E-mail: js_rosovezki@inbox.ru
Tel.: +8 (044) 239‑31‑69
14, bul. Shevchenko, Kyiv, 01033, Ukraine
Grand PhD (Philology), professor of Department of Folkloristics, Institute of Philology, Taras
Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, member of the International Society for Folk Narrative
Research
The article deals with the embodiment of Taras Shevchenko’s appearance in Ukrainian oral prose. Contemporaries noticed existence of colorful legends about the poet yet during his life, and first samples were recorded already in 1882. Several anthologies of folklore samples about Shevchenko have been compiled according to Stalinist canon of folklore studies during the Soviet period. Plenty of texts entered in the newest anthology (2006), published by M. Nazarenko. However, search in archives, scholarly edition and research on folklore about Shevchenko still remain an actual task of Ukrainian folkloristics.
There in oral prose tradition about Shevchenko “Chroniknotizen (Sagenbericht)” (C. von Sydow), which are confirmative for fantastic plots and legends, which have been existing among peasants already, prevail in number. “Memorates” occupy the second position by quantity. “Memorates” present recitals about meetings with the poet, which frequently get more and more distant from plausibility in course of time, and “quasi-memorates”. Pure “fabulates” are met rarely, they are manifested as fragments of oral memoirs often.
Oral prose about Shevchenko consists of an ideological center and periphery. The indicated ideological center has formed a large multi-genre complex, which represents an original Ukrainian version of “social-utopian legend” (myth) about a “returning deliverer” (K. V. Chistov). Shevchenko appears in the role of non-monarchic “returning deliverer”, and the narratives about him keep within the “very stable plot pattern” of legend (myth). Laughter components prevails in the periphery, in which basic genre is represented by an anecdote, most of which had appeared among educated circles of the poet’s acquaintances. Most texts come from Shevchenko’s humorous narrations of about himself, those brilliant examples of his oral bitter “self-derision”.
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