FOLKLORE AS A TERM OF CULTURAL STUDIES.

FOLKLORE AS A TERM OF CULTURAL STUDIES.

Proposed by M.S. Kagan's theoretical concept of the "system of subcultures" allows to summarize in a new way what was developed by the humanities of the XX century. characteristics of folklore. Concretised on the material of European medieval culture, the concept of M.S. The kagana is also productive for the comprehension of culture in subsequent eras, as well as for the culture of modern urbanized civilizations. At the same time, of course, the subculture highlighted by the author "peasant, folklore" in the culture of the Middle Ages cannot be automatically transferred to the entire process of cultural development.

The familiar and still widespread idea of ​​folklore as part of traditional peasant culture is fair and significant in relation to feudal society and for the remaining layers of culture in the peasant environment during subsequent periods in the history of society, as well as partly for modern times, as is convincingly evidenced some generalizing works of ethnographers, folklorists and art critics of the 20th century, as well as new field research, video and tape recordings of folklore, for example, in such centers of traditional culture as the Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian Polesie, Transcarpathia, the Balkan Peninsula and in other protected areas of Europe.

But turning to other materials and authoritative works prompts the objective cultural historian to significantly expand the understanding of folklore as a whole, not limited to traditional peasant culture. The creative activity of various groups of the urban population is no less important for understanding the social nature and forms of folklore, as well as its functioning. This process, which originated in the work of the medieval urban plebs, artisan people who broke with agrarian labor, was especially clearly manifested in the urban carnival culture of the Renaissance, studied in the famous book by M.M. Bakhtin in mass celebrations and amusements of "common people" in the cities of Russia and Ukraine XIX - early. XX centuries, and the game element captured here all segments of the urban population. This phenomenon has been studied, in particular, by Russian art critics, theater experts and folklorists of different generations., Up to the works of the 1990s.

So what, folklore can be considered the rural subculture and creativity of the "common people" of cities? Yes, but not only that. Here we enter the most extensive cultural space. Developing the logical concept of the "system of subcultures", it should be said that folklore as a subculture as a whole is created by any social and ethnic community, any group or any collective that feel the need for "informal" self-expression, in communication between their constituent individuals and in the transmission of works of their creativity other groups and collectives (solidarity or opposition). In cases of opposition of these groups to the existing social and political system, the ruling class, the party in power, the folklore subculture acquires the character of “grassroots” dissidence and dissent.

Experts refer to folklore as amateur creativity of any professional (by occupation) environment - the creativity of miners, hunters, raftsmen, fishing artels, etc. In the same sense, it is customary to talk about student folklore, about the folklore of tourists and climbers, about the folklore of soldiers and sailors, about Cossack marching songs and about the folklore of different types of Cossacks as a whole as a military class, in our time - about the folklore of participants in the battles in Afghanistan (us I happened to listen and record songs from different people who were being treated at the clinic of the Military Medical Academy in the 1980s).

A peculiar part of the folklore subculture is the folklore of the former penal servitude and exile in Russia, prison songs, created later - the folklore of the GULAG of the Soviet era, collected and published by St. Petersburg folklorists (V.S.Bakhtin and others). the so-called “robbery” songs were the subject of special folkloristic studies in Russia, as well as the typologically similar multi-genre folklore of “robbers”, “opryshkov” and similar cycles of legends, songs and dances in the folklore of other peoples. A special group is made by the creativity of people of the "bottom", "thieves songs", refrain of street children.

A large layer in the culture of many peoples of the middle of the XX century. formed the folklore of the Second World War: front-line, partisan, refugees, anti-fascist Resistance in the occupied countries of Western Europe, folklore of uprisings in the ghetto, folklore of different ideologically and political orientations of patriotic forces in Poland, the Balkans, Western Ukraine, the Carpathians. This layer has been studied by folklorists from many countries, but it needs new objective research.

Of undoubted interest is the folklore of the population of the USSR in the era of mass repressions, anti-Soviet jokes, sayings, ditties, as well as a series of anecdotes like “about Chapaev”, “Armenian radio”, the folklore of the dissident movement in different countries, modern political jokes, etc.

A special part of the folklore subculture is non-canonical creativity of various confessional communities (legends and legends of the Old Believers - "schismatics" and songs of sectarians in Russia, Hussite songs in the Czech Republic, songs of tradition, legends of monasticism, in particular, in various monastic courtyards of Athos). And the official church itself was not free from apocryphal legends, from non-canonical chants ...

