On the History of the Aesthetic Conceptualization of the Ballad in the 19th Century: Some Remarks in Source Study and Typology

The main question raised in the article is: what were the poetic features of the lyrical epic folk songs, newly found and recorded in the 1830s, that allowed their collector P.V. Kireevsky to qualify them as ballads and thus create in his archive a special part called “Ballads and Elegies”, whereas in their authentic sphere of usage these texts were never marked with any stable genre definition? The crucial problem in this sense was the multiple plot incompatibilities between, on the one hand, the diverse plot reality of folk songs and, on the other hand, the paragons of poetic culture already canonized in the 1830s and familiar to the Russian reader who was aware of their European originals and Russian versions translated mostly by V.A. Zhukovsky. It occurred that the disinterest in the mystic of the world beyond was the main borderline that separated Russian folk texts from their European counterparts in which this theme was very productive. Further exploration and reconstruction were based on Kireevsky's archives kept now in the Manuscript Division of the Russian State Library and in the State Historical Museum as well as on all the printed editions of Kireevsky's folk song collection issued from the mid-19th century till the end of the 20th century. The major approach used in the article to the attracted representative sources comprised, firstly, a comparison of plot versions, secondly, a more detailed view of their localization within Kireevsky's collection as a whole and within selected handwritten notebooks in particular (as a special example, A. Koltsov's notebooks were analyzed). The latter case is of specific importance: here the folk song collector formulated the genre nature of his records having separated the ballad out of the massif of the rest of the oral lyrics. As a result, the comparison the author of the article had made allowed him to identify a number of dominating motifs which (no matter whether the mystic and the fantastic were involved) on the typological level correlate the folk ballad with the literary one. The most important phenomena revealed in the course of the study are the double-nature and tricky substitutions on the levels of characters and images - the device persistently used by the anonymous authors of folk songs. Finally, the formal and logical structure of the ballad text was clarified. It has become clear that as the doppelganger game and the mixing of social roles and statuses were activated in the plot, the strongest position among the participators of this interplay was the position of the hero who was to make his choice (sometimes a blind one) between two problematic poles presented either as a single person symbolically split into two or two characters acting like doppelgangers. This core structure produces texts of the ballad genre and is obviously recognized by Kireevsky, who classifies the songs he collects using the name of the genre borrowed from the contemporary European and Russian poetry. In order to clarify the role and the functional essence of the ballad plot rather than its motif and semantic features, in the final part of the article, its author compared the above-mentioned devices of folk ballads with (at first sight) similar features of the Russian heroic epic songs (byliny) which often contain motifs homonymic to ballad stories on trickery and doppelgangers. In the course of this comparison, the principal dissimilitude of the epic imago mundi as compared to the ballad one was revealed.

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