 1923 to 1930 was concentrated in the Folklore Section of the State. acad. thin Sciences, transformed in 1930 into the State. acad. art history, as well as from 1926 to 1930 in the Folklore subsection of the Institute of Literature and Language RANION. The main workers of these organizations made many expeditions to collect different types of folklore, both in villages and in factories (in particular, the widespread study of proletarian folklorism is the merit of Soviet folklorists, since bourgeois folkloristics almost completely ignored this topic ).
In recent years, Moscow folklorists have united in the work of the Folklore Section of the SSP. From the beginning of 1938, a special department of Russian folklore was organized at MIFLI. In Leningrad, since 1930, the unifying folklore center has been the Folklore Section of the Academy of Sciences. In previous years folklore work was conducted in the section of peasant art of the Eastern Institute of Art History and in the Fairytale Commission of the Geographical Society. Among the regional folklore centers, Saratov, Irkutsk, Voronezh, and Smolensk should be noted. In national regions and republics, work on folklore was widely developed in local scientific institutions: in the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, in the Belarusian Academy of Sciences, in Baku, in Tbilisi, Yerevan, in Tashkent, Ashgabat, etc. However, in a number of national republics and regions, folklore has been used more than once by local nationalist elements for their own purposes hostile to the socialist system. Despite individual manifestations of local nationalism and sometimes great-power chauvinism in folklore, the flourishing of genuine Soviet folklore speaks for itself. One of the brightest and clearest proofs of this is the volume “Creativity of the Peoples of the USSR” (XX years of the Great October Socialist Revolution in the USSR 1917-1937) (M., 1937, Pravda publishing house). This book, compiled from the best examples of folklore of various peoples, is evidence of the high cultural, political and artistic growth of the working people of the Soviet Union and an indicator of the enormous role that oral poetic creativity - folklore - plays in the life of the working masses.
The height to which folk poetry has risen in the USSR is shown by the creative activity of such folk poets as the Lezgin ashug-order bearer Suleiman Stalsky and the Kazakh akyn-order bearer Dzhambul, whose names and songs are known throughout the Union and are surrounded by an aura of great glory. Bibliography:
Buslaev F.I., Historical essays on Russian folk literature and art, vol. I-II, St. Petersburg, 1861; His, Folk Poetry. Historical essays, St. Petersburg, 1887; Veselovsky A. N., Collected Works, Series 1, vol. I and vol. II, no. I, Petersburg, 1913; Miller V.F., Essays on Russian folk literature, 3 vols., M., 1897, 1910, 1924; Pypin A.N., History of Russian ethnography, vol. I-IV, St. Petersburg, 1890-1892; Speransky M.N., Russian oral literature, M., 1917; Loboda A. M., Russian heroic epic, Kyiv, 1896; Savchenko S.V., Russian folk tale (History of collecting and studying), Kyiv, 1914; Kagarov E. G., What is folklore. " Artistic folklore", M., 1929, book. 4-5; Sokolov Yu. M., Immediate tasks of studying Russian folklore, ibid., 1926, book. 1; Him, Folklore and Literary Studies, in the book: In memory of P. N. Sakulin. Collection of articles, M., 1931; His, The Nature of Folklore and the Problems of Folklore Studies, “ Literary critic", 1934, No. 12; Zhirmunsky V.M., The problem of folklore, in collection. "WITH. F. Oldenburg. To the fiftieth anniversary of scientific and social activity (1882-1932),” ed. Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Leningrad, 1934; Azadovsky M.K., Preface to the collection. "Soviet folklore", vol. 1, ed. Academician Sciences of the USSR, Leningrad, 1934; Gorky M., Soviet literature (Report at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers), M., 1934; Him, On Literature, 3rd ed.; M., 1937; Piksanov N.K., Gorky and folklore, Leningrad, 1935; Against the falsification of the people's past (About the play “Bogatyrs” by Demyan Bedny), ed. “Art”, Moscow - Leningrad, 1937; Sokolov Yu. M., Russian epic epic (Problem of social genesis), “Literary critic”, 1937, No. 9; Van Gennepp ​​A., Le folklore, P., 1924; Kaindl R. F., Die Volkskunde, ihre Bedeutung, ihre Ziele und ihre Methode, Wien, 1903; Corso R., Volklore. Storia. Obbietto. Metodo. Bibliografia, Roma, 1923.

Literary encyclopedia. - At 11 t.; M.: Publishing House of the Communist Academy, Soviet Encyclopedia, Fiction. Edited by V. M. Fritsche, A. V. Lunacharsky. 1929-1939 .

Folklore

(English folk-lore - folk wisdom), a term introduced in 1846 by the English scientist W. J. Toms to denote folk culture. In modern folklore, this word is understood in two ways - more broadly and more narrowly. In a narrow sense, folklore refers to oral verbal and musical folk art; in a broader sense, it refers to the entire set of cultural phenomena generated by the creativity of a group or individuals within the framework of collective consciousness. In the latter understanding, folklore includes not only verbal genres, but also language, beliefs, rituals, and crafts. The most important feature of folklore, in contrast to literature and modern book culture in general, is its traditionalism and orientation towards the oral method of transmitting information and, as a consequence, variability, the absence of a stable form, the only correct option. Folklore is a phenomenon of collective consciousness, its existence is impossible outside of society; the performer needs a listener who simultaneously acts as a co-creator, helping the performer, and as a “censor”. Folklore is not focused on creating something new, like modern book culture, but on the repeated reproduction of what already exists, therefore cultural facts external to folklore (author's poems that become folk songs) rarely penetrate into folklore.
Folklore is characterized by formulaicity - the use of a large number of stable phrases, clichés, “commonplaces” that are repeated both within one and in different genres. At the core folklore creativity lies improvisation within the framework of tradition. The performer of a folklore text does not keep it in memory and does not pronounce it by heart, but each time at the moment of performance he creates it anew, constructing it, like a mosaic, from individual fragments. Therefore, it is almost impossible to record the same text word for word from one performer several times, even with a short time interval.
Folklore is based on man's most ancient ideas about the world around him and even in modern society contains traces of archaic beliefs, rituals, and mythological stories. Most of them are not perceived by the bearers of folklore as such, but are only reconstructed, however, already from the end of the 18th century. folklore attracted the attention of researchers as “living antiquity.” The role of folklore in the life of its bearers is much broader than the role of literature, music and other types of art in the life of a modern urban person. Folklore is a universal system that provides all the cultural and everyday needs of a person. Only a small number of folklore genres are of an entertaining nature, while the rest are correlated with history, medicine, agronomy, meteorology and many other areas modern knowledge. In modern life, some folklore phenomena have been repressed and disappeared, but others continue to exist and develop to this day.
Along with the folklore of the people as a whole, there is the folklore of individual closed groups, united by common interests, age, professional, gender and other characteristics: school, army, tourist, etc. Such folklore provides cultural needs and performs a unifying and isolating function. Knowledge of texts related to the folklore of a particular group also serves as a way of identification, separating one’s own from someone else’s. Encyclopedia of Cultural Studies

