Image of the city in folk songs

Modern folklore as a conglomerate of traditional, newly emerging genres and marginalized forms exists in the urban environment, demonstrating both continuity and change, reflecting orientations of modern folk consciousness. Regardless of the origin, song genres in the urban environment turn to the topic of the city, offer the "genre interpretation" and build the "genre-determined" image of the city. The purpose of this work is to identify genre conditions in the representation of the image of Tomsk in urban folk songs. The material are texts of urban romances, bard songs (made by folklore laws), student folklore and chastooshkas recorded in the urban environment of Tomsk. In the research the following issues were considered: features of portrayal of the city as such in urban culture, in contrast to the village one; features of representation of the city characteristic of Tomsk urban culture; specifics of portrayal of Tomsk in some subcultures of the city. In urban culture citizens actualize image of the city through stereotypes and cliches associated with the perception of a city which is largely due to a certain normative notion of the city as a concentration of the intellectual forces of the city's companies, architectural masterpieces, cultural facilities, etc., fixed in a given culture or subculture. Student songs describe the main characteristics of the city represented in art and poetry, in the media and in political discourse. Student folklore depicts Tomsk as a Siberian university town. This is a holistic system performing a single function. The spatial organization of the city is not represented in texts of student songs being irrelevant for the self-identity of the student-resident of the city. In urban romances and bard songs the center of attention is a person living in a graceless world; the events unfold in the worldly plane. These texts represent "consumer" Tomsk as a complex organism with a division into districts that have their own history and mythology and are in opposition relations to each other. Citizens model the image of the city on the basis of the historical and mythological context of a single district and the city as a whole. In Tomsk chastooshkas, the main urban themes are love, social and political issues traditional for the genre. Student Tomsk appears through the prism of socio-cultural and socio-economic issues that allow students to self-identify, create a normative idea of the Alma Mater. Socio-political themes are discussed as the opposition of the government and the people, which is characteristic for the chas-tooshka.

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