The Biography of Folklore Collector Helliodore Rusov and His Collection of Tales in “The Olonets Provincial Gazette”

Альманах
Key words
biographical research, provincial folklorists, tales, Olonets Provincial Gazette, Manchuria, Kharbin
Author
Daria D. Abrosimova
About the Author
Дhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-3227-8069
E-mail: abrosimova@kizhi.karelia.ru Tel.: + 7 (8142) 79-98-57
10a, Kirov sq., Petrozavodsk, 185035, Russian Federation
Researcher, Kizhi State Open-Air Museum of History, Architecture and Ethnography
Received
Date of publication
DOI
https://doi.org/10.26158/TK.2023.24.2.004
Body

One of the trends of contemporary folklore research is the study of provincial folklorists’ biographies, as well as their work collecting and publishing folklore. This article presents one such biography based on newly obtained archival materials concerning Helliodore Rusov, a veterinarian by profession. Rusov’s biography is quite unusual because of his many changes of residence; he moved from one corner of the Russian empire to another, and after the Revolution of 1917, left the country altogether. As a folklore collector, Rusov published two selections of texts in “The Olonets Provincial Gazette”, one of spells and the other of tales. The latter is a genre of folklore rarely published in periodicals from Olonets province. Together with a biographical study of Rusov, the article discusses the place of these tales’ plots within the Russian tradition. The author finds that among them there are not only common ones but also those that are rare and deserving of further study

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For citation

D. D. The Biography of the Folklore Collector Helliodore Rusov and His Collection of Tales in “The Olonets Provincial Gazette”. Traditional Culture. 2023. Vol. 24. No. 2. Pp. 55–64. In Russian.