(English folklore - folk wisdom) is a designation for the artistic activity of the masses, or oral folk art, which arose in the pre-literate period. This term was first introduced into scientific use by the English archaeologist W. J. Toms in 1846 and was broadly understood as the totality of the spiritual and material culture of the people, their customs, beliefs, rituals, and various forms of art. Over time, the content of the term narrowed. There are several points of view that interpret folklore as folk artistic culture, as oral poetry and as a set of verbal, musical, game types of folk art. With all the diversity of regional and local forms, folklore has common features, such as anonymity, collective creativity, traditionalism, close connection with labor activity, everyday life, the transmission of works from generation to generation by means of natural memory. Collective life determined the emergence of similar genres, plots, and such means among different peoples. artistic expression, like hyperbole, parallelism, various types of repetitions, constant and complex epithet, comparisons. The role of folklore was especially strong during the period of predominance of mythopoetic consciousness. With the advent of writing, many types of folklore developed in parallel with fiction, interacting with it, influencing it and other forms of artistic creativity and experiencing the opposite effect.

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FOLKLORE

English folklore - folk knowledge, folk wisdom), folk poetry, folk poetry, oral folk art - a set of different types and forms of mass oral arts. creativity of one or several. peoples The term "F." introduced in 1846 archaeologist W. J. Toms, as a scientist. the term is officially adopted by English. folklore society "Folklore Society", main. in 1878. Originally "F." meant both the subject of research and the corresponding science. In modern historiography is a science that studies the theory and history of f. and its interaction with other types of art, called. folkloristics. The definition of F. cannot be unambiguous for all historians. stages, because its social and aesthetic. functions, content and poetics are directly dependent on the presence or absence in the cultural system of a given people of its other forms and types (handwritten or printed books, professional theater and pop music, etc.) and various methods of dissemination of literary arts. works (cinema, radio, television, sound recordings, etc.). F. arose in the process of formation human speech and in ancient times it covered all forms of spiritual culture. It is characterized by comprehensive syncretism - functional and ideological. (F. contained the rudiments of artistic creativity, historical knowledge, science, religion, etc.), social (F. served all layers of society), genre (epic, fairy tale, legend, myth, song, etc. not yet differentiated), formal (the word appeared in inextricable unity with the so-called extra-textual elements - intonation, melody, gesture, facial expressions, dance, sometimes figurative art). Subsequently, in the process of social differentiation of society and the development of culture, various types and forms of f. arose, expressing the interests of the department. social strata and classes, folklore genres were formed that had various social and everyday purposes (production, social-organizing, ritual, gaming, aesthetic, cognitive). They were characterized by varying degrees of aesthetic development. beginning, various combinations of text and extra-textual elements, aesthetic. and other functions. In general, F. continued to remain multifunctional and syncretic. The use of writing to record text distinguished literature from the oral forms of literary arts that preceded it. creativity. From the moment of their inception, writing and literature turned out to be the property of the highest social strata. At the same time, literature at first, as a rule, was not yet a phenomenon. artistic (for example, chronicles and annals, diplomatic and journalistic works, ritual texts, etc.). In this regard, the actual aesthetic. The needs of society as a whole were satisfied for a long time mainly by oral tradition. The development of literature and growing social differentiation led to the fact that already in the late feudal period. F.'s period became predominant. (and among many nations exclusively) the property of the working people. the masses, because literary forms of creativity remained inaccessible to them. Social differences in the environment that created literary and folklore works led to the emergence of a definition. range of ideas and various arts. tastes. This was accompanied by the development of specific systems of literary (story, novel, poem, poem, etc.) and folklore (epic, fairy tale, song, etc.) genres and their poetics. The transition from oral forms of creation and transmission of art. works that are characterized by the use of natural elements. means of communication (voice - hearing, movement - vision), to fixing and stabilizing the text and reading it meant not only a more advanced way of accumulating and preserving cultural achievements. He was accompanied and determined. losses: a spatial and temporal gap in the moment of creation (reproduction) of art. the work and its perception, the loss of the immediate. contact between its creator (writer) and the perceiver (reader), loss of extra-textual elements, contact empathy and the possibility of making textual and other changes depending on the reaction of the perceivers. The significance of these losses is confirmed by the fact that even in conditions of universal literacy, not only traditional folklore, but also other oral and at the same time synthetic ones continue to exist and re-emerge. forms, and some of them are of a contact nature (theater, stage, readers, performances of writers in front of an audience, performance of poetry with a guitar, etc.). Characteristic features of f. in the conditions of its coexistence with literature and in opposition to it: orality, collectivity, nationality, variability, combination of words and arts. elements of other arts. Each work arose on the basis of poetics developed by the team, was intended for a certain circle of listeners and acquired its origins. life, if it was accepted by the team. Changes made by the department. performers could be very different - from stylistic. variations until a significant reworking of the plan and, as a rule, did not go beyond the boundaries of the ideology and aesthetics of the definition. environment. Collectiveness creative. process in F. did not mean its impersonality. Talented masters not only created new songs, fairy tales, etc., but also influenced the process of dissemination, improvement or adaptation of traditions. texts to the historically changed needs of the collective. Dialectical the unity of the collective and the individual was contradictory in poetry, as in literature, but in general tradition in poetry was more important than in literature. In social conditions. division of labor on the basis of oral tradition, in parallel with mass and unprofessional performance, which is characteristic of the arts of all nations, unique professions arose associated with the creation and performance of poetic, musical and other works (Ancient Greek rhapsodes and aedas; Roman mimes and histsiones; Russian buffoons; French jugglers; German shpilmans; later Russian guslars; Ukrainian kobzars; Kazakh and Kyrgyz akyns and zhirshi; French chansonniers, etc.). In the early feud. period, performers who served the dominant social strata emerged. A transitional type of singer-poet arose, closely associated first with chivalry (French troubadours or German minnesingers), later with burghers (German troubadours). Meistersingers) or the clerical-student environment (French or German Vagants; Polish, Ukrainian and Belarusian Vertepniks). In some countries and regions, in conditions of slow development, patriarchal-feudalism. way of life, transitional forms of a unique oral literature were formed. Poetic works were created specifically. persons, disseminated orally, there was a desire to stabilize their texts. At the same time, the tradition has preserved the names of the creators (Toktogul in Kyrgyzstan, Kemin and Mollanepes in Turkmenistan, Sayat-Nova in Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, etc.). In Russian F. there was no developed professionalization of singers. We can only talk about the department. names mentioned in the writing of Ancient Rus' (singer Mitus; possibly Boyan). Each genre or group of folk genres fulfilled a specific purpose. social and household functions. This led to the formation of