Small Genres of Pottery Folklore in the Published Works of the Institute of Art Studies, Folklore and Ethnography in the 1950s – Early 1960s

Abstract

Extermination of a whole range of academicians together with a number of specialized institutions and organizations, practice of suppression of their achievements and science submission to the ideology could not help but be affected negatively the state of ceramological studies. After World War II, the Ukrainian Soviet science has been dominated solely by the Art Studies approach to the pottery research with its inherent interpretation of the spiritual culture as something secondary, inconsequential and contrasted to artistic, technological, social, economic, biographical aspects primarily. It has caused the loss of scientific traditions started by several generations of ethnologists, folklorists, mythologists and culturologists. The specialists in Art Studies and Ceramology only occasionally have paid attention to craftsmen folklore, subsequently losing numerous possibilities to study it when handicraft production and memories on it starts to disappear. Still, compilation and publication of folklore works about potters, pottery traders, wirers and earthenware have been continued in spite of all the obstacles. Due to the Institute of Art Studies, Folklore and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic chaired by Maksym Rylskyi, the head of the Writers’ Union of the Ukrainian SSR, a neoclassical poet, an academician of the AS of the Ukrainian SSR, a circle of folklore collectors has been formed uniting professional folklorists, educational specialists, figures of culture and art, writers. The emergence of the academic book series Ukrainian Folk Art and a popular series Library of the Ukrainian Oral Folklore is considered as an important success introducing new or previously unpublished archive texts about potters, pottery traders, wirers, earthenware. They have enriched greatly the source base of ceramological studies. Valentyna Bobkova, Fedir Lavrov, Halyna Sukhobrus, Yosyp and Alla Bahmut, Ivan Berezovskyi have paid attention to small forms of folklore such as proverbs, sayings, riddles about potters and pottery craft. These editions of phraseologisms and riddles manifesting richness and inexhaustibility of the folk language have influenced significantly the development of the Ukrainian literature of that time, in particular the genre of bizarre prose.