Original scientific paper
FOLKLORE AND POLITICS: FROM THE UKRAINIAN HISTORICAL VIEWPOINT
Jevgenij Paščenko
; Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu, Odsjek za istočnoslavenske jezike i književnosti, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Abstract
Starting out from comparison with Krleža's observations on Croatian political folklore from World War I, the paper points to the large fund of Ukrainian oral creativity expressing a critical stance towards the political events in Ukraine from 1918 onwards. At the very beginning of Russian socialism, a myth was created about the ideologically dangerous Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism as justification for the harsh anti-Ukrainian repressions. By way of internal and external censorship, that political myth prevented the meaningful organisation of national culture. Because of ideological dogmas, Ukrainian ethnology developed under political dogmas that ignored the creativity of the ordinary man and his attitude towards politics. From the beginning of Ukrainian independence in 1918 right up until the repressions of 1932, folklore with political content and pronouncedly anti-Bolshevik stances developed throughout the Ukraine. That material was long kept in limited access funds of the Ukrainian M.T. Rylski Academy of Sciences Institute of Art Studies, Folklore and Ethnology in Kiev.
The notations were accumulated in response to a call for collection of folklore from the Ukraine from the beginning of the 1920s. Their study was prevented at the beginning of the dogmatic period in Ukrainian ethnology and this state of affairs lasted right up until the regime was brought down at the beginning of the 1990s. Unfortunately, the material was not published, due to scholarly inertia. The various forms and content of that creativity are demonstrated in the paper. An era of soc-realism took hold in Ukrainian ethnology after the 1930s, and it was to continue. The folklore of the preceding period that is presented in the paper was passed over in silence and banned. Authorial folklore constructs were introduced as an expression of solidarity with the people and with the Party. The Ukrainian epic corpus known as dumy, which became forms for the creation of a fictitious epic, was particularly affected. Ideological pressure deformed Ukrainian folklore. Unfortunately, certain authors adopted those forms and misrepresented them as actual, original Ukrainian popular creativity.
Keywords
Ukrainian oral literature of anti-Bolshevik content; dumy; the Ukrainian M. T. Rylski National Academy of Sciences Institute of Art Studies; Folklore and Ethnology
Hrčak ID:
23278
URI
Publication date:
19.12.2007.
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