Folk Ballads Research Articles

Review: Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, by Kimberly Mack

Review: <i>Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White</i>, by Kimberly Mack

Сучасне баладознавство на південнослов’янських наукових теренах

The analysis of still relevant problem of the lyric-epic genre of ballads functioning in the South Slavic region is suggested in the following investigation. In particular, it is planned to consider the specificity of this genre existence in the South Slavs and its analysis in the studies of scholars-folklorists, namely Serbs, Croats, Bulgarians, Bosnians, Macedonians, Slovenes. A priority area of the research concerns to terminological aspect when considering the specific features of the ballad genre. The folk ballad as a scientific problem continues to be the object of contradictions at the present time. The discussions touch on the main issues: the definition of ballad concept, its distribution, genre specificity, place in the system of folklore heritage in general and in the hierarchy of lyric and epic works in particular; the existence of international plots in the ballad, national originality of the ballads, classification of ballad works, ballads poetics, etc. In general it is difficult to determine a common chronology of ballad works existence for European countries; since the very name ballad has a historical character, it is hardly possible to speak on a single and natural scheme of development of the ballad as a folklore genre form. Terminological vagueness and uncertainty are not an accidental phenomenon here, as this denomination has been associated classically with the features that often have no clear link and genetic inheritance between them. The ballad is defined by its own genre specificity, and the researchers of South Slavic folk ballads determine common features of the ballad genre. The ballad is aimed at the depicting the private world of ordinary people, the world of human passions, reproduced in a tragic way. And, accordingly, the main attention is paid to the solution of a key conflict.

Folk ballad "Prince Mikhailo" in the context of the Russian musical and epic tradition

The article for the first time carries out a comparative study of variants of the Russian folk ballad "Prince Mikhailo" about the mother-in-law-destroyer. The study summarizes various sources of folk tunes – auditory recordings of the XIX century, publications from folklore archives of collectors of the XX century, previously unpublished folklore materials. Among them are tunes recorded in the Tver, Nizhny Novgorod, Vologda, Murmansk, and Arkhangelsk regions. The author draws attention to a little-known recording of the ballad made in the Novgorod region, and designates the role of this fact as an important evidence of the involvement of Novgorodians in the hit of "Prince Mikhailo" in the Northern Russian territories. The purpose of the study is the need to give a typological and historical assessment of the ballad tunes. A special perspective of the work is aimed at finding related musical forms in other genres of the Russian musical epic. The analysis showed that the ballad tunes recorded in various regions of Russia belong to the same musical type. It is based on a single-verse line of 8-complex composition with a choreographic ending, covering 10 or 12 musical-time units. The melodic features of the tunes testify to their fret unity associated with the narrative orientation of intonation. During the study, it was found that "Prince Mikhailo" is performed only with the melodies of the described structure. Moreover, it is the only proper ballad text assigned to this model. In Russian musical folklore, a structural type with a choreic ending was revealed (in addition to the ballad "Prince Mikhailo") in spiritual poems, tall tales, and some church hymns. The article suggests that it has developed among the Russian professional singers – buffoons and kalik pererozhikh. The role of Ancient Novgorod in the formation of a special cultural environment that contributed to the formation of these social institutions and the musical repertoire of its representatives is indicated.

