Spring Man: A Belief Legend between Folklore and Popular Culture, by Petr Janeček

Slavic myths increasingly survive in people’s consciousness as supernatural elements or as literary characters rather than as real beliefs in their existence. Adult readers in Poland and Slovakia, for example, encounter Slavic supernatural beings in the fantasy literature book series such as Wiedźmin by Andrzej Sapkowski and Černokňažník by Juraj Červenák; however, literature cannot be expected to portray superstitions and demons in the same way as belief legends. Placing Sapkowski’s and Červenák’s works within the context of ethnographically recorded beliefs illuminates various aspects of intercultural and intertextual relationships within the literary setting. This article shows that there are several types of literary adaptation of Slavic myths: adaptation in accordance with folk beliefs, denial of superstitions, incorporating a folk myth in order to create an illusion, and using the name of a demon while also adding characteristics from other sources – especially from popular culture.

ebook). Petr Janeček's Spring Man: A Belief Legend between Folklore and Popular Culture is a comprehensive study of an urban folklore character from his appearance in 1919 in Bohemia to his current form in popular culture as a symbol of Czech nationalism, the working class, and social activism. Janeček covers the origins, appearances, behaviors, and functions of Spring Man [Czech, pérák] who appeared in legends largely in urban areas throughout the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. Janeček maintains that the idea of the Spring Man of folklore as a WWII resistance fighter arose from post-war literature and ideologically based scholarship and creative work and that Spring Man was morally ambiguous rather than heroic. While tales about Spring Man as a resistance fighter exist, far more common are tales in which he terrorizes the populace or attacks women. The one consistent characteristic in the tales is Spring Man's ability to escape, usually by leaping away. The reader is introduced to Spring Man in three vignettes intended to show the metamorphosis of Spring Man from monster to hero. The first, set in Prague in 1945 during the German Protectorate period, describes a boy returning home at night who sees a "dark figure… bounding down from the hill's crest with unnaturally high leaps" (1). The boy recognizes him because of his appearance: dressed in black and masked, and, most importantly, wearing shoes with springs in the soles. Frightened because he has heard stories about Spring Man's attacks on innocent people, the boy crouches next to his gate. As Spring Man passes the terrified boy, he grimaces at him and lets out a sound like the "bark of a rutting deer" (2). The second vignette describes the 1965 screening of the animated film Spring Man and the SS (1946). Children and teens are enthralled by the film and create games featuring the Czech superhero fighting the Nazis or attempt to mimic him by attaching springs to their shoes. The third vignette depicts a 2015 social action by an anonymous person purporting to be Spring Man, who criticizes the Czech nation for hypocrisy in commemorating Auschwitz while ignoring the former concentration camp in Lety which was the location of a pig farm at the time of the action. Janeček provides these vignettes as snapshots of the transformation of an urban legend into a principled superhero. The book's first chapter provides personal accounts and newspaper reports about Spring Man from 1919 through the 1970s. These legends first appeared in the mining and laboring regions of Bohemia and proliferated throughout Protectorate-era Czech lands during the later years of WWII. Many of the tales were collected by Janeček and his colleagues from informants who were children at the time the legends and rumors about Spring Man were circulating. Chapter

Spring Man: A Belief Legend between Folklore and Popular Culture deconstructs the nationalistic myth of Spring Man that was created after the Second World War in visual culture and literature and presents his original form as an ambiguous, ghostly denizen of oral culture. Petr Janecek analyzes the archetypal character, social context, and cultural significance of this fascinating phenomenon with the help of dozens of accounts provided by period eyewitnesses, oral narratives, and other sources. At the same time, the author illustrates the international origin of the tales in the originally British migratory legend of Spring-heeled Jack that reaches back to the second-third of the nineteenth century, and Janecek also draws parallels between the Czech myth of Spring Man and similar urban phantom narratives popular in the 1910s Russia, 1940s United States and Slovakia, and 1950s Germany, as well as other parts of the world.