Folklore in the Handwritten Albums of Yerevan Schoolgirls as a Manifestation of Urban Youth Subculture

Abstract

In the last decades of the last century, the culture of keeping handwritten scrapbooks was widespread among urban schoolgirls. These scrapbooks are considered one of the small forms of urban and rural folklore of the recent Soviet past and have become an object of study by folklorists and anthropologists. This type of handwritten folklore has been widely studied in the works of foreigners, especially Russian theorists. It is usually referred to as post-folklore or subculture (Neklyudov). Various manifestations of adolescent behavior can be found in these manuscript albums: from rebelliousness to touching lyricism, from magical in-nature guessing games to sociological questionnaires. The predominant texts in these handwritten albums are lyrical texts consisting of couplets, quatrains, and rarely six verses, close to ditties. These small rhyming texts were recorded, memorized, and supplemented by friends and classmates. The tradition of girls’ albums survives today but is perceived as a relic of the Soviet era. These days, young people prefer to use social networks to express themselves. What is the Odnoklassniki portal but an electronic handwritten album? If modern folklore is actively and purposefully studied abroad, in the Armenian reality there are practically no serious studies on the topic so far. The main material of this study is schoolgirls’ notebooks created in Yerevan in the 80–90s of the 20th century, as well as materials recorded by the author from the former albums’ owners. Schoolgirls of this generation are now mature women, some of whom still lovingly keep their school handwritten albums. The article deals with the peculiarities of the folklore of girls’ school albums in Yerevan, the period and medium of their existence, and their genre-thematic manifestations, structure, and contents. The author pays most attention to the poetics of girls’ scrapbooks folklore, which is peculiar to urban schoolchildren. Such issues as bilingualism, thematic layers of these lyrical texts, expression of love feelings in them, attitude to friendship, school, studies, advice about love and life, relations with the older generation, and others are studied. Folklore formulas, allegorical expressions, and fortune-telling games characteristic of school-age psychology are also examined.