Stikh Umilitelen and Its Folk Versions: A Syllabic-Accentual Interpretation of Literary Syllabic Verse

Abstract

This paper examines a folklore interpretation of literary culture at the verse level. The author studies the structural transformation of syllabic text in a culture in which the syllabic-accentual system of versification has become standard. This is what makes the study innovative, as, traditionally, comparative studies focus on images and motifs. The goal of the research is to identify the prerequisites, directions, and mechanisms of the folklorisation of literary verse. It refers to several editions of a syllabic poem dating back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and folk versions of this text that existed in the Russian north, known as Stikh Umilitelen (About Death, On Life Ending, etc.). The author uses audio recordings of folk texts made during expeditions, which makes it possible to get a more accurate idea of the norms of folk accentuation. The analysis is carried out at a multidisciplinary level, involving literary studies, folk studies, and linguistics. The author carries out a comparative description of the literary and folk texts. He also provides a metrical analysis based on methods and approaches suggested by M. L. Gasparov and T. V. Skulacheva and uses the rules and techniques of the study of folk verse developed by J. Bailey. Additionally, the article describes the basic structural features of the literary syllabic poem, identifies the main parameters of the transformation of syllabic verse into syllabicaccentual verse, and discusses the techniques and possible structural prerequisites of folklorisation in both the literary and folk traditions.