the department. genres of F. with their characteristic themes, images, poetics, and style. IN ancient period Most peoples had tribal traditions, work and ritual songs, mythological. stories, early forms of fairy tales, spells, incantations. Later, at the turn of the transition from pre-class society to class society, modern societies arose. types of fairy tales (magical, everyday, about animals) and archaic. epic forms. During the formation of the state, heroic epic, then epic. ballad and historical songs content, history legends. Later other classical genres. F. formed non-ritual lyrical. song and romance, later types of folklore. drama and even later - the genres of worker F. - revolutionary. songs, marches, satire. songs, oral stories. The process of emergence, development of department. genres of f., especially the duration of their productive period, the relationship of f. with literature and other types of professional arts. creativity are determined by the characteristics of history. the development of each people and the nature of its contacts with other peoples. Thus, tribal traditions were forgotten among some peoples (for example, among the Eastern Slavs) and formed the basis of history. legends from others (for example, Icelandic sagas from Icelanders). Ritual songs, as a rule, were timed to coincide with different periods agricultural, pastoral, hunting or fishing calendars entered into various relationships with the rites of the Christian, Muslim, Buddhist and other religions. The degree of connection between the epic and mythological ideas are determined by specific socio-economic. conditions. An example of this kind of connection is the Nart tales of the peoples of the Caucasus, Karelo-Fin. runes, ancient Greek epic Germanic languages ​​left oral existence relatively early. and Western Roman epic. The epic of the Turkic peoples existed for a long time and acquired later forms. and east Slavs There are different genre versions of African, Australian, Asian and European fairy tales. peoples The ballad among some peoples (for example, the Scots) acquired clear genre differences, while for others (for example, the Russians) it is close to lyrical. or ist. song. The poetry of each people is characterized by a unique combination of genres and a specific role of each of them in the general system of oral creativity, which has always been multi-layered and heterogeneous. Despite the bright national The coloring of folklore texts, many motifs, plots, and even images of characters in the folklore of different peoples are strikingly similar. Such similarities could arise as a result of the development of f. from a common source (common archaic features of f. the Slavs or Finno-Ugric peoples, which go back to the common Proto-Slavic or Proto-Finnish heritage), or as a result of the cultural interaction of peoples (for example, the exchange of fairy tale plots Russians and Karelians), or the independent emergence of similar phenomena (for example, common plots of fairy tales American Indians and peoples of the Center. Europe) under the influence of general patterns of development of the social system, material and spiritual culture. In the late feudal period. time and during the period of capitalism in the people. lit. began to penetrate the environment more actively than before. works; some forms of lit. creativity acquired mass distribution (romances and songs of literary origin, so-called folk books, Russian “lubok”, German “Bilderbogen”, etc.). This influenced the plot, style, and content of folklore works. People's creativity storytellers acquired certain features of lit. creativity (individualization, psychologism, etc.). In socialist In society, the availability of education has provided an equal opportunity for the development of talents and professionalization of people, and a variety of modern technologies have become widespread. forms of mass literary arts. culture - amateur lit. creativity (including partly in traditional folklore forms), amateur club performances, folk song creativity. choirs, etc. Some of these forms are creative, others are performing in nature. Design of folkloristics in independent work. science dates back to the 30-40s. 19th century The formation of folkloristics and the beginning of scientific research. collecting and publishing F. was associated with three main. factors: lit. romanticism, which was one of the forms of expression of the self-awareness of the emerging bourgeoisie. nations (for example, in Germany, France, Italy), national liberation. movement (for example, among the southern and western Slavs) and the spread of social liberation. and educational ideas (for example, in Russia - A. I. Herzen, N. G. Chernyshevsky, N. A. Dobrolyubov; in Poland - A. Mitskevich, etc.). Romantics (German scientists I. G. Herder, L. Arnim and C. Brentano, brothers W. and J. Grimm, etc.; English - T. Percy and J. Macpherson, etc.; Serbian - V. Karadzic and others; Finnish - E. Lenrot and others; Russian Decembrists) saw in F. an expression of nationalism. spirit and national traditions and used folklore works to reconstruct history. facts not reflected in written sources. Emerging within the framework of romanticism, the so-called. mythological school (German scientists A. Kuhn, W. Schwarz, W. Manhardt and others; English - M. Muller, J. W. Cox and others; French - A. Pictet and others; Italian - A de Gubernatis and others; Russian - F. I. Buslaev, A. N. Afanasyev, etc.), based on the achievements of Indo-European. linguistics, believed F. European. peoples the heritage of the most ancient Proto-Indo-European. myth-making. Romantics in glory. countries saw F. as a general glory. inheritance, preserved to varying degrees by different branches of the Slavs, just like the Germans. Romantics saw modernism in F. German-speaking peoples share the common heritage of the ancient Germans. In the 2nd half. 19th century based on philosophy. Positivism developed evolutionary schools in folklore studies, which is associated with a growing awareness of the unity of the laws of development of folklore and the recurrence of folklore plots and motifs in different ethnic groups. environments So representatives of the so-called. anthropologist schools (E. Tylor, E. Lang and J. Fraser - in England; N. Sumtsov, A. I. Kirpichnikov, A. N. Veselovsky - in Russia, etc.) explained the global recurrence of folklore phenomena by the unity of people. psychology. At the same time, the so-called comparativism (comparative historical method), which explained similar phenomena more or less mechanically. borrowing or “migration of plots” (German - T. Benfey, French - G. Paris, Czech - J. Polivka, Russian - V.V. Stasov, A.N. Pypin, A.N. Veselovsky, etc. .), and the “historical school” (the most vivid expression in Russia - V. F. Miller and his students; K. and M. Chadwick in England, etc.), which sought to connect the history of each people with its history and did a lot of work by comparison of sources documents and folklore stories (especially epic ones). At the same time, the “historical school” was characterized by a simplified understanding of the mechanism of art. reflection of reality in F. and (like certain other trends in bourgeois folkloristics of the late 19th - early 20th centuries) the desire to prove that people. the masses only mechanically perceived and preserved the arts. values ​​created by the upper social strata. In the 20th century Freudianism (which interpreted folklore stories as a subconscious expression of inhibited sexual and other complexes), ritualism, became widespread. theory (linking the origin of verbal art primarily with magical rites; French scientists P. Centiv, J. Dumezil, English - F. Raglan, Dutch - J. de Vries, American - R. Carpenter, etc.) and "Finnish school", establishing historical and geographical. areas of distribution of plots and developing the principles of classification and systematization of F. (K. Kroon, A. Aarne, W. Anderson, etc.). The origin of the Marxist trend in folklore studies is associated with the names of P. Lafargue, G. V. Plekhanov, A. M. Gorky. In the 20-30s. 20th century The formation of Marxist folkloristics in the USSR continued, after the 2nd World War of 1939-45 it became widespread in socialist. countries (B. M. and Yu. M. Sokolov, M. K. Azadovsky, V. M. Zhirmunsky, V. Ya. Propp, P. G. Bogatyrev, N. P. Andreev, etc. - in the USSR; P Dinekov, C. Romanska, S. Stoykova and others - in Bulgaria; M. Pop and others - in Romania; D. Ortutai and others - in Hungary; J. Krzyzhanovsky and others. - in Poland; J. Horak, J. Ex, O. Sirovatka, V. Gasparikova and others - in Czechoslovakia; V. Steinitz and others - in the GDR). She considers