Zygmunt Gloger i folklorystyka rosyjska

Abstract

The article examines Zygmunt Gloger’s oeuvre in the context of Russian folklore studies, whose beginnings came about later than the beginnings of analogical studies in Western Europe. In Russia, volumes of folklore texts started to be published in the mid 18th century, and scholarly editions – in the 1830s and the 1840s. When Gloger carried out his research, there existed a few theoretical schools of folklore studies in Europe. One of them, the mythological, treated folklore as a reverberation of cosmogenic myths. An analogical school developed in the 1840s and 1850s in Russia. For Russian scholars, however, a more important school was the historical one, the most important representative of which was Aleksandr Wiesiołowski. His studies of folklore and folk art had a significant impact on the theory of borrowings. He authored numerous works, in which he applied a comparative method to the examination of beliefs, legends and rites of different nations. The anthropological school was of much lesser importance in Russian folklore studies. After the October Revolution, folklore studies had to cope with the Marxist-Leninist ideology. Soon there emerged a new term: Marxist folklore studies, based on the conception of the class struggle. Formalism was contested; instead, a primitive sociological perspective gained paramount importance. In the 1960s, when the ideological terror eased off, the Russian folklore studies changed again. The historical school was revived, methods of formal examination were introduced, and there emerged a new, structural-semiotic approach. The contemporary scholarly works use such terms as the Internet folklore, post-folklore and antifolklore. There are professional centers for folklore studies, which have huge archives at their disposal and publish high quality periodicals.