Theme-motif content of the Fasting songs about Saint Yegorii and Tsmok (Dragon) recorded from the Belarusians of the Novosibirsk region

The plot of the victory of Saint George (Yegorii) over Tsmok (Snake) is one of the most ancient and extremely popular in the Slavic folklore, particularly in the Belarusian folklore tradition. A. I. Kirpichnikov, A. N. Veselovskii, A. V. Rystenko, G. P. Fedotov, T. V. Khlybova, L. F. Kostyukovets, and A. V. Morozov are to be noted among the researchers who studied similar texts in the middle of the 19th - beginning of the 21st centuries. In Siberia, the spiritual poems about Yegorii and Tsmok appeared with Belarusian migrants, who arrived at the territory of the modern Novosibirsk region at the beginning of the 20th century. Belarusians called the spiritual poems “fasting songs” because they were sang during the periods of fasting. The paper introduces into the research practice and analyses two previously unknown texts of fasting songs about Yegorii and Tsmok, recorded in the Novosibirsk region from the descendants of Belarusian migrants. These texts are compared with the samples from the Belarus regions where the parents of text performers came from. The texts were considered by analyzing sections and specific motifs; the research interest was also focused on the vocabulary of Siberian variants (Polonisms and Belarusianisms). The analysis allowed evaluating the degree of preservation and text modification features of the Belarusian fasting songs recorded in Siberia. These epic texts withstood the test of time and have almost retained their original form. Despite some separate motifs and sections being omitted and semantic ambiguities and some word transformations being present, the Siberian variants of poems about Yegorii and Tsmok are quite consistent and recognizable. In some cases, they include the motifs that are not encountered in the samples recorded in the metropolitan territory of the tradition. The texts concerned are valuable proofs of the existence of the Belarusian epic tradition in the Siberian region.

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