It is appropriate to recall that both in the past and in modern humanities, the term "folklore" is used in very different meanings: in the narrowest one as "the art of the spoken word", and in others - more or less restrictive, denoting one or another volume of its constituent types and forms. On the other hand, it is often identified with the most general concept of "folk art" or concretized as part of folk art culture. There is nothing reprehensible in the discrepancies of specialists in their views. The trouble lies elsewhere - often terminological disputes have a formal, if not to say - scholastic nature, obscure the essence of the real problem - the need to distinguish between the system of culture and its subsystems, different relationships ("levels") of structures that make up a particular integrity, as well as the need for definition of the concept of "people", understanding of its social and ethnic characteristics changing from era to era.

I will not discuss here all the various definitions of the concept of folklore, this is the prerogative of folklore as a special science [5]. We do not share the categorical statement, all the more strange in the mouths of the leaders of the Republican Center for Russian Folklore under the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, the statement about the need for "reorientation in the study of folklore from folklore and art history to history and sociology". I am convinced that the tasks and possibilities of folklore studies are far from being exhausted. Of course, folklore can be an object of other sciences, the subject of interdisciplinary research. But this should not lead to the absorption of folklore studies by any other science. And this article should not be considered as a rejection of the professional study of folklore. It is nothing more than an application for participation in the discussion of a culturological approach to folklore.

I will trace one tendency in the history of science, including in folklore, which is important for substantiating the possibility of a broad culturological concept of folklore.

The ambiguity of the term "folklore" was predetermined from the very beginning, shortly after this concept was proposed by the English cultural historian William Thoms under the pseudonym A. Merton (in 1846), especially when the Folklore Society, founded in 1870 (Folk- Lore Society) formulated two meanings of the term: as "ancient manners, customs, rituals and ceremonies of past eras, turned into superstitions and traditions of the lower classes of civilized society" and, in a broader sense, as "a set of forms of the unwritten history of the people." In the same place we read: “We can say that folklore embraces the entire culture of the people, which was not used in official religion and history, but which is and which was always his own work”.

Many scientists from Great Britain, the USA, Latin America, France, Germany, Belgium and other countries began to use the term in the universal meaning of “folk knowledge” and “folk traditions”. The sociological trend, founded by A. Varanyak and A. Marinu, embraced the entire complex of artifacts of folk culture. In Scandinavia and Finland, folklore is defined as collective traditional knowledge transmitted through word and action. In Russia, introduced into everyday life by E. Anichkov, A. Veselovsky, V. Lamansky, V. Lesevich in the 1890s - early. XX century, the term overcame the limitation of the subject with the usual concepts of "folk poetry", "folk literature".

In the 1920s - 1930s. in Soviet science, a serious discussion flared up on the topic "What is folklore?" There were two fundamentally different positions opposed. Some scientists - V. Zhirmunsky, E. Kagarov, O. Freidenberg focused their attention on relic elements of folk culture in general. Others - M. Azadovsky, N. Andreev, Yu. Sokolov, N. Kravtsov perceived folklore as oral verbal creativity capable of innovations. In the following decades, theoretical thought in Europe and the Soviet Union increasingly turned to an expansive interpretation of folklore.

Finally, on March 1, 1985, a special Meeting of the Committee of Governmental Experts at UNESCO from different states adopted the following detailed definition: “Folklore (in a broad sense, traditional and widespread culture) is <...> tradition-based creativity of groups or individuals, reflecting expectations (hopes ) the community, which is an adequate expression of its cultural and social identity. Folklore norms and values ​​are transmitted orally, by imitation or in other ways. Its forms include, among others, language, spoken language, music, dance, games, mythology, rituals, customs, crafts, architecture and other arts ”.

We are not satisfied with everything in this definition (in particular, the absence of indications of the development of folklore, the evolution of its traditional forms, the absence of a statement of the fact of the emergence of new types and forms of creativity). Doubt is raised by the wording “other arts”: in reality, both in traditional and modern culture, especially in mass innovation, not everything takes on an artistic form. The question of the relationship in folklore of the aesthetic function with other functions remains controversial, although P.G. Bogatyrev clearly wrote about the polyfunctionality of folklore and even characterized a number of specific non-aesthetic functions. The multifunctionality of folklore is especially important to take into account in its cultural study.