Андресна функція топонімів в українських народних думах

The article analyzes the peculiarities of the functioning of toponyms in Ukrainian folk ballads. It is noted that toponyms as organic components of ballad lyrics are a source that helps to establish the time and place of the event. Ukrainian ballads appeared in the XV–XVI centuries and were created by kobza players up to and including the XX century. Ballads have always reflected reality, important social events, heroic deeds carried out in the name of the people, and therefore it is in this genre that the most reliable information about the fate of Ukraine is concentrated. Toponyms used in the context of folk ballads have an important place and meaning. This layer of vocabulary is important since it precisely reflects socio-historical events, as well as directly mirrors the people’s figurative understanding of the natural environment’s real specifics. Big cycles in the epic work consist of thoughts about the struggle against the Turkish- Tatar and Polish-noble invaders. A prominent place among the works of the heroic epic belongs to the ballads that reflect the history of Ukraine in the XX century (starting from the revolutionary events of 1905). These works are mostly devoted to specific historical events and personalities. The description of real events is impossible without an indication of the event’s place, a description of the area, and this explains the frequency of toponyms in ballad lyrics, as them perform the function of address. 115 toponyms were analyzed, among which the largest group was oykonymy (60), the group of hydronyms has 30 proper names, a slightly smaller number (25) is the group of horonyms. It was found that the frequency of use of one onym or another is primarily related to the subject and content of Ukrainian folk ballads. The central place in these epic works is the fate of Ukraine, the heroic and tragic life of Ukrainians, in this regard, the token Ukraine is a semantic center around which all the positive and negative, the glorious and tragic, is based. It is proved that one of the functions of toponyms in the texts of Ukrainian people’s ballads is address. Toponyms acquire a generalized, abstract meaning, ie the lyrics of Ukrainian folk ballads contain many toponyms, which add other meanings to their own lexicographically fixed meaning, and these meanings implicitly contain people’s attitudes to the world, environment, ie acquire for them a certain cognitive meaning. In this regard, the study of such toponyms allows us to analyze and understand the linguomentality of our people, their spirit, worldview and world perception.

At the Crossroads: The Early Modern Yiddish Folk Ballad

The present study seeks to address the main obstacle in the research of the folk song in eastern Yiddish—the lack of documentation of texts, melodies, and contexts from before the end of the nineteenth century, and the almost complete lack of reliable informants. Based on extant documentation as well as research in neighboring traditions, and conducting a dialogue with a monumental unpublished dissertation by the Soviet musicologist Sofia Magid on the folk ballad in Yiddish (1938), the article outlines three different styles in the eastern Ashkenazi balladic repertoire: the old Yiddish ballad, the German "medieval" ballad that had been absorbed into Yiddish-speaking society since the end of the eighteenth century, and the new sentimental urban ballad. The discussion focuses on the style of the songs from the first group and traces their historical development, poetics, music, social functions, performance by men/women, and interrelations with the printed songs in old Yiddish. The focus on the old ballad as a distinct phenomenon of the early modern East Ashkenazi culture is achieved through examining narrative motifs, rhythmic patterns, and melodic contours. This scrutiny reveals how the aesthetic foundations of the international ballad genre—such as impersonal contemplation of emotional responses to pivotal events in daily communal life, and openness to absorbing diverse poetic and musical elements—contributed to the formation of its premodern eastern Ashkenazi oicotype in the small towns, at the crossroads between the western European heritage, the Slavic environment, Jewish narrative and musical traditions, and the Ashkenazi way of life.

Андресна функція топонімів в українських народних думах

The article analyzes the peculiarities of the functioning of toponyms in Ukrainian folk ballads. It is noted that toponyms as organic components of ballad lyrics are a source that helps to establish the time and place of the event. Ukrainian ballads appeared in the XV–XVI centuries and were created by kobza players up to and including the XX century. Ballads have always reflected reality, important social events, heroic deeds carried out in the name of the people, and therefore it is in this genre that the most reliable information about the fate of Ukraine is concentrated. Toponyms used in the context of folk ballads have an important place and meaning. This layer of vocabulary is important since it precisely reflects socio-historical events, as well as directly mirrors the people’s figurative understanding of the natural environment’s real specifics. Big cycles in the epic work consist of thoughts about the struggle against the Turkish-Tatar and Polish-noble invaders. A prominent place among the works of the heroic epic belongs to the ballads that reflect the history of Ukraine in the XX century (starting from the revolutionary events of 1905). These works are mostly devoted to specific historical events and personalities. The description of real events is impossible without an indication of the event’s place, a description of the area, and this explains the frequency of toponyms in ballad lyrics, as them perform the function of address. 115 toponyms were analyzed, among which the largest group was oykonymy (60), the group of hydronyms has 30 proper names, a slightly smaller number (25) is the group of horonyms. It was found that the frequency of use of one onym or another is primarily related to the subject and content of Ukrainian folk ballads. The central place in these epic works is the fate of Ukraine, the heroic and tragic life of Ukrainians, in this regard, the token Ukraine is a semantic center around which all the positive and negative, the glorious and tragic, is based. It is proved that one of the functions of toponyms in the texts of Ukrainian people’s ballads is address. Toponyms acquire a generalized, abstract meaning, ie the lyrics of Ukrainian folk ballads contain many toponyms, which add other meanings to their own lexicographically fixed meaning, and these meanings implicitly contain people’s attitudes to the world, environment, ie acquire for them a certain cognitive meaning. In this regard, the study of such toponyms allows us to analyze and understand the linguomentality of our people, their spirit, worldview and world perception.

