Poetic origins in folklore text: mythopoetic aspect

   One of the most difficult questions in the specifics of folklore is still the question of the extent of expression or complete absence of poetic or artistic origins within it. On the material of the folklore collection of two expeditions (1938–1940) of Yakut researcher Andrei Andreevich Savvin, an attempt is made to identify and describe the poetisms of the Yakut oral tradition.

   The aims and objectives of the article include the analysis of folklore variants proper, recorded by Savvin, in the aspect of discovering the poetic origins in them, which determined the structural and typological method of research.

   In the folklore recordings by Savvin, a stable layer of archaic texts is found, which are distinguished by a distinct structured poetic plan. In this regard, it was suggested that one of the criteria for selecting these variants was the presence of a poetic origin in them, which allows us to consider them as poeticisms of archaic origin. The poetological in them is expressed for the most part through the form and its elements (formulas, the organization of a line-verse, repetitions and parallelisms, etc.), covering the whole structural deployment of the entire text. As a result of the analysis, it was found that the presence of a poetic origin in a text is not contingent on its genre and volume, and the source of such functionality is the poetic language of the tradition as a whole, when an arsenal of poetic means is borrowed from this common heritage. At the same time, the poetic origin in folklore is fundamentally different from the poetic function (Roman Yakobson’s term) in a literary text; on the one hand, it is closely connected with the mythopoetic origin in the tradition itself, being one of the forms of its textual expression; on the other hand, with the “oral” nature of folklore and its hidden poetics, in contrast to the explicit poetics of literature. Thus, the problem of the poetic origin in folklore brings us to the plane of delimitation of two different types of poetics and, accordingly, the differences between folklore and literary types of text.

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