ABSTRACT
All major ethnic groups in the USSR, including the Russians, are familiar with their own folklore. Children study representative works of Russian folklore and those of other nationalities in grade school and middle school. The radio listener and the television viewer are constantly barraged with folk performances. Even the foreign tourist is encouraged to attend folk concerts or to spend money in special hard-currency shops for wooden trinkets and other “folk art” souvenirs. Every year in the USSR, approximately eleven thousand professional folklore collectives give over four million performances, attended by more than five hundred million people. Throughout the country, folklorists supervise the development of folk art and help choirs, dance groups, and individuals prepare works for public performance. 1 Performers of folk songs and dances range from famous decorated professional artists (Liudmila Zykina) and professional groups (the Moiseev Dancers, the Osipov Balalaika Orchestra) to amateurs and amateur groups from all parts of the USSR. In many of their performances, however, the line between true folklore and folk stylization is all too often erased. Since the 1920s, hundreds of popular songs in imitation of the traditional folk song have been written, and no one seems to care whether they spring from the masses or from an individual poet. One popular “folksong” well known in the USSR and abroad, “Little Field, O Field” (Poliushkapole), is by the twentieth-century poet Gusev. One need only look at the table of contents in an anthology of Soviet Russian folklore to see the work of individual authors and performers classified as folklore.
