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Leading specialist-philologist, Russian Literature Department, Lobachevskiy State University of Nizhniy Novgorod — National Research University
The paper gives the results of the search for literary sources of description of calendartimed fist fight and evaluation of veracity of its description in P. I. Melnikov-Pecherskiy’s novel “On the mountains”. According to the tradition of literature studies, this episode has been reckoned as authentic and even used as an ethnographic source. The author has revealed the main source of ethnographic content of that episode, namely the study “Opisanie Yagodinskoy volosti Knyagininskogo uezda”[“Description of Yagodinskaya district of Knyaginin county”] by I. N. Tibrin. Сreating literature text on this basis Melnikov combines three stylistic traditions of describing a folk fist fight, developed in fiction, essays and folklore. The paper shows the way, in which the author converts ethnographic material to become a literature text. The writer turns Tibrin’s descriptive essay into a dramatic, ritualized, structured action, in which members of each gender and age group of rural community play their roles prescribed by the traditional way of life. Individualized characters represent the images of typical members of each such group. In comparison with researcher’s paper, which has served as a source, the ethnographic component of the episode is converted to a more complicated structure of ritualized fist fight. Thus, on the basis of the authentic source of the book Melnikov creates a generalized image of typed a rural festival with a typed fist fight. This description can be accepted as ethnographically authentic. At the same time the episode has no regional features in representation of folk tradition of traditional fist fight. So it cannot be associated with the local tradition of the middle Volga region.
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