The article presents an analysis of the oral memorandum, which tells about a certain domestic incident (suspicion of “hexing” the child), a purification ritual and about a subsequent re-evaluation of what has actually happened by the narrator who is also the central character of the story. It considers other versions of the same plot and describes text-generating mechanisms based on the worldview of that tradition. The author attempts to reconstruct “the prototypical episode”, and identify those event elements that, apparently, did not take place in reality. Such study allows assessing the mythological model role that helps to enrich the oral memorandum with the circumstantial details which at the same time assure its conceptual completeness and credibility.

The article is based on Mongolian and Buryat expeditionary records made during the field expeditions organized by the Center for Typological and Semiotic Studies of Folklore of Russian State University for the Humanities in 2006–2010.

This article explores the variation in the manuscript tradition of one of the Old Icelandic family sagas – “The Saga of Björn, a hero from the HeathValley” Bjarnar saga Hítdælakappa. Usually, the two main versions of the saga are seen as a summary and a longer version. However, their comparison shows that, while there is a huge amount of the identical text, most of the discrepancies are equal variations, and there is no tendency to narrow one of the versions. Those features allow suggesting that the versions relate to each other as two equal retellings (paraphrases) of the text predecessor. That perspective makes it possible not only to revise the existing assessment of one of the versions as an abridgment, but also to see behind those retellings the living tradition of Old Icelandic storytellers who entered the new written culture. As a part of the research into the mechanics of such retelling the paper offers the overview analysis of the variation discrepancies and the method of their counting and classification.

The paper polemizes with the “pre-Roman” interpreting the genesis of the dragua images in Albanian folklore. The mythological character – a chaser of hailstorms by confronting another character who is, in turn, leading the hailstorm, and thus protects his “own” territory from the hail and tempest, is a very popular figure in all Slavic (as well as in neighboring non-Slavic – Albanian, for example, as far as the Balkans are concerned) traditions. The paper considers the functional and typological parallels between the Albanian dragua (drangoni) and comparable mythological characters from Serbian and Croatian tradition – the zmajevity/alovity people, and claims that the peculiarities of Albanian tradition are not in some initially specific invariant directly stemming from the pre-Roman tradition but in the incorporation of the images of dragua (drangoni) into the later literary tradition. With that incorporation, dragua lose one of their key typological characteristics in the oral folk tradition – namely, the motif of their souls leaving their bodies to combat the demonic adversary – and enter the timely sociopolitical context as some personification of Albanian patriotism – what, in turn, is based on a comparison (typical both for Albanian oral heroic epic and for other Balkan traditions) of a cultural hero to a mythological character – the chaser of the hailstorms.

Often the folk motifs are the basis for the author’s poetic and musical work. But reverse processes are also possible when the author’s text generates a number of folklore versions. As an example, the poem “Bondage” was written by N.G. Tsyganov in the style of folk lyricism and it gave rise to a number of folklore texts. Different variants of those songs in turn served as material for composer’s arrangements. As a result, throughout the existence of the text its different versions have originated as well as different works based on the same source text. So to the poem of N.G. Tsyganov Sergei Rachmaninoff wrote his choir of the same name. Also V. Zakharov and S. Prokofi wrote their arrangements based on close versions of folk songs which were recorded in theVoronezhregion.

The aim of the work is to study the lyrical plangent song “Nightingalesolov’yushko”, including its origin history, spread and existence. To doing so it is necessary to set the features of the song type by comparing the options recorded in different territories. The rhythmic, compositional and fret models comparison allows to reveal the invariant of the song. On that basis it may be possible to trace the new life of the song in the Russian composers works.

