PECULIARITIES OF THE FOLK-TALE REPERTOIRE AND THE LIFE PATH OF F. P. GOSPODAREV, A BELARUSIAN (1865–1938)

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the storyteller F. P. Gospodarev (1865–1938), who was born and lived until almost forty years of age in Belarus and then, by a twist of fate, ended up in life-time exile in the former Olonets Governorate. He spent more than thirty years in Petrozavodsk, and worked for a whole ten years at the Aleksandrovsky (Onega) plant. In 1937–1938, folklorist N. V. Novikov managed to record almost the entire repertoire of the retired Gospodarev (over 100 folk-tales) under a program for collecting workers’ folklore. All the collected materials were included in a separate collection No. 62 of the Russian Fund of the Scientific Archives of the Karelian Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Gospodarev’s tales were published in Karelia in periodicals in the late 1930s and within two collective volumes: “Songs and Tales at the Onega Plant” (Petrozavodsk, 1937) and “Tales of Philip Pavlovich Gospodarev” (Petrozavodsk, 1941), which also include biographical information and portrait of the tale-teller. KarRC RAS Scientific Archives has a unique collection No. 154 dated 1980, which contains the memoirs of Gospodarev’s contemporaries (relatives, neighbors and former employees of the Onega plant) about his life in Petrozavodsk. These archival materials are undoubtedly valuable as they give a chance to see the tale-teller through the eyes of his near ones. Gospodarev’s repertoire contained all genre varieties of folk-tales. Personally, he preferred tales with novelistic and anecdotal content, and hardly ever told tales about animals. Many folk tales recorded after this performer are quite voluminous and feature a connection to literary sources (popular editions and folk-tales by A. S. Pushkin, P. P. Ershov), despite the fact that Gospodarev was illiterate.