f., on the one hand, as the oldest form of poetic poetry. creativity, a treasury of arts. people's experience masses, as one of the components of the classic. heritage of the national arts culture of each people and, on the other hand, as the most valuable source. source. When studying ancient eras history of mankind, F. is often (together with archeology) an indispensable source of history. source, especially for studying history. development of ideology and social psychology adv. wt. The complexity of the problem lies in the fact that archaic. folklore works are known, as a rule, only in records of the 18th-20th centuries. or in earlier lit. processing (for example, German "Song of the Nibelungs"), or archaic. elements included in later aesthetics. systems. Therefore, the use of F. for history. reconstructions require great care and, above all, the involvement of comparisons. materials. The features of reflecting reality in various genres F., combining aesthetic, cognitive, ritual and other functions in different ways. Experience in studying genres that were perceived by performers as an expression of history. knowledge (prosaic historical traditions and legends, song historical epic), showed the complexity of the relationship between plots, characters, time, to which their actions are attributed, epic. geography, etc. and authentic history. events, their real chronological, social and geographical. environment. Development of artistic history the thinking of the people did not come from empiricism. and a specific depiction of events to their poeticization and generalization or legendary-fantastic. processing as events are forgotten, but vice versa - from the so-called. mythological epic, which is a fantastic reflection of reality in mythological categories (for example, the successes of mankind in mastering fire, crafts, navigation, etc. are personified in F. in the image of a “cultural hero” of the Promethean type), to heroic. epic and, finally, to history. songs, in which much more specific history is drawn. situations, events and persons, or history. ballads, in which nameless heroes or heroes with fictitious names act in a situation close to real-historical ones. In the department the same stories of history. legends or epic. songs are reflected largely non-empirically. ist. facts, but typical socialist. collisions, history state of politics and arts. consciousness of the people and folklore traditions of previous centuries, through the prism of which history is perceived. reality. At the same time, as in the historical legends, and in historical-epic songs. works often preserved the most valuable historical data. points of view details, names, geographical. names, everyday realities, etc. So, G. Schliemann found the location of Troy, using data from ancient Greek. epic songs "Iliad" and "Odyssey", although he did not accurately determine the location of the "Homeric" layer in the cultural layers of the Trojan excavations. The mechanism of reflection of the source is even more complex. in reality in vernacular fairy tales, lyrical and everyday songs. Songs of a ritual nature, conspiracies, etc., to a greater extent, reflect non-history. reality as such, and the everyday consciousness of the people themselves are facts of the people. everyday life That. F. as a whole did not passively reproduce the empirical. socio-economic facts and political reality or everyday life, but was one of the most important means of expressing people. aspirations. F. is also of great importance for elucidating the history of ethnicity. contacts, the process of formation of ethnographic. groups and historical-ethnographic. regions. Lit.: Chicherov V.I., K. Marx and F. Engels on folklore. Bibliographical materials, "Sov. folklore", 1936, No. 4-5; Bonch-Bruevich V.D., V.I. Lenin on oral folk art, "Sov. ethnography", 1954, No. 4; Friedlander G. M., K. Marx and F. Engels and questions of literature, 2 ed., M., 1968 (chapter folklore); Propp V. Ya., Specifics of folklore, in collection .: "Tr. anniversary scientific sessions of LSU. Philological section Sciences, Leningrad, 1946; by him, Historical roots of a fairy tale, L., 1946; his, Folklore and Reality, "Russian Literature", 1963, No. 3; his, Principles of classification of folklore genres, "Soviet ethnography", 1964, No. 4; his, Morphology of a fairy tale, 2nd ed., M., 1969; Zhirmunsky V.M., On the issue of people. creativity, "Uch. zap. Leningrad. Pedagogical Institute named after A. I. Herzen", 1948, v. 67; his, Folk heroic epic, M.-L., 1962; Gusev V. E., Marxism and Russian. folkloristics of the late XIX - early. XX century, M.-L., 1951; his, Problems of folklore in the history of aesthetics, M.-L., 1963; his, Folklore. History of the term and its modernity. meaning, "Soviet ethnography," 1966, No. 2; by him, Aesthetics of Folklore, Leningrad, 1967; Putilov B.N., On the main features of people. poetic creativity, "Scholarship of the Grozny Pedagogical Institute. Ser. Philological Sciences", V. 7, 1952, No. 4; him, About the historical. studying Russian folklore, in the book: Rus. folklore, c. 5, M.-L., 1960; Cocchiara J., History of folkloristics in Europe, trans. from Italian, M., 1960; Virsaladze E. B., The problem of the specificity of folklore in modern times. bourgeois folklore, in the book: Literary Research of the Institute of History. cargo. lit., v. 9, Tb., 1955 (summary in Russian); Azadovsky M.K., History of Russian. folkloristics, vol. 1-2, M., 1958-63; Meletinsky E. M., Hero of a fairy tale, M., 1958; his, Origin of heroic. epic Early forms and archaic monument, M., 1963; Chistov K.V., Folklore and modernity, "Soviet ethnography", 1962, No. 3; his, Sovr. problems of textual criticism in Russian. folklore, M., 1963: his own. On the relationship between folklore and ethnography, "Soviet ethnography", 1971, No. 5; his, Specificity of folklore in the light of information theory, "Problems of Philosophy", 1972, No. 6; Folklore and ethnography, Leningrad, 1970; Bogatyrev P. G., Questions of the theory of people. Art, M., 1971; Zemtsovsky I.I., Folklore as a science, in: Slav. musical folklore, M., 1972; Kagan M.S., Morphology of Art, Leningrad, 1972; Early forms of art, M., 1972; Corso R., Folklore. Storia. Obbietto. Metodo. Bibliographie, Roma, 1923; Gennep A. van, Le folklore, P., 1924; Krohn K., Die folkloristische Arbeitsmethode, Oslo, 1926; Croce V., Poesia popolare e poesia d´arte, Bari, 1929; Brouwer S. , Die Volkslied in Deutschland, Frankreich, Belgien und Holland, Groningen-Haag., 1930; Saintyves P., Manuel de folklore, P., 1936; Varagnac A., Définition du folklore, P., 1938; Alford V., Introduction to English folklore, L., 1952; Ramos A., Estudos de Folk-Lore. Definic?o e limites teorias de interpretac?o, Rio de J., (1951); Weltfish G., The origins of art, Indianapolis-N. Y., 1953; Marinus A., Essais sur la tradition, Brux., 1958; Jolles A., Einfache Formen, 2 ed., Halle/Saale, 1956; Levi-Strauss S., La pendee sauvage, P., 1962; Bawra S. M., Primitive song, N. Y., 1963; Krappe A. H., The science of folklore, 2 ed., N. Y., 1964; Bausinger H., Formen der "Volkspoesie", B., 1968; Weber-Kellermann J., Deutsche Volkskunde zwischen Germanistik und Sozialwissenschaften, Stuttg., 1969; Vrabie G., Folklorue Obiect. Principle. Metoda, Categorii, Buc, 1970; Dinekov P., Bulgarian folklore, Parva chast, 2nd ed., Sofia, 1972; Ortutay G., Hungarian folklor. Essays, Bdpst, 1972. Bible: Akimova T. M., Seminar on Narratives. poetic creativity, Saratov, 1959; Melts M. Ya., Questions of the theory of folklore (materials for the bibliography), in the book; Russian folklore, vol. 5, M.-L., 1960; his, Modern folklore bibliography, in the book: Russian folklore, vol. 10, M.-L., 1966; Kushnereva Z.I., Folklore of the peoples of the USSR. Bibliographical source in Russian language (1945-1963), M., 1964; Sokolova V.K., Sov. folkloristics for the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution, "Soviet ethnography", 1967, No. 5; Volkskundliche Bibliographie, V.-Lpz., 1919-57; Internationale volkskundliche Bibliographie, Basel-Bonn, 1954-; Coluccio F., Diccionario folklorico argentino, B.-Aires, 1948; Standard dictionary of folklore, mythology and legend, ed. by M. Leach, v. 1-2, N.Y., 1949-50; Erich O., Beitl R., W?rterbuch der deutschen Volkskunde, 2 Aufl., Stutt., 1955; Thompson S., Motif-index of folk-literature, v. 1-6, Bloomington, 1955-58; his, Fifty years of folktale indexing, "Humanoria", N.Y., 1960; Dorson R. M., Current folklore theories, "Current anthropology", 1963, v. 4, No. 1; Aarne A. and Thompson S., The types of folktale. A classification and bibliography, 2 rev., Hels., 1961; Slownik folkloru polskiego, Warsz., 1965. K. V. Chistov. Leningrad.

