Children's scary narrative folklore: On the genre diversity of tradition

The aim of this article is to demonstrate the genre diversity of the tradition designated by most scientists as "children's scary stories" or "strashilki". Therefore, it is relevant to raise the question of the need for a genre distinction of narratives related to this tradition. The presence of a large number of forms, different in poetics and origin, which are attributed to this tradition by researchers, substantiates the need to allocate a self-sufficient area of "children's scary narrative folklore", along with such functional-semantic segments as "everyday", "game", "ritual" and "comic" folklore in the children's folklore. The material of the study is scary stories of children's folklore, collected from archival, scientific and Internet sources and belonging to different genre forms. Based on the results of systematizing the theoretical developments in the works of colleagues on the species of children's scary stories, as well as on the author's own observations of the living tradition (both oral and network) and its comprehensive analysis, the author proposes a universal system of genres and genre varieties of children's scary narrative folklore, covering its most famous and widespread phenomena. At this stage, the system looks like this: Area: Children's scary narrative folklore (ChSNF) Genre: Strashilka (scary story) Genre varieties of Strashilka: "classical" strashilka; strashilka-pugalka (jumpscare); strashilka-bylichka (bailichka) Some researchers also single out: strashilka-skazka (fairy tale), strashilka-byl' (true story), slukhi-tolki (children's rumors), In-ternet-strashilki Genre: Children's mythological story (bylichki) Genre: Antistrashilka (anti-scary story) Genre varieties of Antistrashilka: antistrashilka-strashilka; antistrashilka; realistic antistrashilka Genre: Pugalka (jumpscare story) Genre varieties of Pugalka:pugalka, strashilka-pugalka Genre: Antipugalka (anti-jumpscare story) Genre: "Strange" and "scary" fabulats Genre: Stories about evocations The author does not attribute actual evocations and sadistic rhymes to ChSNF (due to their different functional orientation). The list of ChSNF genres is not limited to the above species, but other forms are found less regularly and are practically not investigated, which at the moment makes it impossible to establish the presence or absence of their genre varieties. On the basis of the system of the genres of children's scary narrative folklore stated in this article, it is obvious that the content invested by researchers in the notion "children's scary stories" is much broader and more diverse than is commonly believed in science. In addition, contrary to the existing opinion on the stagnation of the above-mentioned genres of children's folklore, they do not go into oblivion, but, gradually, with the movement of children's leisure to the Internet, they are transferred to a new habitat. In the net, works of children's scary narrative folklore are replicated, acquire new variants and parodies, network literature doubles. They also become a reason and/or material for the emergence of modern scary stories. Therefore, it is no longer possible to use common terms and consider all scary stories that exist among children and teenagers as a single genre formation.

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