Russian epic tradition in the former Yenisei District

Abstract

The article examines the regional epic tradition of the Yenisei District against the background of the history of settlement by Russian people in the 17th – 19th centuries along the Siberian rivers of Yenisei and Angara. The author proceeds from the thesis on epic metropolises, through which the distribution of epics in the European part of Russia was carried out: “mother metropolises” (Kiev, Vladimir-Suzdal lands, Novgorod); “colonization metropolises” (Novgorod, Vladimir-Suzdal lands, Moscow), from which the epics moved primarily to the Russian North; “regional metropolises” (points of the Russian North, the Volga region), from where the epic spread to the lands of a certain large historical and cultural region; “local metropolises” that performed the same function of spreading epics, but on a more limited territory. The Yenisei-Angara region played the role of a “regional metropolis” in Siberia and at the same time a “colonization metropolis” for the promotion of Russian epics to the east of Siberia (Kolyma, Indigirka, and Anadyr). The author describes the epic repertoire of the region (the plots “Ilya Muromets and the Robber Nightingale”, “Ilya Muromets and robbers”, “Ilya Muromets and Kalin the Tsar”, “Ilya Muromets and Sokolnik”, “Dobrynya Nikitich and the Serpent”, “Dobrynya and the failed marriage of Alyosha Popovich”, “Sukhman”, epics-neoplasms “Dobrynya’s fight with a woman Gorynishche”, “Kalinin-tsar takes the girl away”). Attention is focused on the uniqueness of individual details in the construction of plot twists and images of heroes. The characteristic of all the few texts recorded at the end of the 19th – 20th centuries is given. It indicates the processes of the decay of the song-epic tradition in the local region, which was expressed primarily in deformed and fragmentary recordings. Special mention is made of the fading of the function of historical memory in epics, as evidenced by the disappearance of toponyms important for epics (for example, Kiev).

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