Traditions and Transitions folk narrative in the contemporary world
16-20
July 2001 The University of Melbourne, Australia
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Traditions and Transitions folk narrative in the contemporary world |
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Olga Belova and Vladimir Petrukhin are unable to attend the congress and present this paper.
The etiologic folk legends of the Eastern Slavs based on
the Bible show that canonical plots are reinterpreted in folk tradition
according to the stereotypes of the folk-mythological consciousness. The
material gathered between 1980-2000 during field research in Polesje (one of
the most culturally archaic regions in East Slavia) represents the living tradition
of the Bible narratives, which reflect not only the specific content of the
folk Bible in comparison with its ‘canonical original’, but also the fragments
of Slavic pre-Christian folk beliefs and archaic rituals.
A number of authentic ‘biblical’ narratives particularly based on the
Judeo-Christian apocrypha and folk Slavic cosmological beliefs are analysed in
the paper. The legends about the transformation of Adam's and Eve's bodies
after the Fall, Cain and Abel and the emergence of the spots on the Moon, the
emergence of spirits of the water, of the wood, etc. as a result of the casting
out of the ‘demons' from the Heavens, the spider ‘spinning’ the world, the
transmutation of the first man into a stork because of his violation of God's
interdiction, the harmful devil's activity in Noah's Ark and some others are
striking examples of the co-existence of different traditions (Slavic and
non-Slavic, literary and folklore) in the oral culture of Polesje.
We come to the conclusion that in the sphere of East Slavic traditional
culture, the contemporary folk Bible narratives contribute to the survival of
the scriptural patrimony as well as a to a set of mythological beliefs.
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