Neronetskaya E.K., Rodchenko N.V.
Russia, Novozybkov
There is no need to speak extensively during the round table about the cultural and historical importance of careful collection, strict systematization, and scientific publication of works of oral folk creativity, especially at the linguistic and ethnographic border of neighboring peoples. And if during Soviet times, in works discussing the closeness, mutual influence, and interpenetration of Russian and Belarusian folklore and literature, reviewer-ideologists invariably noted their enormous political significance in strengthening the friendship of the two fraternal peoples, then now, in the conditions of the independent existence of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus, such political significance has increased a hundredfold.
The fates of Russians and Belarusians were united during the times of Kievan Rus, and the intense exchange of cultural values did not cease during the independent existence of the two Russian states—Lithuania and Muscovy. Finally, during the formation and rise of the Russian Empire in the 18th-19th centuries, and especially during the more than 70 years of Soviet rule, we lived in one state, experiencing such memorable tragic events for the peoples as the revolution and civil war, collectivization and the “purge” of 1937, the Great Patriotic War, and the Chernobyl disaster, followed by the collapse of the USSR. I remember students from the branch of BGU in Novozybkov asking why, for example, residents of a neighboring village are called “Muscovites” or how to understand the folk curse “may you get syphilis.” Our explanation of the origin of these words not only surprised the students but also made them think about their native land’s connection to the unstoppable course of history (the residents of Lithuania called the fugitives from Muscovy “Muscovites,” while “syphilis” was referred to as “French disease,” i.e., the disease brought by Napoleon’s troops to Russia in 1812).
The importance of studying the Bryansk-Gomel borderland is heightened by the fact that the historically established Russian-Belarusian administrative border was lost by the post-revolutionary period, and only the data from folklore and ethnographic expeditions allowed the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on December 6, 1926, to transfer the Gomel and Rechitsa districts to the BSSR, which constituted more than half of the territory of the present Gomel region. This was the second enlargement of the territory of the BSSR; the first occurred in March 1924, when the previously small Belarus was doubled in size by transferring almost entirely the present Vitebsk and Mogilev regions from the RSFSR. To avoid touching on the sensitive issue of borders in the future, we note that in the summer of 1920, during the Soviet-Polish War, British Foreign Minister N. Curzon demanded in an ultimatum form to stop the advance of Soviet troops on Warsaw precisely at the line established by folklorists, which separates the Polish and Belarusian ethnicities (known in history as the “Curzon Line”). It was along the “Curzon Line” (with concessions to Poland) that the victorious powers legally established the current Belarusian-Polish border at the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences in 1944 and 1945, which largely coincides with the historical border between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland. Similarly, the modern Russian-Belarusian border, finally determined in the mid-1920s, almost completely repeats the border established by the Andrusovo Peace Treaty of 1667 and legally confirmed by the Eternal Peace of 1686 between Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
We felt it necessary to make our reservation to warn both novice researchers and nationalistic politicians obsessed with their ideology against attempts to equate ethnographic and state borders. These borders, in the absence of geographical boundaries between peoples in the form of impassable mountains, deserts, or seas, never coincide. Thus, besides Germany, the German language is spoken in Austria and several neighboring countries; the same can be said for the French language, Arabic, Persian, etc.
A great deal has been done in the collection, systematization, and study of folklore in the Russian-Belarusian borderland at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. Truly, a monument to beloved folklore studies and an eternal tribute to the collector himself is the extensive and detailed four-volume “Smolensk Ethnographic Collection” (1891-1903) by V.N. Dobrovolsky (1856-1920). It can be confidently stated—there is ample evidence for this—that Dobrovolsky’s “Collection” nurtured a cohort of Smolensk poets such as M. Isakovsky, A. Tvardovsky, N. Rylenkov, and others less known. Even the revolutionary Lenin, distant from folklore studies, according to his secretary V.I. Bonch-Bruevich, said that one could write a wonderful study about the aspirations of the people based on Dobrovolsky’s materials. And such a study, albeit poetic, was written in the 1930s-40s by Smolensk poets with the selfless help of the already deceased Vladimir Nikolaevich.
