Abstract
The study is based on the material of folklore and ethnographic expeditions of 2013–2018 to the Smolensk and Bryansk regions of Russia and the Mogilev and Vitebsk regions of Belarus, in terms of the international project “Belarusian-Russian ethnocultural interaction in a transboundary perspective”. The author considered a complex of folklore texts (mythological stories, prohibitions, prescriptions) and practices associated with various characters, positioned as magic specialists — sorcerers, folk healers, fortune-tellers. The paper presents local nominations of magic specialists, the actions they perform, the principles of folk classification of such characters, highlights the key motifs of narratives about them and the social functions of spreading such stories. The author introduces similar materials from other regions — both geographically close (Polessye) and geographically more remote (Russian North, Siberia) — to identify the local (actually borderline) specifics. An analysis of the expeditionary data shows that the principles of separating harmful and helping magical specialists are situationally determined: one should not talk about the existence of two clearly defined classes of characters in the folklore tradition of the borderline, but rather about perceptions according to which there are people endowed with magical abilities, capable — depending, for example, from personal likes and dislikes — both harm and help. The data of modern expeditions to the Belarusian-Russian borderland demonstrate the stability of traditional folklore motifs in stories about magical specialists and their performance has significant functions of social regulation in small communities.
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