E-mail: Nikolavna@inbox.ru, Tel.: +7 (499) 181-24-62
4, 2nd Selskokhozyaystvenny pass., Moscow, 129226, Russian Federation
PhD in Philology, Docent, Professor, Department of the Philology, Research Director, Institute of the Humanities, Moscow City University;
Scientific Editor, Scholarly Almanac “Traditional Culture”
This article provides a critical review of a rare regional thematic collection of texts of different genres, “And there is no one dearer in the world than one’s own mother. Don Folklore About the Mother”, prepared in 1983 by the Don folklorist and teacher T. I. Tumilevich mainly on the basis of field materials. It presents a cross-section of works from the 1940s to the 1970s showing that living on the Don in these years one could hear paremias, non-ceremonial drawn out songs, epics, wedding and funeral songs, as well as recruitment and wedding lamentations. Tumilevich discusses the works’ genre and plot structure and identifies all-Russian traditional motifs and formulas as well as their local specifics. In connection with the thematic core of the collection, motherhood is presented as a universal though complex spiritual phenomenon; the relationship between mother and adult son is shown to be an important component. The structure of the anthology is held to represent the “life text” of a mother as illuminated in folklore. Attention is paid to the poetics of song lyrics, to the symbolism of natural imagery, in particular. The author discusses the relevance of the collection for its time and for today, and relates it to subsequent folklore research. She concludes that the material Tumilevich collected should be taken into account when doing further research on local and regional traditions, when identifying their dominant features, and when systematizing song plots from different times by their variants.
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