As for the no less monumental folklore and ethnographic work of Yefimiy Fyodorovich Karsky (1861-1931) “Belarusians” (vol. 1-3, 1903-1922), it would not be an exaggeration to say that this comprehensive, labor-intensive, and multi-volume scientific work marks the beginning of Belarusian folklore studies, ethnography, and all philology, including literary studies. “The central place in Karsky’s scientific heritage,” we quote from the Belarusian Soviet Encyclopedia, “the main monument of his life, is truly called the Belarusian encyclopedia—a monumental three-volume work ‘Belarusians’… in seven issues.” Rumor has it that in the 1960s-70s, Belarusian scholars repeatedly raised the question of reissuing this unique work, which had become a bibliographic rarity; however, vigilant Soviet censors allowed only ideologically sound “extracts” from “Belarusians” to be published, while Karsky’s St. Petersburg heirs allegedly insisted on a complete phototypic reissue, similar to how V. Dahl’s dictionary is published. These rumors are quite indicative of that time. Be that as it may, extracts from the seven volumes of Karsky’s “Belarusians” were still published in one volume, so to speak, for the mass reader and “to avoid complaints.” For the then-political apparatus of the Central Committee of the CPSU, the strictly objective methodology of the scholar, Christian motifs in folklore works, and the very “Ethnographic Map of the Belarusian Tribe” were clearly unacceptable, especially since Karsky drew the boundary of the Belarusian language’s distribution 100 km east of Smolensk near the town of Dorogobuzh, including in the area of the “Belarusian tribe” the southern part of the Pskov region and almost entirely the Smolensk and Bryansk regions. How could the subordinates of the main ideologist of the country, Suslov, know that ethnographic and state borders—this is, as they say in Odessa, two big differences—and that the only one who equated them in 20th-century Europe was Hitler?
We do not have the opportunity to speak in detail about other Belarusian and Russian folklorists of the late 19th-early 20th centuries who worked at the intersection of the ethnic groups of interest to us. For our dear colleagues and students from the Novozybkov branch of BGU and Gomel University, as a prospect for their further work on collecting gems of folk poetry and life wisdom, we mention Zinaida Fyodorovna Radchenko (1839-1916), who recorded about 700 folk songs, including 180 with musical notation. Would it not be fruitful now, over 100 years later, to visit the villages of the same Gomel district in the Republic of Belarus or Surazhsky in Bryansk (there is also a Surazh in Vitebsk!) and see how much they remember their ancestors’ songs, what new elements have been introduced into their texts, whether the old rituals and customs have survived, and all that Zinaida Fyodorovna immortalized in her collections? It is worth noting here that the Russian noblewoman Z. Radchenko, as well as the native of Starodub, Professor Pavel Andreyevich Rastorguev (1881-1959) from the Novozybkov Pedagogical Institute, and native Smolensk resident V.N. Dobrovolsky are rightly called Belarusian folklorists or linguists in all Belarusian reference publications. It is characteristic that the Belarusian Soviet Encyclopedia gives a high assessment of Rastorguev’s legacy even without considering his most famous work—the dictionary of Bryansk dialects, published in Minsk a few years after the author’s death. The residents of Gomel, of course, honor the memory of their fellow countryman Yevdokim Romanovich Romanov (1855-1922), the most famous folklorist and ethnographer in Belarus, the founder of archaeology, a full member of the Russian Geographical Society, who published over 10,000 folklore works and scientifically described the material and spiritual culture of Belarusian peasantry at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. The main work of E. Romanov—“Belarusian Collection” (vol. 1-9, 1886-1912)—is also referred to in reference publications as “a peculiar encyclopedia of the life and culture of Belarusians.”
As for the Soviet period, all then-university textbooks asserted without evidence that the broad, almost unprecedented collection of folklore began in the 1930s “at the initiative of Gorky,” presumably because the writer always highly valued folk creativity and personally edited the anthology “Creativity of the Peoples of the USSR” (1937), published after his death. This generally good and beautifully published collection unfortunately became a model for censors and, accordingly, for collectors of folklore. Ideology took precedence. Any “mossy, ideologically harmful” texts were ignored, not to mention the overtly anti-Soviet ones, such as: “Thank you, Stalin the Georgian, for being with us in the razin”; “In the collective farm, the road is straight, And from the collective farm, it goes crooked. In the collective farm, I went in boots, And from the collective farm, barefoot!”; later, “Winter has passed, summer has come—Thank you, party, for this.” There is no doubt that our wise people composed many songs and other folklore texts that positively evaluated the grand shifts in the lives and routines of Soviet people. Moreover, artistic literature, primarily poetry, as well as Soviet propaganda, exerted both direct influence and pressure on folklore. Often, ideologically sound folklore works of the 1930s are now presented as almost ambiguous. For example, the poem “Lenin and the Baker” (1940) by Tvardovsky, written based on a legend from the aforementioned collection, contains, if not a double meaning, then its own subtext related to the turbulent year of 1937. The baker and his wife have no reason to fear arrest; the stranger, who turned out to be Lenin himself, was not scolded in vain by the old man, and for the offense of the harvest, an apology from the leader, who inadvertently provoked the old man to curse, is enough. In reality, however, the old man is taken away by two soldiers without explanation or a warrant, and the baker and his wife have no doubt about the righteousness of the authorities (“for the deed, for your words”), and at the end of the poem, after, of course, tea with Ilyich, the old man is still touched by the leader’s humanity. Is this not the Asian mentality of 1937?
