Legendary tales about saints in Tatar folklore

Abstract

The relevance of the research topic is the cultural and social need to comprehend one of the Tatar history and culture key phenomena in terms of holiness and subjects, reflecting the image of “the saint”, the tasks of restoring the people’s spiritual values, the most important ones for the moral education of modern society, as well as the need to replenish knowledge about the specific features of folk spirituality and folk beliefs. The object of the study is Tatar legendary tales about saints. The subject of the study is the image of a saint and motifs about saints in Tatar legendary tales. The purpose of the work is to identify the features, reflecting the image of the saint in Tatar tales, and the prerequisites, forming the basis of the holiness phenomenon. The research task of the article is to review legendary tales about saints, determine their genre features and identify the specific features of reflecting religious trends in modern folk thinking based on the transformation of the image of a saint and ideas of holiness in the oral folk art of the Tatars living in different regions of Russia.The article concludes that the characters of the tales are endowed with holiness due to their sincere faith in God, a feeling of sincere love for him, they do not pursue the goal of demonstrating their abilities.