Article

Name: “The earth stands on God’s sea”: stories about the creation of the world from the Angara region recorded by A. A. Makarenko

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:

The paper presents new archival texts containing folk stories about the creation of the world. The stories were recorded by A. A. Makarenko on the Angara River in the Kezhemsky volost of the Yenisei district in 1904. These records were not included in the collection “Siberian Folk Calendar in Ethnographic Relation: Eastern Siberia. Yenisei province” published in 1913, remaining outside the attention of the scientific community. The folk stories describe how God created the land from the earth raised from the bottom of the sea by Satan (cf.: S. Thompson. Motif-index of folk-literature: A811. Earth brought up from the bottom of primeval water; A812.1. Devil as Earth Diver). These are the complete versions of cosmogonic narratives, almost as in their authentic fixation. The Angara versions of cosmogonic history were compared with the texts of similar narratives from the European territory of Russia, revealing the connection with the folklore traditions of the Russian North. This connection is due to the peculiarities of the settlement of the Angara region: the lower reaches of the Angara River and its tributaries. According to the research, the original settlers of the Angara region were natives of the Russian North, with the old-time core of the Russian population

of these territories being preserved until the revolution. The publication of these texts enhances the comprehension of Russian narrative folklore in Siberia, including the geographical distribution of some folklore motifs.

Keywords: Russian folklore, legends about the creation of the world, Siberian Russian texts

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