E-mail: n.drannikova@narfu.ru Tel.: +7 (8182) 21-61-00
17, Severnaya Dvina emb., Arkhangelsk, 163002, Russian Federation
DSc of Philology, Full Professor, Department of Culture and Religious Studies, M. V. Lomonosov Northern (Arctic) Federal University
This article was financially supported by a grant from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, project No. 18–412–290002, “Narratives on the Destruction of Orthodox Churches and Religious Buildings in the Modern Folklore Tradition of the Arkhangelsk Region.”
This article is devoted to oral narratives about sacrilege (the destruction of buil- dings and other Orthodox Church property) in the narrative tradition of the Arkhangelsk Region. The research takes a traditional approach, centering on the analysis of plots and narrative motifs. Materials for the study are from the folklore archive of the Northern (Arctic) Federal University and refer to different areas of the Arkhangelsk Region. The article’s aim is to identify the main motifs of these stories and their regional characteristics. The material is heterogeneous in the generic sense: there are both “brief testimonies” and more structurally organized “long testimonies.” Religious stories comprise part of local historical memory, knowledge of which testifies to a community’s sense of identity. In modern folklore and speech practice there are different attitudes to the events associated with the demolition of churches and the persecution of priests. Intergenerational cultural transmission was disrupted during the Soviet period; the knowledge and experience of the older generation was depreciated, so that different generations of informants demonstrate dissimilar value orientations. In the early post-Soviet period, when the church revival began and many new believers emerged, stories about punishment for sacrilege again became relevant. However, the author concludes that in the modern folklore tradition the plot motif of God’s punishment for sacrilege has disappeared, despite the fact that for a long time this motif was considered the most stable part of the narrative.
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