Article

Name: The Tower of Babel and the confusion of languages: Biblical story in the Russian Siberian text

Authors: Vera S. Kuznetsova

Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation,

In the section Study of folklore

Abstract: he paper analyses a group of folk “biblical” narrations about the construction of the Tower of Babel by considering how the folklore consciousness masters the plot and the text that are of book origin. The author presents a new found archival text of the oral biblical narrative about the construction of the Tower of Babel and the causes of the diversity of languages in the world, the story of an old Siberian peasant D. N. Plekhanov. The story was recorded by P. A. Gorodtsov on June 19, 1907, in the Tyumen district of the Tobolsk province. The comparison of this text with literary sources indicates that the basis for the oral narrative was the story of Explanatory Palea. The narrator supplements the book source with details and references to the local Siberian tradition, including an attempt to inscribe the peoples associated with the Siberian local tradition into the biblical genealogy. This technique is a way to bring biblical events to the reality of the narrator and the listener. The comparison of the published text with other oral versions of stories about the Tower of Babel made it possible to establish common traits of the mechanisms of the adaptation of book origin narrations by folklore consciousness.

Keywords: Slavic folklore, folk Bible, legends, Tower of Babel, Siberian Russian texts

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