Folklore of Ukrainian Prisoners of War of the Period of the First World War (After the Materials of the Phonogram Archives of the Austrian Academy of Sciences)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of a large-scale anthropological project initiated in 1915 by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. It is provided, in particular, for the phonographic fixation of the examples of spoken language of war prisoners of various nationalities who fought on the side of the Russian Empire: Armenians, Jews, Latvians, Lithuanians, Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, etc. These audio recordings, kept in the Phonogram Archives of the Austrian Academy of Sciences for more than a century, have been introduced into scientific discourse in 2018. They are encrypted and transcribed into Latin. There are the examples of folklore culture of the Ukrainians provided by 17 informants from 8 governorates of the Russian Empire of that time: Chernihiv, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Poltava, Kherson, Katerynoslav, Volyn and Voronezh. Among the list of inhabited areas, where the Ukrainian informants are originated from, we come across the infamous names of the present-day Russian-Ukrainian war: Olenivka, Bakhmut (Donetsk region), Kupiansk (Kharkiv region). Recordings have been made during July–September, 1915 and in 1916 in the war prisoners’ camps in Freistadt (Austria), Reichenberg (now Liberec, the Czech Republic) and in the Vienna hospital. They have been initiated by the famous anthropologist Rudolf Pöch (1870–1921), a native of Ternopil. He has been assisted by the Vienna language expert Hans Pollak (1885–1976) and the Ukrainian linguist and folklore specialist Ivan Pankevych (1887–1958), a graduate of the University of Vienna. Using the phonograph, these researchers have recorded the folk texts of different genres: the Cossack prayers, songs of literary origin, fairy tales (about animals and of novelistic nature), jokes, stories about the summer cycle calendar customs (in particular, about the women ritual dinner called bryksy) and dreams. The characteristic feature of these texts consists of the transformation of the song-like narrative into a prose; they are a valuable field material not only for the folklore specialists, but also for historians and linguists. Audio-recordings, provided by the Ukrainian war prisoners, form a part of 1899–1950s collection of the Phonogram Archives of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and are included into the UNESCO Register of Documentary Heritage Memory of the World / Memory of Humanity.