The Words ‘Laughter’ and ‘Laugh’ in a selection of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads

This paper wittily addresses the theme of laughing and laughter in eight ballads selected from Volume 1 of Gutenberg's three volume collection of English and Scottish Popular Ballads, including Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight, The Cruel Brothers, The Boy and the Mantle, The Laidley Worm, Clark Colven, The Broomfield Hill, King John and the Bishop and Captain Wedderburn’s Courtship, with a variety of other intertextual references. Drawing simultaneously on the two most comprehensive collections of English and Scottish Ballads: Francis James Child's and Steve Roud's, the paper demonstrates that laughter in ballads is "no laughing matter", and, indeed, the balladic laughter, no to be mistaken for (s)laughter, due to its social context of mediaeval times, prevails in various shades of negativity, as corroborated by Norbert Elias's sociological theory of laughter and Anca Parvulescu's study thereof. The paper provides a unique insight into the both merry and mirthless laughter prompted by a modern reading of English and Scottish folk ballads in today's cosmopolitan context.

The Instrumental Component of the Epic Genres of the Carpathian Tradition

If the context of the performance of ritual and dance music is described in detail in a number of monographs at the beginning and middle of the last century, then with descriptions of the existence of epic genres the situation is somewhat different. Most collections of epic songs contain verbal and musical texts, however, the context of the performance, the number of performers, and the instrumental component are not always described.&#x0D; The article is devoted to the epic genres of folklore of the Ukrainians of the Carpathians. The article examines the modern existence of such epic genres of Ukrainian Carpathian folklore as psalm, song-chronicle, ballad. The aim of the study is to show the epic genres of folklore of the Ukrainian Carpathians in the context of its modern existence in the Carpathian village and in connection with the instrumental tradition of the region. The study covers Eastern Galicia (Halychyna), in particular Galician Hutsulshchyna and Pokuttia (Pokucie), where the author's fieldwork took place.&#x0D; Modern field recordings of psalms, which were previously carried by itinerant lyre players, indicate that the works of this genre in some places have survived to this day due to their inclusion in the calendar tradition. Some of them are preserved as Christmas and Lenten songs. So, in the village Stary Lisets of the Tysmenytsa district of IvanoFrankivsk region, the psalm «About Stratenska Virgin Mary» about the siege of the monastery by the Tatars became a carol.&#x0D; In the Kosiv and Verkhovyna districts of Ivano-Frankivsk region (Galician Hutsulshchyna), songs-chronicles («novyny») continue to exist. This genre of Ukrainian folklore appeared in the 17th century. Songs-chronicles reflect historical events from the time of the opryshky movement to the present day and family and household dramas. In the village Khymchyn of the Kosiv region, the author of these lines was lucky to record two songs-chronicles – about Dovbush and about the First World War. The performer alternated singing with playing on a sopilka-dencivka. The author finds out ideas of the bearers of the tradition about the correct performance of songs-chronicles. The classical performance of chronicle songs is predominantly solo (one singer and one accompanist-instrumentalist).&#x0D; Folk ballads that exist in the modern Carpathian region can be divided into local and late ones, a significant part of which came from the Central regions of Ukraine in the 20th century. At the same time, part of the late ballads comes from the ancient ones that arose on the territory of the Ukrainian Carpathians in the 17th–18th centuries. Evidence of the 20th century and the records of modern collectors of Carpathian folklore show that the performance of ancient Carpathian ballads is close to the performance of songs-chronicles.&#x0D; Old Carpathian ballads are characterized by a declamatory manner of singing accompanied by a violin, hurdy-gurdy or sopilka-flute and a narrow ambitus. Old ballads are associated with individual performance and folk-professional instrumentalism. Nowadays they can be heard less often than late ballads associated with collective choral singing. To get a complete picture of the context of the existence of the ancient Carpathian ballads, it is necessary to interview the inhabitants of the villages where they were recorded in the XX – at the beginning of the XXI century – Kornych, Myshyn, Cherni Oslavy, Velykyi Klyuchiv and Kosmach.