FOLKLORE

(English folklore - folk knowledge, folk wisdom), folk poetry, folk poetry, oral folk art - a set of different types and forms of mass oral arts. creativity of one or several. peoples The term "F." introduced in 1846 archaeologist W. J. Toms, as a scientist. the term is officially adopted by English. folklore society "Folklore Society", main. in 1878. Originally "F." meant both the subject of research and the corresponding science. In modern historiography is a science that studies the theory and history of f. and its interaction with other types of art, called. folkloristics.

The definition of F. cannot be unambiguous for all historians. stages, because its social and aesthetic. functions, content and poetics are directly dependent on the presence or absence in the cultural system of a given people of its other forms and types (handwritten or printed books, professional theater and pop music, etc.) and various methods of dissemination of literary arts. works (cinema, radio, television, sound recordings, etc.).

F. arose in the process of the formation of human speech and in ancient times covered all forms of spiritual culture. It is characterized by comprehensive syncretism - functional and ideological. (F. contained the rudiments of artistic creativity, historical knowledge, science, religion, etc.), social (F. served all layers of society), genre (epic, fairy tale, legend, myth, song, etc. not yet differentiated), formal (the word appeared in inextricable unity with the so-called extra-textual elements - intonation, melody, gesture, facial expressions, dance, sometimes figurative art). Subsequently, in the process of social differentiation of society and the development of culture, various types and forms of f. arose, expressing the interests of the department. social strata and classes, folklore genres were formed that had various social and everyday purposes (production, social-organizing, ritual, gaming, aesthetic, cognitive). They were characterized by varying degrees of aesthetic development. beginning, various combinations of text and extra-textual elements, aesthetic. and other functions. In general, F. continued to remain multifunctional and syncretic.

The use of writing to record text distinguished literature from the oral forms of literary arts that preceded it. creativity. From the moment of their inception, writing and literature turned out to be the property of the highest social strata. At the same time, literature at first, as a rule, was not yet a phenomenon. artistic (for example, chronicles and annals, diplomatic and journalistic works, ritual texts, etc.). In this regard, the actual aesthetic. The needs of society as a whole were satisfied for a long time mainly by oral tradition. The development of literature and growing social differentiation led to the fact that already in the late feudal period. F.'s period became predominant. (and among many nations exclusively) the property of the working people. the masses, because literary forms of creativity remained inaccessible to them. Social differences in the environment that created literary and folklore works led to the emergence of a definition. range of ideas and various arts. tastes. This was accompanied by the development of specific systems of literary (story, novel, poem, poem, etc.) and folklore (epic, fairy tale, song, etc.) genres and their poetics. The transition from oral forms of creation and transmission of art. works that are characterized by the use of natural elements. means of communication (voice - hearing, movement - vision), to fixing and stabilizing the text and reading it meant not only a more advanced way of accumulating and preserving cultural achievements. He was accompanied and determined. losses: a spatial and temporal gap in the moment of creation (reproduction) of art. the work and its perception, the loss of the immediate. contact between its creator (writer) and the perceiver (reader), loss of extra-textual elements, contact empathy and the possibility of making textual and other changes depending on the reaction of the perceivers. The significance of these losses is confirmed by the fact that even in conditions of universal literacy, not only traditional folklore, but also other oral and at the same time synthetic ones continue to exist and re-emerge. forms, and some of them are of a contact nature (theater, stage, readers, performances of writers in front of an audience, performance of poetry with a guitar, etc.).

