Былинная география как пространство, размеченное смыслами

Abstract

Researching the connection between place-names and their meanings as the latter are rendered in bylinas, the author tries to disprove the widespread conceptions according to which the geography presented in Russian epic songs is treated as isolated from the reality, as based on epic singers’ erroneous associations of these or those place-names and climatic zones with the four cardinal points, etc. The author concludes that many place-names rendered in bylinas may be treated as presupposing real prototypes – if it is assumed that the bylina universe is marked similarly to the artistic world of Russian spiritual verses. The fact that many bylina plots are connected with the Latyr stone enables one to consider the Holy Land – along with Constantinople, Mount Athos (known in bylinas as “the Holy Mount”), “the Caucasian Mountains”, “the Ararat Mountains”, “the Greek Land”, and “the orochinsk Mountains” – as nearly the main setting of bylina conflicts. In the author’s opinion, so as to render bylina “metahistorical” events, it was necessary to use not certain but “universal” place-names – the ones that indicated not a historicаl event, but different events brought together by the epic consciousness on the principle of spiritual analogy (for example, the image of Kalin Tsar’s invasion may reflect either the Mongol massacre of the 13th century or the Grande Armйe’s encroachment into Russia). Thus, the place-names used in Russian folk epics were of fixed value coordinates, which, in their turn, were well-known to the traditional audience – and so could be used by the epic singer in order to influence his listeners’ value centers.