Russian Reception by James Hogg (Soviet period)

The article continues a series of works devoted to the Russian reception of the Scottish writer James Hogg (1770–1835), a famous interpreter of folk ballads and author of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). Facts and materials related to the perception of J. Hogg in Russia in Soviet times are collected and summarized. It is indicated that during the period under review, in the studies of Russian literary scholars, separate judgments were made on the traditions of R. Burns in the works of J. Hogg, the role of W. Scott in his fate, etc. The Russian translations of the works of the English and American classics (in particular, J. G. Byron, E. A. Poe, J. F. Cooper) that appeared in the Soviet era, which contained references to the Scottish poet, are noted. The publications, which included information about J. Hogg, are comprehended, with special attention paid to S. Ya. Marshak’s epigram “Inscription on the Stone” mentioning J. Hogg’s name, the research of M. P. Alekseev, B. G. Reizov, R. M. Samarin and etc. The scientific works of A. D. Ivanova, first of all her Ph.D. thesis “The originality of the artistic work of James Hogg” (1990), which contributed, along with the changes in social life that occurred at the turn of the J. Hogg, the emergence of new translations of his works are analyzed.

Terminological Arsenal of Ukrainian Folkloristics: the Contribution of Oleksii Dei (On the Occasion of the 100th Anniversary of the Scholar’s Birthday)

The article is dedicated to the centenary of birthday of an outstanding Ukrainian scholar Oleksii Dei. His biography, contribution to the research of folklore are reflected. It is emphasized on the formation of a young scientist as a researcher of I. Franko’s folkloristic activity. The significance of O. Dei as an organizer of scientific studies, instructor of projects, head of the Folkloristics Department of IASFE, editor-in-chief of the journal Folk Art and Ethnography is described briefly. Such aspects of scientist’s activity are called, as participation in international symposiums, forums of slavists, conferences; training of scientific cadres, official opponing of theses, creation of Kyiv scientific academic school of folkloristic researches. O. Dei work as a member of Scientific and the Specialized Scientific Councils at the M. Rylskyi IASFE of the AS of Ukraine, T. Shevchenko KSU is shown. O. Dei as a compiler and editor has taken an active part in the preparation and publication of literary heritage and works of I. Franko in 50 volumes, Lesia Ukrainka in 12 volumes, M. Rylskyi in 20 volumes, Ukrainian Literary Encyclopedia in 5 volumes, publication of the series Folk Art of the Dnipro Publishing House in 15 volumes, the series Ukrainian Folk Songs Recorded by the Writers in 20 collections. He is the author of chapters and articles in the History of the Ukrainian SSR, Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia. O. Dei has promoted actively Ukrainian folklore in periodicals, on the radio, in a special program about Ukrainian folk songs Word – Song on Ukrainian TV. O. Dei has devoted many pages of his scientific works to the figure, literary and artistic heritage of T. Shevchenko, the image of the poet in folklore, the problem of folklore and literature. The scholar’s interpretation of folkloristic terms legend, traditional story, ballad is considered. Attention is paid to O. Dei views on the problems of classification of Ukrainian folklore, songs of Slavic peoples, history of Ukrainian Folkloristics. His contribution to the voluminous series Ukrainian Folk Art as the editorial board’s chairperson, editor-in-chief, compiler is analyzed. His monographic works Poetics of Ukrainian Folk Song, Ukrainian Folk Ballad, which are still relevant in the scientific folkloristic discourse, are mentioned.

