YURII ALEXANDROVICH NOVIKOV’S RECORDS OF FOLK TALES IN THE SCIENTIFIC ARCHIVE OF THE KARELIAN RESEARCH CENTER OF THE RUSSIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

Abstract

The Department of folklore records of the Scientific Archive of the Karelian Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Petrozavodsk holds materials recorded by Yurii Alexandrovich Novikov, a well-known expert in Russian epic texts. Collection No. 23, which dates from the summer of 1969, includes several notebooks with texts in different genres that Novikov and his wife B. P. Kerbelite collected in several settlements of the Pudozh District of Karelia. Some of the recorded folk tales were narrated by several performers. Of these narrators, Novikov especially appreciated Ivan Grigorievich Fomin, whom he remembered even decades later. Regrettably, none of these texts were published in the collection titled Russkie narodnye skazki Pudozhskogo kraia (Russian folk tales of the Pudozh land), which was prepared by A. P. Razumova and T. I. Senkina, researchers at the Institute of Linguistics, Literature and History of the Karelian Branch of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and which was published in 1982. This article describes the folk tales that Novikov recorded and to which he added biographical notes about the performers. Some of these texts are brought to the attention of scholars for the first time. One of them is the folk tale Repka (The Turnip), which was recorded in different variants performed by several performers. The Collection also includes photographs of bearers of the Pudozh folklore tradition, which were taken by the collectors. The publication of these materials expands the knowledge of Novikov’s collecting activities and of the circulation of folk tales in the Pudozh District of Karelia in the late 1960s.