ABSTRACT
Throughout this narrative I have stressed the ways that various groups have constructed images of the folk as a means of representing their own identities. Thus, whereas nineteenth-century elites approached folkways as a source of ‘national character’ and to signify their oneness with the common people, radicals saw allegiance with the narod as a means of differentiating themselves from the autocracy. Soviet post-War culture endorsed its sentimentalized, homogenized kitsch version of the folk as a means of recovering national confidence and expurgating ‘foreign’ elements; a few decades later, oppositional-minded intellectuals revolutionized the study and performance of folklore through attention to the regional and local nature of folk culture. In the post-Soviet period, the debate over the correct way to show Russian tradition constituted a struggle over the representation of Russianness. In all these periods, both government officials and nonconformists utilized conceptions of the folk for political ends; each group, in attempting to give voice to its political position, emphasized different attributes of the imagined ‘other.’ Thus, rather than an object of scientific study or representation (as it is more usually thought of), folk culture functions as a locus in which groups negotiate their identities, a perfect example of Foucault’s notion of discourse as ‘systematically form[ing] the objects of which it speaks.’2