A Sixteenth-Century Swedish Chronicler and his King on Folktales and Ballads

Abstract The first Scandinavian mentions of magic folk tales and ballads are by two clergymen-cum-historians, Olavus Petri (the Swedish reformer, 1493–1552), in a generic discussion in the lengthy Introduction to his unpublished Swedish Chronicle), and Anders Foss (1543–1607, Danish-born bishop of Bergen in Norway), who cites ATU 327B &amp; 853 in a discussion of the reliability of Saxo’s late twelfth-century Gesta Danorum). Both discuss the value of traditional oral tales (and ballads) as historical sources: Anders Foss rejects them, whereas Olavus Petri emphasizes their value as expressions of demotic attitudes towards the rich and mighty. This was heavily censured by King Gustaf I Vasa, who forbade the publication of Olavus’ Chronicle. Note on terminology: Olavus Petri’s preface, a large part of which is here translated for the first time, seems to be the first evidence of the Swedish word “sagor” (plural of “saga”) being used to denote a specific narrative genre (= wonder tales?). Similarly, Anders Foss’s “euentyrer” (archaic plural form of “eventyr” = Märchen, sg. &amp; pl.) is probably the first example of the word being used in this sense in Danish (other than in the still current meaning “adventure” or “quest”).

Russian Reception by James Hogg (Mid-19&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt; — Early 20&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt; Centuries)

The article continues a series of works devoted to the Russian reception of the Scottish writer James Hogg (1770—1835), a famous interpreter of folk ballads and author of “The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner” (1824). The facts and materials related to the perception of J. Hogg in Russia in the middle of the XIX — early XX century are collected and summarized. It is noted that during the period under review, no new translations of J. Hogg's poetry and prose into Russian were created, however, in the articles of leading literary critics (N. G. Chernyshevsky, M. L. Mikhailov, A. V. Druzhinin) when analyzing the works of N. V. Gogol, T. Goode, the translation activity of I. S. Turgenev expressed opinions on certain aspects of the biography and work of the Scottish author. It has been established that the main source of information about J. Hogge and his work was for the Russian reader of the second half of the 19th — early 20th centuries translated publications on the history of English literature and culture, other books by Western European researchers published in Russia. The manifestations of interest of Russian researchers and popularizers of English literature in the work of J. Hogg are comprehended, with special attention paid to the article by N. A. Solovyov-Nesmelov “James Hogg”, which was a literary sketch about the childhood of the writer, and the essay by K. F. Tiander the novel of the first quarter of the 19th century, which offers a different assessment from the predecessors of the Scottish author’s activities as a continuer of the traditions of M. Edgeworth.

The persistent conditions of plantation economy and the fraught spaces of encounter in St Bernard Parish, Louisiana

This article examines how social and economic structures of historic plantation development manage to persist over time and to rearticulate over space. In the early 1900s, the historic plantation sugar economy in St Bernard Parish, Louisiana, suddenly collapsed. Despite efforts by local elites to seize this moment to finally launch a diversified industrial development path, the parish nevertheless sank again into a new cycle of plantation domination and dependency. The dominating sugar sector was broken up only to be rapidly replaced by a vast new monopoly—in, of all things, systematized fur production—whose land tenure and labor regime nearly replicated that of the earlier plantation estates. I examine this folding-over-anew of the plantation, from sugar to fur, in two ways that contribute to recent growing literature on persistent plantation geographies. First, I draw upon theories of Caribbean underdevelopment to identify three persistent conditions of plantation economy. Upon the collapse of sugar in St Bernard, the conditions of estate-based land monopoly, racialized extra-economic labor coercion, and external market/primary commodity dependency constrained the possibility of structural transformation and rearticulated in a new commodity regime based in fur. Second, I turn to consider the experience of workers bound up in the new fur economy who were not, in the main, the debt-bound black workers from the old sugar plantations but a racially and spatially marginal group known as isleños. I draw on a unique set wry folk ballads that isleños maintained as part of local oral tradition to examine the voices of trappers themselves as they negotiated the rearticulating structures of the neo-plantation regime. Thinking with McKittrick's concept of plantation “spaces of encounter,” I find these neo-estate workers forged fraught spaces of discursive and material autonomy that at times resisted, and at times reproduced, the ongoing plantation regime.

