Russian Folk Belief

A scholarly work that aims to be both broad enough in scope to satisfy upper-division undergraduates studying folk belief and narrative and detailed enough to meet the needs of graduate students in the field. Each of the seven chapters in Part 1 focuses on one aspect of Russian folk belief, such as the pagan background, Christian personages, devils and various other logical categories of the topic. The author's thesis - that Russian folk belief represents a "double faith" whereby Slavic pagan beliefs are overlaid with popular Christianity - is persuasive and has analogies in other cultures. The folk narratives constituting Part 2 are translated and include a wide range of tales, from the briefly anecdotal to the more fully developed narrative, covering the various folk personages and motifs explored in Part 1.

A scholarly work that aims to be both broad enough in scope to satisfy upper-division undergraduates studying folk belief and narrative and detailed enough to meet the needs of graduate students in the field. Each of the seven chapters in Part 1 focuses on one aspect of Russian folk belief, such as the pagan background, Christian personages, devils and various other logical categories of the topic. The author's thesis - that Russian folk belief represents a "double faith" whereby Slavic pagan beliefs are overlaid with popular Christianity - is persuasive and has analogies in other cultures. The folk narratives constituting Part 2 are translated and include a wide range of tales, from the briefly anecdotal to the more fully developed narrative, covering the various folk personages and motifs explored in Part 1.

Russian folk beliefs have left their mark, not only on superstitions and customs, but in music, art and some major literary works by the likes of Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Gogol. An exciting exploration of the Russian lower mythology, Russian Folk Belief offers a fascinating glimpse into the admixture of pagan and Christian elements which comprise the world view of the Russian peasant.

...the characters and symbolism in Russian fairy tales could be called Origin of the Russian Psyche. ...masterly and extremely readable...

In the heart of Russia, old ways of perceiving the spirits of home and nature still prevail. Fairy stories, folk art, and calendar customs carry hints of the old gods and offer a now rare way of linking human life to the landscape. This is as true for city dwellers and villagers, for the Russian soul is open to the power of myth and the mysteries of the universe. This book explains how Russia's concept of soul ("dusha") and sensitivity to the landscape extends to archaeologists, scientists, and doctors in Russia, who retain an open-minded approach and a keen interest in psychic phenomena, along with folk traditions and faith healing. Author Cherry Gilchrist has traveled often to Russia and researched its traditional lore, gaining knowledge she interweaves into this book. She blends that first-hand knowledge with serious research to paint a lively picture of these remarkable magical traditions and their enduring power.

Propp's essay in Russian Folk Lyrics extends beyond the formalistic analysis of folklore outlined in his classic The Morphology of the Folktale. In this study, newly translated by Roberta Reeder, Propp considers the Russian folk lyric in the social and historical context in which it was produced. Reeder supplements Propp's theoretical presentation with a comprehensive anthology of examples. Some songs were imitated by or appear in the works of Russia's major writers, such as Pushkin and Nekrasov. Here we find the customs of Russian peasant life expressed through the ritual of song. Whether the songs are about love, labor, or children's games; whether they are sad, humorous, or satiric in tone, Russian folk lyrics are rich in metaphor and symbolic meaning. In addition to the editor's notes to the text and songs, Reeder supplies a bibliography of Propp's sources as well as an extensive selected bibliography.

Presented in a brand new translation, this most comprehensive collection of classic Russian tales will enchant readers for their raw beauty and constant ability to surprise and excite. Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, following the example of the Brothers Grimm in Germany, Alexander Afanasyev embarked on the ambitious task of sifting through the huge repository of tales from Russian folklore and selecting the very best from written and oral sources. The result, an eight-volume collection comprising around 600 stories, is one of the most influential and enduringly popular books in Russian literature. This large selection from Afanasyev's work, presented in a new translation by Stephen Pimenoff, will give English readers the opportunity to discover one of the founding texts of the European folkloristic tradition. Displaying a vast array of unforgettable characters, such as the Baba-Yaga, Ivan the Fool, Vasilisa the Fair and the Firebird, these tales--by turns adventurous, comical and downright madcap--will enchant readers for their raw beauty and constant ability to surprise and excite.

This book examines folk music and dance revival movements in Russia showing how folk 'tradition' in Russia is an artificial cultural construct, which is periodically reinvented.

Professor Yuri M. Sokolov 's 1938 Russian Folklore, originally a Soviet era textbook, was translated as part of a series of significant works on Russian works on the humanities and social sciences.

This book dispels the widely-held view that paganism survived in Russia alongside Orthodox Christianity, demonstrating that 'double belief', dvoeverie, is in fact an academic myth. Scholars, citing the medieval origins of the term, have often portrayed Russian Christianity as uniquely muddied by paganism, with 'double-believing' Christians consciously or unconsciously preserving pagan traditions even into the twentieth century. This volume shows how the concept of dvoeverie arose with nineteenth-century scholars obsessed with the Russian 'folk' and was perpetuated as a propaganda tool in the Soviet period, colouring our perception of both popular faith in Russian and medieval Russian culture for over a century. It surveys the wide variety of uses of the term from the eleventh to the seventeenth century, and contrasts them to its use in modern historiography, concluding that our modern interpretation of dvoeverie would not have been recognized by medieval clerics, and that 'double-belief' is a modern academic construct. Furthermore, it offers a brief foray into medieval Orthodoxy via the mind of the believer, through the language and literature of the period.