Characteristic features of f. in the conditions of its coexistence with literature and in opposition to it: orality, collectivity, nationality, variability, combination of words and arts. elements of other arts. Each work arose on the basis of poetics developed by the team, was intended for a certain circle of listeners and acquired its origins. life, if it was accepted by the team. Changes made by the department. performers could be very different - from stylistic. variations until a significant reworking of the plan and, as a rule, did not go beyond the boundaries of the ideology and aesthetics of the definition. environment. Collectiveness creative. process in F. did not mean its impersonality. Talented masters not only created new songs, fairy tales, etc., but also influenced the process of dissemination, improvement or adaptation of traditions. texts to the historically changed needs of the collective. Dialectical the unity of the collective and the individual was contradictory in poetry, as in literature, but in general tradition in poetry was more important than in literature. In social conditions. division of labor on the basis of oral tradition, in parallel with mass and unprofessional performance, which is characteristic of the arts of all nations, unique professions arose associated with the creation and performance of poetic, musical and other works (Ancient Greek rhapsodes and aedas; Roman mimes and histsiones; Russian buffoons; French jugglers; German shpilmans; later Russian guslars; Ukrainian kobzars; Kazakh and Kyrgyz akyns and zhirshi; French chansonniers, etc.). In the early feud. period, performers who served the dominant social strata emerged. A transitional type of singer-poet emerged, closely associated first with chivalry (French troubadours or German minnesingers), later with the burghers (German meistersingers) or the clerical-student environment (French or German vagantes; Polish, Ukrainian and Belarusian nativity scenes). In some countries and regions, in conditions of slow development, patriarchal-feudalism. way of life, transitional forms of a unique oral literature were formed. Poetic works were created specifically. persons, disseminated orally, there was a desire to stabilize their texts. At the same time, the tradition has preserved the names of the creators (Toktogul in Kyrgyzstan, Kemin and Mollanepes in Turkmenistan, Sayat-Nova in Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, etc.). In Russian F. there was no developed professionalization of singers. We can only talk about the department. names mentioned in the writing of Ancient Rus' (singer Mitus; possibly Boyan).

Each genre or group of folk genres fulfilled a specific purpose. social and household functions. This led to the formation of the department. genres of F. with their characteristic themes, images, poetics, and style. In the ancient period, most peoples had tribal traditions, work and ritual songs, mythological. stories, early forms of fairy tales, spells, incantations. Later, at the turn of the transition from pre-class society to class society, modern societies arose. types of fairy tales (magical, everyday, about animals) and archaic. epic forms. During the formation of the state, heroic epic, then epic. ballad and historical songs content, history legends. Later other classical genres. F. formed non-ritual lyrical. song and romance, later types of folklore. drama and even later - the genres of worker F. - revolutionary. songs, marches, satire. songs, oral stories. The process of emergence, development of department. genres of f., especially the duration of their productive period, the relationship of f. with literature and other types of professional arts. creativity are determined by the characteristics of history. the development of each people and the nature of its contacts with other peoples. Thus, tribal traditions were forgotten among some peoples (for example, among the Eastern Slavs) and formed the basis of history. legends from others (for example, Icelandic sagas from Icelanders). Ritual songs, as a rule, were timed to different periods of the agricultural, pastoral, hunting or fishing calendar, and entered into various relationships with the rituals of the Christian, Muslim, Buddhist and other religions. The degree of connection between the epic and mythological ideas are determined by specific socio-economic. conditions. An example of this kind of connection is the Nart tales of the peoples of the Caucasus, Karelo-Fin. runes, ancient Greek epic Germanic languages ​​left oral existence relatively early. and Western Roman epic. The epic of the Turkic peoples existed for a long time and acquired later forms. and east Slavs

There are different genre versions of African, Australian, Asian and European fairy tales. peoples The ballad among some peoples (for example, the Scots) acquired clear genre differences, while for others (for example, the Russians) it is close to lyrical. or ist. song. The poetry of each people is characterized by a unique combination of genres and a specific role of each of them in the general system of oral creativity, which has always been multi-layered and heterogeneous.

Despite the bright national The coloring of folklore texts, many motifs, plots, and even images of characters in the folklore of different peoples are strikingly similar. Such similarities could arise as a result of the development of f. from a common source (common archaic features of f. the Slavs or Finno-Ugric peoples, which go back to the common Proto-Slavic or Proto-Finnish heritage), or as a result of the cultural interaction of peoples (for example, the exchange of fairy tale plots Russians and Karelians), or the independent emergence of similar phenomena (for example, common plots of fairy tales of American Indians and peoples of Central Europe) under the influence of general patterns of development of the social system, material and spiritual culture.

In the late feudal period. time and during the period of capitalism in the people. lit. began to penetrate the environment more actively than before. works; some forms of lit. creativity acquired mass distribution (romances and songs of literary origin, so-called folk books, Russian “lubok”, German “Bilderbogen”, etc.). This influenced the plot, style, and content of folklore works. People's creativity storytellers acquired certain features of lit. creativity (individualization, psychologism, etc.).

In socialist In society, the availability of education has provided an equal opportunity for the development of talents and professionalization of people, and a variety of modern technologies have become widespread. forms of mass literary arts. culture - amateur lit. creativity (including partly in traditional folklore forms), amateur club performances, folk song creativity. choirs, etc. Some of these forms are creative, others are performing in nature.

