E-mail: hermitage2005@yandex.ru
Tel.: +7 (8142) 78-18-86
11, Pushkinskaya str., Petrozavodsk, 185910, Russian Federation
PhD in Philology, Senior Researcher, Institute of Linguistics, Literature, and History, the Karelian Research Center, Russian Academy of Sciences
The research was supported financially from the federal budget for the implementation of the state assignment of the Karelian Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences (No. 124022000077-1).
This publication presents folklore materials from the archives of the Karelian Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In the 1970s and 1980s, folklorists from the Center tape-recorded three prose versions of the rare ballad about Jovo and Mara. The lyrics are of Serbian origin; the ballad was first published by Vuk Karadžić. It was translated into Russian by A. Kh. Vostokov, N. F. Shcherbina, A. Akhmatova and P. Erastov. The ballad entered Russian folk culture thanks to the translation by Shcherbina. It was his poem that was sung or retold, although it did not receive wide distribution. Traces of the ballad in the Russian North were discovered by A. F. Gil’ferding in the nineteenth century. By the end of the twentieth century, the ballad circulated in the form of a prose retelling. This article publishes three versions of the work with commentary; it notes the similarities and differences between the oral version and Shcherbina’s literary text and offers explanations for some of the “dark spots” of the retelling.
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