Нора в русских былинах

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to comprehensively analyze the lexeme nora in Russian epics and to determine its role in the mythopoetic model of the world. A special research method has been developed — a scheme for describing an epic word, which arose on the basis of a thesaurus description of a folklore word and lexicological studies of a number of key concepts in other archaic traditions that have undergone fundamental processing. It consists of several blocks: phonomorphological, textual, extralinguistic, grammatical, etymological, derivational, semantic, syntactic and poetic. Нора is attested in epics about Dobrynya and the snake, mainly in plur., such a significant predominance of which is not accidental: many holes serve to mark the entrances to the other world, which they collectively form. Accus. is the most frequent case, realized in the construction to go into a hole / holes, describing the motif of the hero’s penetration into the snake’s underground possessions. The synonyms of the hole are an open field, denoting in epics an alien and dangerous space not controlled by the heroes, and the damp earth with its recesses, which are directly related to the lower world with its chthonic inhabitants (snake); antonyms are home and Kiyev-grad, to which it is opposed as chaos, undeveloped space to the developed, unsocialized locus to the society. The attributes of the hole mark the possessor (snake) and the most essential property of the abyss as the lower zone of the universe (deep). Нора finds an attraction to the mythological motif of snake-fighting in the “basic myth”; нора (< Indo-E. *ner-, nor-) has analogies in other Indo-European designations of the other world.