To understand the dynamics of folklore as a subculture, it is not enough to consider any of its types in an arbitrarily chosen historical segment. It is advisable to trace its development in different epochs and consider its fate in our time. Let us try to do this by the example of one of the characteristic phenomena of festive culture, specifically by the example of the spring holiday, known to many peoples as carnival and typologically similar holidays that have received different names from different peoples.

Genetically associated with an archaic agrarian-magical rite that produces fertility, the carnival among the peoples of the Romanesque language family inherited some of the traditions of ancient Roman holidays (Saturnalia and liturnalia), but was formed among the peoples of Europe and acquired its characteristic features in the late Middle Ages. On the whole, being in this era a symbolic reflection of the changing seasons (transition from winter to spring), the carnival acquired an ambivalent meaning (“death fraught with life,” according to M. Bakhtin). This explains a number of customs that accompanied the holiday - abundant ritual food, signs of fertility, the appearance of characters. The central image is more often a symbolic figure (stuffed animal), less often a mummer; the image is endowed with a grotesque characteristic (a fat man is a glutton with hypertrophied male characteristics, or an old man and an old woman who personify winter). Fools and various types of mummers played a prominent role in the actions. The holiday was dominated by erotic and farcical elements. This was facilitated by the buffoon scenes of the "birth" of the Carnival (or the character under other names), the election of the "king" of the holiday (previously also the "king of fools"), the scene of the trial of this character, his accusatory monologues addressed to the "judges", his "will "To the public. The culmination of the holiday was: a scene of the victory of Lent over a passive character with the participation of Death and the Doctor, an episode of his “send-off” (execution, burning, drowning), often a parody scene of a “funeral” according to the church rite (with the participation of the corresponding clerical masks, “undertakers”, a choir ).

Spreading in all the countries of Western Europe, and then in the Balkans, in Eastern Europe, in Russia, in Ukraine, in Belarus ("carnival"), the holiday absorbed many elements of local pre-Christian culture, acquired peculiar ethnic features from each nation, gradually lost its original ritual -magic function. A specific description of the holiday based on materials collected mainly in the 19th - early 20th centuries, is widely and completely for many peoples contained in the collective work "Spring Holidays" (Moscow, 1977) in Russian (with an extensive bibliography in foreign languages), which has not lost its cognitive value ), in the works of Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovak, Serbian, Croatian, Hungarian, German researchers. These descriptions do not so much reconstruct the early stages of the spread of the holiday as they record the nature of the celebration in different nations that has changed by the new time. In modern times, types of entertainment and play culture that were not related to its original meaning were timed to the holiday (for example, in Russia, a puppet theater like "Petrushka", performances in booths, monologues and dialogues called out - "grandfathers" on the balconies of the booth, peddlers' races, carousels and so on). Not only the original type of traditional culture itself changed, but also new forms of culture were layered and adapted. The nature of laughter has changed significantly: it has lost its magical function and acquired a social and everyday orientation.

The last stage in the evolution of the spring holiday is taking place before our eyes. Being “reborn” in many countries (in Italy, for example, since the late 1980s), not spontaneously, but through the efforts of more or less competent organizers, carnivals and typologically similar forms among different nations have turned into spectacles for modern city dwellers and foreign tourists ... In Russia, not always successful attempts are made to reproduce Maslenitsa festivities and amusements. The activity of authentic folklore and ethnographic ensembles is expanding. Groups of professional folklorists and students themselves no longer seek to give their performances in the open air or on the stage a ritual and magical meaning, but carry out the educational and aesthetic task of acquainting the public with genuine folklore works. These performances attract numerous spectators and listeners, who only in rare cases (in squares and city streets) are involved in a common action (mainly children). Sometimes the Maslenitsa rite or its fragments are reproduced at folklore festivals (not necessarily timed to coincide with the days of the Maslenitsa itself).

Thus, the described type of traditional folklore is being transformed into a specific type of folklorism, which has become generally a characteristic form of modern subculture. It is necessary to distinguish between commercial folklorism as an element of the "tourism industry", as a phenomenon of modern mass culture (negatively assessed by authoritative scholars G. Moser, G. Bauzinger, K. Köstlin, D. Antonievich, M. Bashkovich-Stulli, etc.) and, on the other sides - productive forms of truly creative folklorism as an organic process of adaptation, transformation and reproduction of folklore in the culture of modern society, as convincingly written by Czech and Slovak scientists O. Sirovatka, M. Leszczak. S. Schweglak, Hungarian theoretician W. Voigt, German cultural historian G. Strobach and others. Both of these types of folklorism - commercial and creative - are manifested in the experiments of recreation of carnival-type holidays, which makes them relevant for comparative cultural studies.

