E-mail: antonina.antonina282@yandex.ru Tel.: +7 (8422) 44-19-09
4/5, Lenin sq., Ulyanovsk, 432071, Russian Federation
PhD in Philology, Associate Professor, Department of Russian Language, Literature and Journalism, I. N. Ulyanov Ulyanovsk State Pedagogical University
The work was carried out in the framework of the State undertaking of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, No. 34.6993.2017/BCh, “Specifics of the functioning of traditional culture and folklore during the process of Russians’ assimilation of the floristic and geographical regions of the Ulyanovsk (Simbirsk) Volga Region in the 18th — 20th centuries.”
This article attempts to consider a cycle of stories grouped around the image of a shrine as a living, “self-adjusting” system. The cycle is formed of narratives that describe the shrine’s etiology, its history, and miraculous present, but the cycle often changes as the oral tradition becomes routinized. The article analyzes a corpus of texts about shrines that have wide official acceptance and are subject to the routinization of the oral tradition. In this case a kind of redistribution of roles takes place within the cycle. Many written sources record an etiological legend that serves as the official “history” of the region. Thereupon, narrators lose interest in it, which results in a paraphrase rather than a storytelling according to the usual laws of folklore text formation.
A mark of legends is the topicality of their content. The variations characteristic of etiological legends (of the transformative type) become a marker of tales concerning desecration of the shrine. Traditionally, stories about the destruction of a sacred object are considered “daughter” (subsidiary) formations. But with widespread official recognition of the status of a shrine, stories about its destruction often begin to be perceived as the “core of representation,” since it is with their help that the shrine’s sacred character is explained. Thus, one cannot speak of the degradation of the oral tradition even given its widespread official recognition.
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