Leah Feldman, On the Threshold of Eurasia: Revolutionary Poetics in the Caucasus

Reviewed by: On the Threshold of Eurasia: Revolutionary Poetics in the Caucasus by Leah Feldman Samuel Hodgkin Leah Feldman. On the Threshold of Eurasia: Revolutionary Poetics in the Caucasus. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018. 292 pp. Cloth, $59.95. ISBN: 978-1501726507. The traditional inclusion of humanistic scholarship on modern Transcaucasia within Russian and Soviet nationalities studies rather than Middle Eastern studies is, at least in the first instance, not an intellectually motivated categorization but an accident of the contiguity between area studies boundaries and imperial borders. As such, it has sometimes elided relevant cultural and philological context, and occluded productive comparisons in favor of more tenuous ones. In other cases, scholars focused on the Transcaucasia-Russia relationship have produced brilliant scholarship reflecting deep situated knowledge of at least one Transcaucasian language and cultural tradition, which suggests new insights and avenues of investigation for Middle East scholars focused on the Turco-Persian cultural zone. On the Threshold of Eurasia is this latter kind of work: one of very few major comparatist studies of Turkic literary modernism, which is, because of disciplinary boundaries, at risk of being overlooked by scholars of late Ottoman and Turkish Republican literature. Insofar as the book is concerned with Turkic Muslim and Russian literature produced in Transcaucasia between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the consolidation of Stalinism in the late 1920s, both its periodization and its axis of exchange and comparison are Russo-Soviet. But Feldman's reading of this corpus takes seriously the entanglement of both Russian revolutions with contemporaneous transformations in the Ottoman/Turkish and Qajar/Pahlavi domains, and many of the book's central texts participate in that entanglement. Discussing Celil Memmedquluzade's 1909 adaptation of a Nikolai Gogol play, which recounts an unscrupulous Isfahani mullah's con of an ignorant Azerbaijani village, Feldman shows how Azerbaijani writers and critics used Shi'ite taziye to align revolutionary politics with the Schillerian ideal of theater as ritual. A transnational Turkic genealogy of Futurism emerges from her [End Page 284] consideration of uses of the folk ballad (türkü) genre by the Azeri poet Süleyman Rüstem and his more famous Turkish colleague Nâzım Hikmet. Throughout, a touchstone for Feldman and her subjects alike is Mirze Feteli Axundzade/Axundov, who had played such a transformative role in the literary and language politics of Romanov, Ottoman, and Qajar domains in the previous century. Through a reconsideration of his epistles and his famous mersiye on the death of Pushkin, the book moves beyond national historiographies of literary modernization to give us a heterodox but intertextually situated Axundov that should become essential reading for scholars of Turkish and Iranian literary modernity. Part I of the book is a reception study of the Russian literature of empire, focusing on that tradition's immensely productive misreadings and reworkings by Azerbaijani subjects. The first chapter takes as its case study the reception of Gogol in the circle of writers surrounding the satirical journal Mulla Nasruddin, while the second shows various ways that Pushkin was repurposed. Part II presents an early Soviet study in contrast through two asymmetrical chapters. The third chapter is concerned with the avant garde art and theory produced by Russian exiles in Baku during and after the Civil War, and it implicates this avant garde in the ideological translatio imperii from Romanov to Bolshevik rule. The fourth chapter, focused on the literary grouping of the Red Pens (Qızıl qelemler), celebrates the praxis instantiated by the "brief period of avant-garde Azeri poetry," which "in its very confusion of forms between languages and poetic traditions, produced the very sort of organic synthesis and worldly poetic experiments that the Russian futurists had imagined" (p. 215). Note the asymmetry: this synthesis and these experiments, though Russian modernists could theorize them, were beyond their capacity to create, as they instead carried the voice and tropes of empire into the postrevolutionary world. Meanwhile, the national writers of Transcaucasia were busy realizing these theories as literary practice, largely unbeknownst to the Russian avant-gardists who lived among them. The book's political wager for the present, declared most explicitly in the introduction, is that in a time...

Educational function of american folk ballad

The purpose of the article is to consider the instructive potential of the American folk ballad XVI-XIX. An integrated approach is used. Descriptive and comparative methods of analysis allowed to generalize existing approaches to solving the problem of instructiveness in folklore. The historical method was used to describe the situation in North America, against which the American folk ballad developed. The connection of Puritan philosophy with ballads is substantiated by methods of text and context analysis, the moral values ​​of the first settlers are determined. The scientific novelty of the work is that, despite the numerous statements of folklorists on the importance of the instructive function of folklore, it was not considered on the material of the American folk ballad of the XVI-XIX centuries earlier. Conclusions. Folklore should be considered as a specific moral code of conduct. The song form acts as an effective medium through which the younger generations join the moral values ​​approved by the Puritan community.