Design of folkloristics in independent work. science dates back to the 30-40s. 19th century The formation of folkloristics and the beginning of scientific research. collecting and publishing F. was associated with three main. factors: lit. romanticism, which was one of the forms of expression of the self-awareness of the emerging bourgeoisie. nations (for example, in Germany, France, Italy), national liberation. movement (for example, among the southern and western Slavs) and the spread of social liberation. and educational ideas (for example, in Russia - A. I. Herzen, N. G. Chernyshevsky, N. A. Dobrolyubov; in Poland - A. Mitskevich, etc.). Romantics (German scientists I. G. Herder, L. Arnim and C. Brentano, brothers W. and J. Grimm, etc.; English - T. Percy and J. Macpherson, etc.; Serbian - V. Karadzic and others; Finnish - E. Lönrot and others; Russian Decembrists) saw in F. an expression of nationalism. spirit and national traditions and used folklore works to reconstruct history. facts not reflected in written sources. Emerging within the framework of romanticism, the so-called. mythological school (German scientists A. Kuhn, W. Schwarz, W. Manhardt and others; English - M. Muller, J. W. Cox and others; French - A. Pictet and others; Italian - A de Gubernatis and others; Russian - F. I. Buslaev, A. N. Afanasyev, etc.), based on the achievements of Indo-European. linguistics, believed F. European. peoples the heritage of the most ancient Proto-Indo-European. myth-making. Romantics in glory. countries saw F. as a general glory. inheritance, preserved to varying degrees by different branches of the Slavs, just like the Germans. Romantics saw modernism in F. German-speaking peoples share the common heritage of the ancient Germans. In the 2nd half. 19th century based on philosophy. Positivism developed evolutionary schools in folklore studies, which is associated with a growing awareness of the unity of the laws of development of folklore and the recurrence of folklore plots and motifs in different ethnic groups. environments So representatives of the so-called. anthropologist schools (E. Tylor, E. Lang and J. Fraser - in England; N. Sumtsov, A. I. Kirpichnikov, A. N. Veselovsky - in Russia, etc.) explained the global recurrence of folklore phenomena by the unity of people. psychology. At the same time, the so-called comparativism (comparative historical method), which explained similar phenomena more or less mechanically. borrowing or “migration of plots” (German - T. Benfey, French - G. Paris, Czech - J. Polivka, Russian - V.V. Stasov, A.N. Pypin, A.N. Veselovsky, etc. .), and the “historical school” (the most vivid expression in Russia - V. F. Miller and his students; K. and M. Chadwick in England, etc.), which sought to connect the history of each people with its history and did a lot of work by comparison of sources documents and folklore stories (especially epic ones). At the same time, the “historical school” was characterized by a simplified understanding of the mechanism of art. reflection of reality in F. and (like certain other trends in bourgeois folkloristics of the late 19th - early 20th centuries) the desire to prove that people. the masses only mechanically perceived and preserved the arts. values ​​created by the upper social strata. In the 20th century Freudianism (which interpreted folklore stories as a subconscious expression of inhibited sexual and other complexes), ritualism, became widespread. theory (linking the origin of verbal art primarily with magical rites; French scientists P. Centiv, J. Dumezil, English - F. Raglan, Dutch - J. de Vries, American - R. Carpenter, etc.) and "Finnish school", establishing historical and geographical. areas of distribution of plots and developing the principles of classification and systematization of F. (K. Kroon, A. Aarne, W. Anderson, etc.).

The origin of the Marxist trend in folklore studies is associated with the names of P. Lafargue, G. V. Plekhanov, A. M. Gorky. In the 20-30s. 20th century The formation of Marxist folkloristics in the USSR continued, after the 2nd World War of 1939-45 it became widespread in socialist. countries (B. M. and Yu. M. Sokolov, M. K. Azadovsky, V. M. Zhirmunsky, V. Ya. Propp, P. G. Bogatyrev, N. P. Andreev, etc. - in the USSR; P Dinekov, C. Romanska, S. Stoykova and others - in Bulgaria; M. Pop and others - in Romania; D. Ortutai and others - in Hungary; J. Krzyzhanovsky and others - in Poland; J. Horak , J. Ex, O. Sirovatka, V. Gasparikova and others - in Czechoslovakia; V. Steinitz and others - in the GDR). She considers f., on the one hand, as the oldest form of poetic poetry. creativity, a treasury of arts. people's experience masses, as one of the components of the classic. heritage of the national arts culture of each people and, on the other hand, as the most valuable source. source.

When studying the most ancient eras of human history, philosophy is often (together with archeology) an indispensable source of history. source, especially for studying history. development of ideology and social psychology of people. wt. The complexity of the problem lies in the fact that archaic. folklore works are known, as a rule, only in records of the 18th-20th centuries. or in earlier lit. processing (for example, German "Song of the Nibelungs"), or archaic. elements included in later aesthetics. systems. Therefore, the use of F. for history. reconstructions require great care and, above all, the involvement of comparisons. materials. The features of reflecting reality in various genres of fiction, which differently combine aesthetic, cognitive, ritual, and other functions, are also taken into account. Experience in studying genres that were perceived by performers as an expression of history. knowledge (prosaic historical traditions and legends, song historical epic), showed the complexity of the relationship between plots, characters, time, to which their actions are attributed, epic. geography, etc. and authentic history. events, their real chronological, social and geographical. environment. Development of artistic history the thinking of the people did not come from empiricism. and a specific depiction of events to their poeticization and generalization or legendary-fantastic. processing as events are forgotten, but vice versa - from the so-called. mythological epic, which is a fantastic reflection of reality in mythological categories (for example, the successes of mankind in mastering fire, crafts, navigation, etc. are personified in F. in the image of a “cultural hero” of the Promethean type), to heroic. epic and, finally, to history. songs, in which much more specific history is drawn. situations, events and persons, or history. ballads, in which nameless heroes or heroes with fictitious names act in a situation close to real-historical ones.

In the department the same stories of history. legends or epic. songs are reflected largely non-empirically. ist. facts, but typical socialist. collisions, history state of politics and arts. consciousness of the people and folklore traditions of previous centuries, through the prism of which history is perceived. reality. At the same time, as in the historical legends, and in historical-epic songs. works often preserved the most valuable historical data. points of view details, names, geographical. names, everyday realities, etc. So, G. Schliemann found the location of Troy, using data from ancient Greek. epic songs "Iliad" and "Odyssey", although he did not accurately determine the location of the "Homeric" layer in the cultural layers of the Trojan excavations. The mechanism of reflection of the source is even more complex. in reality in vernacular fairy tales, lyrical and everyday songs. Songs of a ritual nature, conspiracies, etc., to a greater extent, reflect non-history. reality as such, and the everyday consciousness of the people themselves are facts of the people. everyday life That. F. as a whole did not passively reproduce the empirical. socio-economic facts and political reality or everyday life, but was one of the most important means of expressing people. aspirations. F. is also of great importance for elucidating the history of ethnicity. contacts, the process of formation of ethnographic. groups and historical-ethnographic. regions.

