Критерии характеристики жанра богатырской сказки и основные отличия богатырских сказок от образцов эпоса*

Abstract

The article examines the correlation between the heroic epic and heroic fairy tales. In many traditions, the two folklore forms are close enough to one another and manifest a number of similarities. The problem brought up is essential to both genre identification of some text patterns and to further discussions over historical interconections between heroic fairy tales and the epic. It is believed that the heroic fairy tale could have been the form to have directly preceded the early epic patterns or had been on of such forms. Nowadays, scholars note that in certain cases the heroic fairy tale is a result of recent transformation of epic forms to have emerged due to weakened positions of the epic within the existing tradition, reduction in the number of epic patterns as such, progressive loss of epic performance techniques, etc. The paper expresses the opinion that both the epic and the fairy tale — and the heroic fairy tale in particular – had emerged and existed as independent forms with differing attitudes towards the depicted realities: fairy tales are obviously fictitious narratives, while epic texts can potentially describe true events. The generous 2017 publication of Kalmyk heroic fairy tales makes it possible to outline the key features of such tales and — even more important — to identify essential differences between the genre and epic patterns, namely that of the Jangar. The analysis conducted has shown that structures of Kalmyk heroic fairy tales are more diverse as compared to the introduced (delineated) plot models: many of the declared elements have not been found in the examined texts, and not all fairy tale motifs have been clustered in corresponding models; some features once referred to as those to characterize heroic fairy tales can be attributed to Jangar songs as well. Within the Kalmyk folklore tradition, such heroic tales do retain certain essentially distinct features in relation to the Jangar, though remaining comparable enough in terms of plots and motifs. The article emphasizes both common genre differences between the Jangar and heroic tales, and differences between the forms within the Kalmyk tradition. The multiple common elements of heroic tales and the Jangar (poetic techniques, motifs, formulas, etc.) are attributable to the process of intercommunion between the differing — though semantically similar — forms. The fairy tale versions of Gesar and Jangar songs included in the corpus of Kalmyk heroic fairy tales look like quite recent trasformations of epic patterns. The Jangar and heroic tales are approximately similarly abundant in Buddhist realia which signifies their traditional unity; but Jangar songs still contain pre-Buddhist religious beliefs. The study concludes that the genre group of heroic tales basically retains the structure pattern inherent to the magic fairy tale and determined following V. Propp’s functions; the main character of heroic tales is more individualistic in his deeds and goals as compared to epic heroes, and unlike the case with Jangar Bogdo, such fairy tale heroes bear no function of social organization.