Етичне та ірраціональне в ліро-епічній пісні (на прикладі народних балад)

The love in the Ukrainian folk ballad is the center of the axiological model, associated with the concepts of “care”, “tenderness”, “warmth”, “joy” and so on. At the same time, this feeling often appears in antinomies, as it can become a powerful destructive force, shattering destinies and entire worlds. The aim of the work is to clarify the dialectic of ethical and irrational in Ukrainian ballads about love and premarital relationships, family life. Among the tasks: to trace the opposition structure of the concept of “love”; to find out the dialectic of the ethical and the irrational in the folk ballad. The vital meaning of the subject is characterized by certain conceptual features: the desire to achieve love, to have a loved one, to give happiness, to die for love, to fight with the world for their feelings, to know the essence of love, to expose indifference to recklessness. Carelessness as a human defect that causes tragedy appears in several realities of the song. Love in the dramatic boundaries of the work becomes not only the world but also the universe. With the death of a loved one does not come the death of love, because a stressful situation exacerbates these feelings, and partially manifests them in the human mind. Textual analysis of ballads reveals that often in life love is associated with a change of ideas, life meanings of the subject, a state of spiritual confusion. Love is distinguished by ambivalence: through suffering or hopelessness it turns into hatred. You can draw the same parallels by exploring the existence of love in folk ballads. The antinomy of the individual and the social in the studied lyrical songs is manifested at the level of a special human reality. Important concepts of “boon”, “care”, “mercy” are taken beyond positive emotional perception: the power of love becomes another force. On the example of such ballads we can trace the realization of educational and psychological functions: to encourage rethinking of the act, to teach a person to love the world and other people with true love, to help in spiritual growth. The ambivalence of love is manifested even at the level of poetic structuring of the text. Even this oppositional structure of the concept of «love», represented in the ballad, confirms the indirect discursive orientation of folklore on the model of the anthropological model, which is structured according to the system of values of the Ukrainian ethnic group. The essential assessment of an event or character of a folklore work, presented at the level of recognition – denial, contributes to the assertion of axiological constants: love in harmony, spiritual unity, mutual aid, tenderness and care as a synthesis of ethical and rational, goodness and beauty can bring this feeling to the horizon of majesty and eternity. Thus, in a folk ballad, the folklore image of a loved one is revealed at the level of cognitive activity of the society and the whole ethnic group.

