WAR IN UST-TSILMA LAMENTS: IMAGERY AND THEMES

The study characterizes poetic textualizing of the war theme in laments appearing in Ust-Tsilma — the rural region at the embouchment Pechora — the river’s Tsilma — the tributary), one of richest oral traditions of the Northern Russia. The analyzed data consist primarily of recordings made during the Great Patriotic War — in 1942 (published in 1963). The article covers some of the denominations — words and attributive phrases relating to the concepts of “war”, “weapons”, “enemy”. “The great war, the sanguinary” is the most frequent epithet nomination of the war, whereas such metaphorical substitute equivalents as “blazing flames” or “black cloud” appear sporadic. The vocabulary denoting weapons and ammunition specified in laments in the context of describing the war as a battle is quite diverse. Generalizing lexical units (“an enemy”, “a foe”) and actual historical lexemes (“a fascist”,“Hitler”) were used widely to denote the adversary. Besides, there occurred numerous interesting occasional descriptions of the enemy (“a robber, a thug”, “a beast” etc.). The article also analyzes the motifs peculiar to the war-themed laments: the beginning of the war, military mobilization, farewell and advices to the soldiers, leaving for the battlefront, soldiers’ daily life, the battle, perishing.

The motifs of seeing off and soldier’s destination manifest the war image as a far foreign country, the death realm which is opposite to home and threatens soldiers with a horrible doom. The war theme in the Ust-Tsilma lamentations reaches its climax in the motif of a soldier’s not-burial. Furthermore, the author pays attention to the connection between poetics of the war-related laments and other lamentation subgenre groups as well as other genres of the Ust-Tsilma folklore. As a result it is concluded that the war lamentations widely used poetic means of the burial poetry; parallels to some components of the literary vocabulary can be found in bylinas and lyrical songs.