Folkloristic image of Peter the Great in the context of the Karelian epic tradition

Abstract

The article explores the image of Peter the Great in folklore through the case study of Karelian historical songs. The first Russian emperor visited Karelian land, where battles of the Great Northern War unraveled, a few times. Following the tsar’s order, cannon plants were founded on the Lososinka River bank, and there subsequently formed the City of Petrozavodsk. Owing to Peter I, the first Russian spa resort, Martial Waters, was established. The emperor’s name and feats were well known to local people, who composed historical songs about him, made up novelistic folk tales and numerous traditions with various plots. Such folklore pieces were in usage among both ethnic Russian and ethnic Karelian population. This article is in the mainstream of a heightened interest in Peter the Great’s personality associated with his 350th anniversary. Published and archived texts of Karelian historical songs recorded in the late 19th – first half of the 20th centuries were picked out as the sources for the study. The main objective was to consider the folkloristic image of Peter the Great. The comparative historical and comparative-contrastive methods were applied, permitting the sources of the emperor’s image to be identified and its evolution compared to archaic images from Karelian epic songs to be tracked. Analysis of the material has led to a conclusion that Karelian historical runo songs about Peter I originated on the basis of traditional epic songs. The folkloristic image of the Russian emperor to similized with one of the key figures of the Karelia epic – Väinämöinen. Peter the Great’s activities are likened to the feats of epic heroes, who created proto-things and could cope with any tests and trials using magical knowledge. In the texts analyzed here, Peter I was given names adapted to the Karelian tradition so that this image could be integrated into the “us” circle as someone close to the folk. Certain definitions, however, indicate that the tsar belonged to a different social environment.

Acknowledgments: The study was funded from the federal budget as part of the state project assigned to the
Karelian Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

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