BELARUSIAN EPIC LEGACY OF WORLD WAR II: THE PLOT OF MATVEY PLATOV

Abstract

The article concerns issues related to the history of the development of the theory of the Belarusian epic in the Soviet science of the 1940–1950s and rethinking of some provisions and simplified assessments regarding the social nature and meaning of late traditional folk art that are common in Belarusian folklore studies. The processes of recoding and compression of the facts of the historical past in the Belarusian folklore are investigated. The work introduces the hypothesis of the epic plot of “Platov as an unknown guest of the Frenchman” being textualized in the folklore war narrative about the war of 1812. During World War II, he was transformed into the plot “The partisan commander acts in the German rear”. A conclusion is made that folk heroic-adventurous stories about Konstantin Zaslonau and the plot of Matvey Platov share the same genesis. The materials of the expeditions of 1943, 1945–1946, which were carried out by Belarusian scientists to the Polesie and Vitebsk regions of the BSSR, were used.
 It has been proven that the stories about the partisan commanders of the Second World War – Konstantin Zaslonov and Sidor Kaupak – contain elements of a heroic-adventurous and adventurous-adventure character and correspond to a number of motives of everyday fairy tales and anecdotes. The research methodology is based on structuralist approaches in epic studies.