The present study is dealing with a discourse of the corporeity in Russian body positive blogs in Instagram. “Body Positivity” it is a growing social movement and the media trend spreading the idea of a tolerant attitude to your appearance and body and to bodies and appearance of others. The present article is concerned with the comprehension of a body and urban spaces (particularly the city space) interactions in blog posts and commentaries to them. The comprehension is made within theoretical conceptualizations of body socialization in works of Rolan Bart and Jean Baudrillard, as well as of Michel Foucault’s concepts of body policy and Richard Sennet’s one of passive body. The present study provides a discourse and content analysis of body positive posts on Instagram by that the author figures out a list of the most common places/spaces where a body becomes actual or actualized what means the body perception causes psychological discomfort and deprivation. As a result, people often feel like they need an action or manipulation with their bodies to be taken against their will. Usually, it happens in food services, public beaches, and swimming pools, shopping centers, in public transport and in the city streets.

The work aims to present a current (on 2020th) picture of the existence in the Russian-language segment of the Internet of phenomena that are based on Russian oral tradition for the children’s “invocation of spirits” and that together are forming its modern network equivalent; to identify the continuity and original features in their poetics and specifics in their existence, and to establish general patterns and trends in the development of the network tradition as a whole.

The author’s research source base includes a public page of the folklore archive in the Lobachevsky University (UNN) with texts of “invocation of spirits”, widely distributed in the Russian-language segment of the Internet; 13 sections of forums that captured the memories of adults about their participation in children’s “invocation of spirits”; 14 groups in the social networks “Vkontakte” and “Odnoklassniki”, publishing methods of “invocation of spirits”; 15 collections of instructions for “invocation of spirits” posted in the online community Wattpad; 19 channels and 13 separate YouTube videos dedicated to performing rituals, as well as presentations of existing methods for invocation of spirits; materials in the “invocation of spirits” category at the site of scary stories 4STOR.ru

The author collected and reviewed the publications of texts and videos related to the children’s tradition of “invocation of spirits” that cover the periods from 2005–2020 and from 2014–2020, respectively.

Also respectively in 2013 and 2016 she began selecting the material itself and fixing observations on the development of children’s tradition “invocation of spirits” in the Russian-language segment of the Internet.

Based on the media texts that refer to the results of a survey conducted in March 2019 byLevadaCenter on the attitude of Russians to Stalin’s personality and his role in the history of the country, the author analyzes the tools that are used by Russian-language media in reporting information that represents public opinion. The study is conducted in the framework of the frame-analytical approach, in the variant closest to its rhetorical direction associated with persuasion. The analysis of the texts reflecting the results of opinion polls shows that the framing of the results of the polls turns out to be primarily associated with the framing of the survey object established by the polling company, as well as with the routine work of media production. Such restrictions can be eliminated to some extent by various framing strategies: selecting the information to be covered, choosing the focus of the issue, engaging an expert for a comment, shortening plots to rating labels, and tricks specific to working with the survey data on combining different groups of answers under one general category and the search for maximum and minimum indicators not necessarily for the same issue, cited for comparison and the effect of dynamics.

The reviewed book considers the funeral lamentations as a form of communication with the other world. The author analyzes the context of ritual lamentations, the content and structure of ritual texts, formulas and the order of their combination in texts (semantics and syntagmatics), in the fourth chapter considering how lamentations work. The study is based on rich archival and field data that were collected in theVologdaregion from the beginning of the 20th century to 2018. Numerous stories from the expeditions demonstrate subtle author’s reflection on her field work. Texts of lamentations recorded in expeditions of different years are published in the Appendix to the book. Analyzing ritual texts, the author draws attention to the peculiarities of the language, to which elements and formulas were preserved longer than others. Elena Yugay considers ritual lamentations as a “residual phenomenon” in modern times. On the one hand, this approach impoverishes the view of current processes. But on the other hand, the author invites us to reflect on why funeral lamentations are gradually fading into the past and what comes in their place.

The review describes the Alla Aliyeva’s archaeographic work on the accumulation and analysis of documents depicting the creative path of the Uvarov couple in theCaucasus. Attention is focused on the importance of the first reprint of the “Caucasus. Travel diaries of Praskovya Uvarova” for scholars who research the folklore and religious tradition for peoples in the Eastern and Southern Black Sea regions at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. In the text the most curious, in the opinion of the author of the review, quotations are cited and the results of the initial analysis of several stable mythological plots from the countess’s travel records are presented.