ABSTRACT
Outside Russia the folk heritage of the country is best known in its operatic, musical and balletic guise. Stravinsky’s Firebird (Zhar Ptitsa), Rimsky-Korsakov’s operas Sadko and The Snow Maiden (Snegurochka), Vaznetsov’s monumental paintings of legendary folk heroes or the elegant reworked folk images of the illustrator Bilibin and the neoprimitivist paintings of Goncharova, Larionov and Malevich at the beginning of the twentieth century all brought folkloric material, if not folklore itself, to the West. Although it is often not obvious in translation, the impact of folklore on literature is no less significant. This fact reflects the overall importance of oral tradition in Russian life. Up until the Revolution the great majority of the population depended upon an oral culture and, despite socialist protestations and efforts at eradication, things changed only gradually. Economic backwardness possesses few advantages, but in Russia where, additionally, the great geographical expanses resulted in the isolation of communities, it helped to maintain the peasants’ premodern world-view. Inter alia their views found expression in songs, tales, folk beliefs, rituals, laments and legends. Then as towns grew in the course of the nineteenth century, rural migrants were drawn to them; in 1864 in westernized Petersburg, for example, half the population were peasants, most of them illiterate. The new arrivals brought with them their folklore, which was modified in the new context and fed into a developing urban folklore. The oral heritage in Russia is as a result both rich and varied.