Folklorists of that time were required to produce texts that “glorified the new reality of the Soviet village,” reflected the successes of socialist industrialization, and praised the leaders, primarily Stalin (“Many stars shine in the sky, And one is crystal, We have composed many songs About our dear Stalin”). Such texts can be found by the thousands in collections and textbooks on folklore of that time, usually in the genre of chastushkas. Meanwhile, pre-revolutionary folklorists and the same V. Dobrovolsky specifically warned that true folklore texts should be sought not just far from cities but also in villages located at least 7 versts from the railway—because the nearest villages are “infected with vulgar urban chastushkas.” Interestingly, Soviet collectors of folklore, i.e., university teachers with students undergoing folklore practice, understood the ideological constraints limiting them and approached their work with humor and creativity. I remember that at scientific conferences in the 60s-70s, around one such collector, V., professors and associate professors gathered, laughing, while he poured out pearls of folk chastushkas with ideologically impeccable commentary: “My darling is washing his face in the yard, Because a plane flew over with a toilet.” Or even more audacious: “And my darling and I at the meter Kissed until morning—We would kiss more, But the vagina hurts.” (In the first case, the commentary was that industrialization in the USSR reached the point that waste falls from the sky, and the well-trained rural “darling” is being disinfected quite scientifically—with boric acid; in the second case, a young Muscovite, having tasted the basics of culture, shows self-censorship, replacing “bad” words with literary ones, which, by the way, would not hurt modern youth to do). Despite all this, Soviet folklorists did a great deal in the noble cause of collecting works of folk creativity, especially in the areas of systematization, study, and promotion. Here, one could name hundreds, if not thousands, of names; we will limit ourselves, for understandable reasons, to the names of the collector of Belarusian proverbs and phraseology F. Yankovsky and the late brother of ours, G.V. Rodchenko (1929-1994). Of the 17,000 collected folklore texts from Sluchchyna, about a hundred were published in the form of a brief collection “Eternal”; however, the elder son of the collector, Vadim Grigoryevich, an associate professor of mathematics at Grodno University, is determined to complete his father’s work by publishing his entire folklore archive.
The authors of these lines are proud that in the late 1990s they were among the initiators of the joint collection of folklore texts by scholars from Novozybkov and Gomel in the Bryansk-Gomel borderland. Over the past 15 years, our colleagues and students from the Novozybkov branch and Gomel University have collected and systematized a wealth of folklore material, which is, of course, an eternal tribute to both the collectors themselves and the unbreakable friendship and centuries-old kinship of the two neighboring peoples. Enthusiastic about their noble cause, associate professors of GGU Elena Kostritsa and Svetlana Vergeyenko, under the tireless guidance of Professor Valentina Stanislavovna Novak, have almost scoured the Vetka, Dobruzh, and Gomel districts in search of pearls of folk creativity, with material from two of these districts already published. Such promptness is enviable; it is certainly predetermined by the fact that the Department of Belarusian Culture at GGU has been successfully operating for several years, for which the collection and publication of folklore texts is one of the main priorities and directions of work. No less than the Gomel residents, under the guidance of Professor Starodubets Svetlana Nikolaevna and the activists of the Novozybkov branch of BGU, including Olga Belugina, Maria Mukhina, Svetlana Kurkina, and others, have contributed, receiving consultations and assistance from both Gomel residents and Moscow professor V.L. Klyaus. The latter, by the way, is a graduate of Professor Ilyasov’s school in Ulan-Ude, which has done much for the study of the life and folklore of Siberian Old Believers, descendants of the Vetka assistants of Pugachev by the decree of Catherine II.
Yet, writing articles and dissertation research based on the collected material is not enough; folklore texts need to be published. Let our students and colleagues from Novozybkov take the good example of their fellow countryman Professor Rastorguev, whose lovingly crafted portrait hangs in the department: during his lifetime, the scholar long and unsuccessfully sought the publication of his dictionary, but the highly regarded book was published only after the unforgettable Pavel Andreyevich’s death. However, we have no doubt that the extensive folklore material collected by the heirs and continuators of the noble work of Professor Rastorguev will soon be published in a worthy format.
Source:
Neronetskaya E.K., Rodchenko N.V. The Eternal. On the Study of Folklore of the Belarusian-Russian Borderland // Normativity in the Conditions of Mixing East Slavic Languages in the Territory of the Russian-Belarusian-Ukrainian Borderland: Round Table Dedicated to the Day of Slavic Writing and Culture (Novozybkov, Bryansk Region, May 24-25, 2012). Collection of Scientific Articles / Ed. S.N. Starodubets, S.M. Pronchenko, V.N. Pustovoytova. – Bryansk: RIO BGU, 2012. – P. 253-259.