A Brief History of Russian Folklore
Ada Wordsworth finds the links between matriarchy, nationalism and communism in Slavic Fairytales.
Vasilisa the Beautiful, the heroine of one of the most famous Russian fairytales, in an illustration by Ivan Bilibin.
For generations, folklore, and particularly skazki (fairytales), have formed an integral part of Russian life. Beginning in pre-Christian Rus’, codified in the nineteenth century, and manipulated for political purposes under the Soviet Union, these stories are one way to track the social history of Russia and its traditions. With Russia’s size leading to a great variety of stories, and its extreme political states throughout the centuries meaning that the political uses of folklore have been far more significant than in other cultures, it is no wonder that the study of Russian and Slavonic folklore is such a vast and thriving topic.
The Christianisation of Rus’ under Vladimir I was the first hurdle that Slavic folklore needed to cross. The innate relationship between Paganism and folklore meant it was seen as an obstacle to the conversion of the peasantry by the clergy, and consequently was banned in the 12th century. Fortunately, this ban was impossible to fully implement, and in the end it was largely the Church which was forced to adapt, blending aspects of folklore into Christian stories, leading to the kind of blend of religions (dvoeverie) which can also be seen in Native American communities today. However, much of the matriarchal nature of pre-Christian folklore was lost, along with the previous tropes of wise, old magical women acting as key figures in advising and guiding heroes (bogatyri), and even of female heroes (palenitsi or bogatyrki) themselves.
This can most clearly be seen in the development of Baba Yaga, the most famous of all Slavic folk characters, who is present in stories throughout Central and Eastern Europe, and into Russia. Before Christianity, she was an embodiment of the Pagan goddess of regeneration, living in the forest which was a symbol for the crossing between life and death, and represented a sort of Mother Earth-figure. She acted as a shamanic wise woman advising heroes, and was central to their victories. Her lack of children or a husband allowed her the freedom she required to dedicate her life to her art. However, with the Christianisation of the Slavic world and the increasingly patriarchal nature that came with it, this became unacceptable and was seen as threatening to the preferred social order, and thus she was rewritten as the evil witch we know today.
Baba Yaga flying in on her mortar, in an illustration by Ivan Bilibin
Baba Yaga, again in an illustration by Ivan Bilibin.
The codification and study of Russian folklore began in the early nineteenth century, as increased literacy and the rise of the Romantic movement led to a desire to write down and preserve oral traditions. The role of class in this is central, with writers such as Pushkin attempting to ‘improve’ the stories told to him by his nanny growing up. Though incomparable to the impact of Christianisation in the scale of alteration, it is inevitable that the role of wealthy men in writing these tales led to a further loss of their original egalitarianism. Once these stories were written down, the need for mothers and nannies to tell them, altering them as they wished, decreased hugely. Despite this, this codification provided the means with which scholars could first begin to look at folklore from an academic perspective. It was at this time that folklore began to be classified into different subsections - household tales, animal tales, and heroic folksongs being the most popular.
The use of folklore as a means to promote nationalism also began at this time, with the Slavophile movement. Slavophiles viewed folklore as evidence of the innate Christian values of the Russian narod (people), as shown in the goodness and morality prized in folktales, as well as evidence of a national tradition that united Slavs long before Peter the Great’s attempts at European nationhood. Throughout the Russian empire, folklore consisted of similar themes and stories, for example Baba Yaga, uniting the huge expanse with, what the Slavophiles deemed to be, a similar ethical understanding of the world, and beyond that, a similar - and uniquely Russian - soul.
Folklore’s significance in the daily life of the narod made it a perfect format of propaganda under the Soviet Union, and particularly under Stalin. The typical formula — a modest lower class hero defeating a greedy upper class villain with the help of a benevolent leader — played into the Soviet narrative of class struggle overseen by the state, and was therefore taken up in the writing of new folktales. These aimed to emphasise the improvement of life under the USSR, and to exemplify the forms of heroism thought of as central to its success - hard work and loyalty to the state.
Simultaneously, traditional folklore was edited and censored in order to ensure its compliance with the state message. The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) was set up in order to suppress folklore which might have been deemed to corrupt the Soviet people, in particular children, who were deemed to be particularly vulnerable to the so-called ‘bourgeois nonsense’ of folklore, whilst folk singers were rigorously educated in Marxist philosophy, so as to empower them to effectively promote the communist message in their storytelling. This is, of course, perverse: the tales of the people, which had travelled from the peasantry up to the highest points of the monarchy, were then turned into tales of the state, transmitted downwards to ordinary people.
Vladimir Propp, a leading Formalist theorist of folklore.
This is not to say that folklore was always used as propaganda in the USSR. The 1920s are often called the ‘golden years’ of skazki; a brief moment between the tsarist regime and Stalinism when the state was too busy with the economy to think about academia. In this time folklorist academics flourished and developed two schools of thought: the Formalist and the Finnish. The Formalists focussed on folklore as an apolitical art form, whereas the Finnish looked at it from a historical-geographical perspective. Whilst both can be criticised for their lack of social analysis, their mere existence indicated a momentary breath of fresh air for Soviet folklorists to work free from the degree of censorship they would soon experience.
In the post-Soviet era, urban folktales are flourishing, with the internet providing the kind of community spaces once seen in villages and hamlets. Some critics do not consider these to be folklore, since they do not form part of an oral tradition, and instead label them ‘post-‘, or ‘anti-‘ folklore, however there is growing agreement that the communities formed online and the stories that move through them are the epitome of twenty-first century folklore. Where once storytellers would travel the country, performing tales, nowadays the internet is a sphere of performance and reflection. With feminist and queer readings of folklore growing in popularity, and an acceptance of the role the Church played in distorting stories, the matriarchal origins of Slavic folkloric traditions are coming to the fore in progressive circles of the internet, as well as in the “new folk talks” of modern writers such as Ludmila Petrushevskaya.
The undeniable appeal of these simple, exciting, comforting tales has been an area of consistency throughout Russia’s tumultuous history. Their adaptations into different forms of media in the past century has added further to their role as a central pillar of Russian life. In a country as large as Russia, containing so many different customs and cultures, the strength of the folkloric tradition is vital in order to unite people from childhood and to create a common sense of community and history. As politicised as Russian folklore may have been, and may become again, it seems to me that the classic characters of Baba Yaga and Vasilisa the Beautiful show no signs of losing their status as key aspects of every Russian’s childhood, regardless of political outlook or social status.
Ada Wordsworth is a third year student of Russian Studies at UCL SSEES, focussing on politics, literature, and the intersections between them. Her other primary interests are the impacts of climate change as well as LGBT+ liberation movements in Russia and the former Soviet Union.