13th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research

Presentation Abstracts

PANTCHENKO, Alexandre

Eschatological Expectations in a Changing World: narratives about the end of the world in present day Russian folk culture

This paper is based on ethnological evidence of the culture of Russian peasants between the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One characteristic of the epoch is a special type of apocalyptic folk narrative. The specifics of such narratives are difficult to understand without studying the peculiarities of their performance. However, an analysis of recorded narratives that have been adequately attributed according to modern techniques of field research make such a study possible.

Contemporary eschatological narrative created by Russian peasants is connected to the idea of prophetic fulfilment. The source of apocalyptic talk is usually not in the motifs of Christian apocrypha, which are compared with real events in order to presage the coming of the apocalypse, but in the construction of the events themselves as signs of the end of the world.

It seems that the main function of such narratives is to interpret the changing dynamics of social life (the alteration of day-to-day life, novelties of technogeneous character, etc.). When a modern Russian peasant becomes aware of social reality, which is not limited by habitual forms of everyday life, he uses the interpretative mechanism of eschatological narrative.

Thus, the apocalyptic expectations of twentieth-century Russian peasants are mainly connected with processes of acculturation, i.e. the influence of a culture highly developed in technology on a less strong culture. Such processes when accompanied by changes in the social structure and reorganization of systems of values in society inevitably cause a certain tension. The latter is often expressed by different messianic movements. A classical example of such movements is the Melanesian ‘cargo-cults’ that became widespread in the first half of the twentieth century.