Kevin BarryThat Old Country Music: Stories

BOOKS IN REVIEW semi-autobiographical novel. When asked in London by a young Palestinian student for advice about funding his education, Said mailed him a £1,500 check. His children teased him for having elitist taste in music. Unable to cope when his son, Wadie, was hospitalized with osteomyelitis, he fled to a concert. He saw a therapist his entire adult life. These are the delicious, humanizing details that sustain a compelling biography in part because they are not available in the subject’s own oeuvre. Brennan supplies these anecdotes in an altogether enthralling biography, but, much like reading Said, his focus on complex literary history can be exhausting. Nevertheless, Places of Mind is a masterful portrait that encourages readers to continue grappling with the complicated ideas to which Said devoted his life. Peter Krause New York Kevin Barry That Old Country Music: Stories New York. Doubleday. 2020. 208 pages. THOUGH NO GHOSTS move through its pages, Kevin Barry’s That Old Country Music is a catalog of hauntings. The characters who populate these eleven stories are bedeviled by phantoms: memories and possibilities, places they can’t forget, and people they really should. The resultant confrontations are chronicled by the Irish author with equal parts earthy relatability and offhand poeticism. Barry introduces his collection with a quote from filmmaker Jane Campion on “the romantic impulse,” characterized as both “heroic” and “foolhardy.” Several of Barry’s stories vividly evoke this tightrope walk. “The Coast of Leitrim” finds its underachieving-aesthete protagonist easing into an affair with a like-minded Polish émigré, then almost wrecking things through nothing more than petty insecurity . In “Saint Catherine of the Fields,” a middle-aged music scholar confronts his romantic failings while transcribing a folk ballad about a woman who, with her husband ’s support, enraptures and destroys an unsuspecting herdsman for “no more than a sport.” And in the titular tale, a young mother-to-be contemplates her destiny while waiting for her baby’s father, an exparamour of her mother’s, to return with the spoils of a petrol-station robbery. A raw form of self-discovery marks “Deer Season,” in which a country girl with a taste for Bolaño novels harnesses “the new soft rhythm of her power” to seduce a forestry worker into taking her virginity, running him out of town in the process. Two other stories offer alternate takes on notions of absorbing identity through others . In “Old Stock,” a writer inherits a country cottage from his satyrish uncle (“Cause of death: the west of Ireland”), then gets more than he bargained for when the house’s aphrodisiac properties begin to turn him into the old libertine reincarnate . Another elder bequeaths his self to the more willing protagonist of “Roma Kid,” who wanders away from her rootless family, is rescued from injury by a trailerdwelling pensioner, and slowly assimilates his home, his books, and his very way of being. Barry was once something of a nomad himself, boasting seventeen addresses by his midthirties, and an ambivalence about the itinerant lifestyle shades the narrator of “Extremadura (Until Night Falls),” a cynical wanderer washed up in western Spain, and the rich-pig mother and son of “Toronto and the State of Grace,” who crash-land in the narrator’s pub to reminisce about their rancorous ramblings as they drink themselves to metaphorical and (in one case) literal death. Even legends are not immune to the traveler’s travails in “Roethke in the Bughouse,” a fictionalized chronicle of the American poet’s unexpected institutionalization during an early 1960s pilgrimage to the coastal isle of Inishbofin. Yet no matter where we roam, our travels terminate the same way, a fact Barry examines in a pair of striking tales that grapple with the inevitability of death. The shaggy-dog-scented “Who’s-Dead McCarthy ” chronicles a man whose daily bread is the incessant sharing of the details of recent passings, simply because he finds the very notion of death “impressive . . . no one has the answer to it.” And a troubled small-town police sergeant aims to answer that yawning question in “Ox Mountain Death Song,” as he stalks the terminally ill scion of a clan...

Ballade for Piano and Orchestra in the First Half of the 20th Century: Stylistic and Form-building elements

This article presents a comparative analysis of creative solutions within the genre of ballades for piano and orchestra in works created by local and foreign composers in the first half of the 20th century, such as L. Różycki, G. Tailleferre, B. Britten, N. Medtner, and I. Shamo. It has been determined that most works are characterised by purposeful inspiration which influenced their style. The basis of the genre lies in the synthesis of various features of the folk ballad and the poetic piano concerto. The first component combines epic song features, parts of folk songs or their arrangements, and declamatory melodies. The second one can be noticed in the different types of cooperation between the soloist (or soloists) and the orchestra, in the combination of features characteristic for single-part and cyclic forms (suite, rhapsody or different types of cyclic sonatas), and in the logic behind juxtaposing contrasting genre features or the figurative transformation of monothematic variants.

The Philosophical Attitude of Eugene Hütz, Singer of Gogol Bordello

The Philosophical Attitude of Eugene Hütz, Singer of Gogol Bordello

Aggravated into Writing: Margaret Walker, Iowa, and the Workshopping of African American Literature

This essay provides the first in-depth literary and biographical analysis of Margaret Walker's time in 1939–40 as a poetry student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. There, she clashed with her teacher, Paul Engle, over the proper form and content of African American poetry, a conflict that anticipates many recent testimonials of the marginalizing of writers of color in MFA programs. Walker nonetheless credited Engle with having "aggravated [her] into writing": she accepted his direction to write pastoral folk ballads—published in her landmark volume of modern Black poetry, For My People (1942)—rather than protest poems, but she subversively infused them with both the political radicalism of her earlier work and implicit critiques of the discipline imposed by the Writers' Workshop. Walker's simultaneous influence by and resistance to Engle instructively models the negotiations performed by African American writers in white institutional spaces, or what Hortense Spillers calls the "work of the black creative intellectual" within the academy. Walker's encounter with Engle also reveals the origins of many of the institutional assumptions of the postwar creative writing program in the complex political and aesthetic discourses of Depression-era leftism. My reading of the Walker–Engle encounter at Iowa, and its literary products, makes a case for recognizing the dialectically constructive and restrictive role the academic writers' workshop has played in African American literary history, a role much more foundational than usually recognized by scholars of both African American literature and the history of the MFA program.