ABSTRACT
Perhaps no period in the history of the search for folk traditions has yielded such wealth as that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Russia. The feverish activity of this era resulted in most of the major collections of oral literature and in numerous accounts of Russian village life and belief. If one facet dominates this abundant and varied material, surely it is its archaic quality: one can only be astonished at the degree to which the Russian peasant succeeded in preserving his ancient, pre-Christian customs and worldview. Indeed, almost every ethnographic study of village life from this period made this point. In his classic work on the village of Budogoshcha, V. N. Peretts noted that a thousand years of Christianity had penetrated the peasant’s imagination only superficially and had not displaced his ancient beliefs in all sorts of “fantastic” spirits of nature.1 Speaking of the Sol ′vychegodsk District (Vologda Province), N. Ivanitskii made the extreme statement that his informant, a native of the village of Markovo and a peasant typical of that region, was a ”complete pagan“ who had heard something about God from his parents, but knew nothing whatsoever about Christ.2
