E-mail: greek23@mail.ru;
Tel.: +7 (8142) 78 18 86;
Pushkinskaya st. 11, 185910 Petrozavodsk, Russian Federation;
PhD (Philology), researcher, Institute of Language, Literature and History of Karelian Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences
The article analyzes the folklore materials performed during World War II, primarily the period from 1941 to 1944. A large part of the territory of the Karelian-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic, including its capital Petrozavodsk, was occupied by Finnish troops thereat. There inside the occupied zone dwelled about 86 thousand people. For the whole territory of the republic militant authorities organized 10 concentration camps. most of which were located in Petrozavodsk. Only within the city of Petrozavodsk over 20 thousand people were contained at 6 concentration camps. Unendurable conditions, hunger, contagious disease and unsustainable labor, as well executions by shootings, caused fatalities with number of victims from 4000 up to 7000, according to different estimates.
The author has studied thoroughly the archival collection of the war prisoners’ folklore, rubricated as “The camp songs recorded from persons under occupation of the Finns and prisoners of concentration camps during the 1941–1944”, dated 1944 and stored in the Scientific Archives of the Karelian Research Centre of Russian Academy of Sciences. It includes 442 storage items. An unique storage unit comprises any single oral recorded text, whether it were an amateur song in 15 quatrains or four lines long chastushka-ditty. These recordings reveal experience of the prisoners, their hopes and aspirations, as well as relationship between those who lived behind barbed wire and those who guarded them.
Besides a significant number of prisoners’ songs and ditties, the analyzed collection includes a lot of songs of literature origin, songs from movies, songs about love, almost all the popular songs about Stepan Razin, about the Motherland, the Red Army. Persecution could not discourage aspiration to creativity. However not all the texts possess greater artistic value, they reflect the thoughts and feelings of people who retained human values despite unhuman living conditions.
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