Folklore as Evidence of Peasant Mentalite: Social Attitudes and Values in Russian Popular Culture

Abstract

The study of has recently been elevated from its former lowly status on the margins of undergraduate language and syllabuses to the very forefront of new approaches to social history. Previously regarded as having little more than curiosity value to the antiquarian historian, has become an important source of evidence for the histoire des mentalites pioneered by French scholars of the Annales school. In the English-speaking world, too, the annalistes' concern with the attitudes and values of the ordinary people of preindustrial society, and especially of the peasantry, has come to be shared by a new generation of historians of culture.2 For some, indeed, folklore is now identified with culture: the concept includes not only the oral literature of folktales and folk poetry, but also the entire body of customs, rituals, and traditional practices which comprise a culture,in the anthropological sense.3 The study of Russian peasant mentalite, however, remains a largely underdeveloped field for historians. In the USSR scholars are more inhibited by disciplinary boundaries than their Western colleagues, and research on aspects of popular culture has been largely monopolized by specialists on and ethnography.4 Such scholars, of course, have