Divide up the next set of readings
What happened two years ago and the desire for an artistic response
Existing memorial
Planned memorials
Other artistic responses to tragedy
Vietnam War Memorial
Oklahoma City bombing and the memorial to that
Other artistic responses:
Vietnam War and films such as Deerhunter, Apocalypse Now
Discussions on NPR, PBS of artistic responses to tragedies, life-changing situations
Some situations get no memorial
Tragedies caused by religious sects:
Waco
Heaven's Gate
Jonestown
Natural disasters
The various hurricanes, as in Camille in VA
What is the difference?
Esoteric/exoteric
Changes thinking, belief
What about successful wars, as in WWII?
Perhaps memorials to individual battles where there is significant loss
George Bush Sr.'s Gulf War goes unheeded- except perhaps for sick soldiers
The silly response to tragedy- sick jokes
Why in the world would there be a silly response?
Does it trivialize the tragedy?
Or is something else going on?
If the negative event is too disturbing, then a more structuring devices such as the limerick response to John and Lorena Bobbitt
If it is too, too horrid, no response at all
The woman who drowns her 2 sons
What at 9/11?
There are jokes
See the NewFolk website
Back to Russian material- and it is connected
I believe epic is an artistic response to a BAD situation, a situation of loss in war which causes you to rethink your beliefs
So, what do we know about it so far
Epic is connected to war
If it does not tell about a battle
Or a conflict between 2 heroes, one Russian and one foreign
Then it deals with warriors in general- bogatyri
The length of the narratives is relatively short, though they could once have been joined into longer stories
Broken up episode from episode with time
The verse is stychic, as in composition is line-by-line
Rather than stanzas
The line length is uneven, though there seem to be 3 major beats per line
These 3 formal features lead people to assume that the poetry, as it is recorded in the late 19th century, is a degeneration from a former poetry, one that was
Longer
Had more even and regular lines, though probably not rhyme
Rhyme tends to be a feature of shorter poetic forms
When you tell a long story, the poetry tends to by stychic
It was sung to the accompaniment of a musical instrument (at least it was)
Not in the Siberian recordings
According to Putilov and Jakobson, one distinction between epic and lament is that the former is sung by men to a musical accompaniment and the latter is sung by women a cappella. Well
The Russian instrument is the zither (gusli)
Ukrainian- bandura, lira (hurdy-gurdy)
South Slavic- gusli, but this time a bowed lute
Or it can be a dombra, a plucked lute
We will get to the location where epic is performed in a little while
Basically, some countries have it and some do not
Even among the Slavs
It was considered prestigious to have epic- consider high art and having epic proves that you are high and developed civilization, like classical Greece with Homer
Along the same lines, epic is a genre that seems to come and go
It dies out
Other genres do not- jokes, for example, are widely told here and now it all societies that we know of
All cultures have some sort of tale
Be in fairy (magic) tale or the legend type
Epic- not so
Even in those cultures that have it, it seems to die out
It was first recorded by Kirsha Danilov, early in the 19th century, something like the early interest in tales
Big collecting push in the 1870's and basically up until Stalin
By then, epic exists only in the Russian North
Onega, Pechora, Arkhangel'sk, Kareliia
By the time collecting comes back in the Brezhnev era, it is gone in the Russian North
Basically only place found is Siberia and, even then, tends to be far east and among Old Believers. Why would this be so?
Why would epic tend to die out and disappear?
Their speculations now
Go back to examination of content
Talked about some songs from the so-called mythological group
Please note that not all scholars will agree on these divisions
Sviatogor and his wife
Sviatogor and the coffin
Volga i Mikula
Volkv Vseslavievich
These are etiological in a way
Talk about a change in eras- the era of Sviatogor is passed
A certain way of being and believing no longer exists
The Kievan group
How Ilia becomes a bogatyr
The various Ilia stories
Ilia Muromets and the Wandering Beggars
Ilia Muromets and Nightingale the Robber
Ilia Muromets and Idolishche
Ilia Muromets and Kalin Tsar
Ilia quarrels with Vladimir
Dobrynia and the various Dobrynia stories
Mykhailo Potyk
And the various other heroes
The Novgorod group
Sadko
Vasilii Buslaevich
What are these poems about?
What is the tone?
What sorts of things strike you?
Ending
Gender relations
What makes a hero heroic
Position of the ruler
What about the narrative style
To what extent are various things described
To what extent are various people described
How is dialogue rendered
Are these stories of loss?
What is lost? Is it a type of relationship between the sexes?
Which would mean a social restructuring and a loss of a type of society, a way of life
Issue of hubris
To what extent are they saying that the Russians overestimated what they could do and thus got themselves into big trouble
Compare to Song of Roland
Relationship of these songs to reality
To what extent do these songs reflect real historical figures and real battles or other events?
How consistent are they in terms of presenting what they claim to be fact,
Such a family relations
Events
Recall my telling them that epic was used not only as proof of having a high culture and being civilized, but also as a way of reconstructing a loss literature
And a lost history
If there is no document of the Primary Chronicle type, then use epic
With the caveat that the memory of the folk may be imperfect and some restoration would be needed
Playlist for the CD
Russian epic 1- Старинная песня про Данилушку, Н.К. Рожин, 1982
2- Калика читает Голубиную книгу, А.Н. Щелканова, 1985
3- Братья разбойинки и сестра, А.Л. Чечелова, 1983
4- Добрыня и Алеша, П.К. Соседов, 1984
5- Теща в плену у зятя, Ф.А. Санталова, 1982
6- Федор Колыческий и Мельфа-Софья Болховница, Е.С. Киселев, 1985
7- Отправление Скопина, А.И. Винокурова, 1982