КАК ИСТОРИЯ СТАНОВИТСЯ ФОЛЬКЛОРОМ: МЕХАНИЗМЫ ФОЛЬКЛОРИЗАЦИИ ИСТОРИЙ О ВОЙНЕ И ХОЛОКОСТЕ

Abstract

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries folklorists used to believe that folklore can be a historical source. But soon this belief was refuted, and any attempts to correlate folklore and reality began to look unscientific and even ridiculous for many years. Folklore texts began to be spoken of as stable structures in which the narrative pattern dominates the details. However, the corpus of folklore texts about recent historical events, such as the Great Patriotic War and the Holocaust, is still being formed in our time. Based on interviews dedicated to the memory of the occupation and collected during expeditions to Rostov-on-Don, the Bryansk region and the North Caucasus, we described two mechanisms by which the narrative of real events turns into quasi-historical folklore narratives. The first folklorization mechanism is adding specific details to evoke strong emotions in the listener and force him to pass the text on. The second mechanism that distinguishes the evidence from the quasi-historical folklore narrative is the “moral” message contained in the text. In such stories, the perpetrators always are punished, and the people who have acted right are rewarded.