“Chur-chur, Play with it and give it back to me”: A typology of ritualized practices for recovering lost objects

The article examines ritualized practices aimed at recovering lost items in contemporary Russian society. The study is based on a corpus of messages from internet forums and social media (2008–2025), as well as data from an online survey conducted in the summer of 2025. The paper identifies the communicative models underlying these practices and analyzes the range of their modalities drawing on speech act theory (J. Austin, J. Searle). The material allows for the identification of several types of such techniques: communication with the domovoi and the devil, prayers addressed to saints, playful rituals involving characters from internetlore (Vovan, Marinochka, San Sanych), as well as the practice of symbolically entrusting an item to N.P. Kokhanova. These practices differ not only in terms of speech act type and modality, but also in the ways their efficacy is recognized: they are legitimized through intrafamily communication, religious and folkloric tradition, or receive collective validation in online environments. Reliance on different forms of recognition accounts for the diversity of these practices, their coexistence, and the possibility that a single individual may employ several of them simultaneously.

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