A. S. Stepanova’s Expeditionary Map (For the Folklorist’s Anniversary)

This article maps out the main milestones in the collecting activity of Alexandra Stepanovna Stepanova (b. 1930), a well-known Karelian folklorist. Stepanova has made an invaluable contribution to the collecting of Karelian folklore; her work fell on a period when the Karelian language was in active use, so that it was possible to record practically all genres of folklore both in Russian and in the native language of the informant. The rich fruits of her expeditions include epic and incantatory runes, Karelian yoigas, spiritual poems, fairy tales, mythological prose, various types of paremia, and a variety of song genres from ballads to “cruel romances” and chastushki. She worked at the Institute of Language, Literature and History of the Karelian Scientific Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences for almost half a century, during which time she published several folklore collections, authored a monograph and a dictionary devoted to the language of laments. Stepanova is known in Russia and abroad for her work on Karelian lamentations — an ancient genre, difficult to classify — and for her work deciphering texts and translating them into Russian, as well as for her other scholarship. The survey of Stepanova’s expeditions in this article is organized according to geographical and chronological principles. One of its key sources was an interview with the scholar that was recorded by the authors in March, 2024.