Lit.: Chicherov V.I., K. Marx and F. Engels on folklore. Bibliographical materials, "Soviet folklore", 1936, No. 4-5; Bonch-Bruevich V.D., V.I. Lenin on oral folk art, "Soviet ethnography", 1954, No. 4; Friedlander G. M., K. Marx and F. Engels and questions of literature, 2nd ed., M., 1968 (chapter folklore); Propp V. Ya., Specifics of folklore, in the collection: "Proceedings of the anniversary scientific session of Leningrad State University. Section of Philological Sciences, L., 1946; his, Historical roots of a fairy tale, L., 1946; his, Folklore and reality, "Russian Literature", 1963, No. 3; his, Principles of classification of folklore genres, "Sov. ethnography", 1964, No. 4; his, Morphology of a fairy tale, 2nd ed., M., 1969; Zhirmunsky V.M., On the issue of folk art, "Uch. zap. Leningr. ped. Institute named after A. I. Herzen", 1948, v. 67; his own, Folk heroic epic, M.-L., 1962; Gusev V. E., Marxism and Russian folklore of the late XIX - early XX centuries, M. -L., 1951; his, Problems of folklore in the history of aesthetics, M.-L., 1963; his, Folklore. History of the term and its modern meaning, "Sov. Ethnogr.", 1966, No. 2; his own, Aesthetics of Folklore, L., 1967; Putilov B.N., On the main features of folk poetic creativity, "Uch. zap. Groznensky ped. in-ta. Ser. philological Sciences", v. 7, 1952, No. 4; his, On the historical study of Russian folklore, in the book: Russian folklore, v. 5, M.-L., 1960; Cocchiara J., History of folklore in Europe, translated from Italian, M., 1960; Virsaladze E. B., The problem of the specificity of folklore in modern bourgeois folklore studies, in the book: Literary Research of the Institute of Historical Georgian Literature, v. 9, Tb., 1955 (summary in Russian); Azadovsky M. K., History of Russian folkloristics, vol. 1-2, M., 1958-63; Meletinsky E. M., Hero of a fairy tale, M., 1958; his same, Origin of the heroic epic. Early forms and archaic monument, M., 1963; Chistov K.V., Folklore and modernity, "Sov. ethnography", 1962, No. 3; his own, Contemporary problems of textual criticism of Russian folklore, M., 1963: his own. On the relationship between folklore studies and ethnography, "Sov. ethnography", 1971, No. 5; his, Specifics of folklore in the light of information theory, "Vopr. philosophy", 1972, No. 6; Folklore and ethnography, L., 1970; Bogatyrev P. G., Questions of the theory of folk art, M., 1971; Zemtsovsky I. I., Folklore as a science, in the collection: Slav. musical folklore, M., 1972; Kagan M. S., Morphology of art, L., 1972; Early forms of art, M., 1972; Corso R., Folklore. Storia. Obbietto. Metodo. Bibliographie, Roma, 1923; Gennep A. van, Le folklore, P., 1924; Krohn K., Die folkloristische Arbeitsmethode, Oslo, 1926; Croce V. , Poesia popolare e poesia d'arte, Bari, 1929; Brouwer S., Die Volkslied in Deutschland, Frankreich, Belgien und Holland, Groningen-Haag., 1930; Saintyves P., Manuel de folklore, P., 1936; Varagnac A ., Definition du folklore, P., 1938; Alford V., Introduction to English folklore, L., 1952; Ramos A., Estudos de Folk-Lore. Definicão e limites teorias de interpretacão, Rio de J., (1951) ; Weltfish G., The origins of art, Indianapolis-N.Y., 1953; Marinus A., Essais sur la tradition, Brux., 1958; Jolles A., Einfache Formen, 2 ed., Halle/Saale, 1956; Levi-Strauss S., La pendee sauvage, P., 1962; Bawra S. M., Primitive song, N. Y., 1963; Krappe A. H., The science of folklore, 2 ed., N. Y., 1964; Bausinger H., Formen der "Volkspoesie" , B., 1968; Weber-Kellermann J., Deutsche Volkskunde zwischen Germanistik und Sozialwissenschaften, Stuttg., 1969; Vrabie G., Folklorue Obiect. Principii. Metoda, Categorii, Buc, 1970; Dinekov P., Bulgarian folklore, Parva chast , 2nd ed., Sofia, 1972; Ortutay G., Hungarian folklor. Essays, Bdpst, 1972.

Bibliography: Akimova T. M., Seminar on Narratives. poetic creativity, Saratov, 1959; Melts M. Ya., Questions of the theory of folklore (materials for the bibliography), in the book; Russian folklore, vol. 5, M.-L., 1960; his, Modern folklore bibliography, in the book: Russian folklore, vol. 10, M.-L., 1966; Kushnereva Z.I., Folklore of the peoples of the USSR. Bibliographical source in Russian language (1945-1963), M., 1964; Sokolova V.K., Sov. folkloristics for the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution, "Soviet ethnography", 1967, No. 5; Volkskundliche Bibliographie, V.-Lpz., 1919-57; Internationale volkskundliche Bibliographie, Basel-Bonn, 1954-; Coluccio F., Diccionario folklorico argentino, B.-Aires, 1948; Standard dictionary of folklore, mythology and legend, ed. by M. Leach, v. 1-2, N.Y., 1949-50; Erich O., Beitl R., Wörterbuch der deutschen Volkskunde, 2 Aufl., Stutt., 1955; Thompson S., Motif-index of folk-literature, v. 1-6, Bloomington, 1955-58; his, Fifty years of folktale indexing, "Humanoria", N.Y., 1960; Dorson R. M., Current folklore theories, "Current anthropology", 1963, v. 4, No. 1; Aarne A. and Thompson S., The types of folktale. A classification and bibliography, 2 rev., Hels., 1961; Slownik folkloru polskiego, Warsz., 1965.

K. V. Chistov. Leningrad.

Soviet historical encyclopedia. - M.: Soviet Encyclopedia. Ed. E. M. Zhukova. 1973-1982 .

See what “FOLKLORE” is in other dictionaries:

- (in the cultural aspect) in the “broad” sense (all folk traditional peasant spiritual and partly material culture) and “narrow” (oral peasant verbal artistic tradition). Folklore is a collection of... ... Encyclopedia of Cultural Studies