Unfortunately, while the problem of folklorism has been the subject of many studies and discussions in Western and Central Europe since the early 1960s, Soviet science, in essence, ignored this problem, despite the fact that V.M. Zhirmunsky in the preface to the first volume of "History of Russian folklore" by M.K. Azadovsky (1958) designated the term "folklorism as a" broad social phenomenon "associated with" the struggle around the interpretation and use of folklore in the everyday life of Russian literature and culture. " Soviet scientists in the 1930s - 1980s, moving away from the broad interpretation of folklorism that was outlined in Russian science, limited themselves to one of its types - the "folklore interests of writers" (the formula of MK Azadovsky) and literary critics. The term itself is absent in Soviet encyclopedic dictionaries and appeared for the first time in the additional (!), 9th volume of the Brief Literary Encyclopedia (1978). Such a long one-sided coverage of the problem was a consequence of the prevailing narrow, literary-centric perception of folklore as "the art of the spoken word."

The process that we noted with the example of the spring holiday is typical in our time for other traditional folk rituals and holidays (with the exception, perhaps, only of Christmastide) and in general for many types of traditional folklore in general. The easiest way was to interpret this phenomenon as a regression of folk culture, but, in our opinion, it can be objectively considered as a natural replacement of one type of subculture by another type of subculture that creates new values. Therefore, folklorism in its entirety can become the subject of the closest attention.

In conclusion, we will try to determine the main common features of various phenomena (from an archaic rite to a modern anecdote), which are combined into a special type of subculture. Regardless of the time, environment and place of origin, these phenomena are characterized primarily by the fact that they express the need of certain collectives and groups for informal self-expression and mutual communication. They are the result of collective creativity (if they arise at the initiative of the individual, break away from him and become the property of one or another community, undergoing more or less transformation, variation).

They are characterized, as a rule, by the temporary coincidence of creation and public performance, as well as the transfer of artifacts from one community to another and from generation to generation, which makes them traditional. The life of many artifacts, as a rule, is long, but their latent existence is also possible, which leads to the revival of artifacts that have disappeared from everyday life or forgotten artifacts after a generation (from grandfathers to grandchildren), or even after several generations (a fact established by an outstanding Spanish folklorist academician Menendez Pidal and confirmed repeatedly in our time). The phenomena of folklore subculture are inherent in the ability to self-development, renewal, actualization. Finally, it should be noted that this subculture is included in the continuous process of development of culture as a whole, it functions as a part of the system, is in different connections with other subsystems, is capable of borrowing new forms of culture and ways of transferring its experience and values. At the same time, it was and remains a "grassroots" culture, which, however, does not diminish its importance in public life.

List of references.

1.        Bogatyrev P.G. Artistic means in humorous fair folklore // Questions of the theory of folk art. M., 1971;

2.        Bogatyrev P.G. Questions of the theory of folk art. M., 1971.

3.        Chicherov V.I. Winter period of the Russian folk agricultural calendar of the 16th-19th centuries. (Essays on the history of folk beliefs). M., 1957;

4.        Chistov K.V. Folk traditions and folklore. Essays on Theory. L., 1986;

5.        Gusev V.E. Russian folk art culture (Theoretical essays). SPb., 1993.

6.        Honko L. 1) Four forms of adaption of tradition // Studia Fennica. Vol. 26. Helsinki 1981;

7.        Kagan M.S. Philosophy of culture. SPb., 1996.

8.        Kagarov E.G. What is folklore // Art folklore. T. 4-5. L., 1929;

9.        Kargin A.S., Khrenov N.A. Folklore and the crisis of society. M., 1993.

10.    Nekrasova M.A. Folk art as part of culture. M., 1983;

11.    Newsletter / Published by Nordic institute of Folklore. Turku, 1987

12.    Propp V.Ya. Russian agrarian holidays. L., 1963;

13.    Rozhdestvenskaya S. B. Russian folk art tradition in modern society. M., 1981;

14.    Zhirmunsky V.M. Problems of folklore // Sergei Fedorovich Oldenburg. For the fiftieth anniversary and scientific and social activities. L., 1934;

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