The Will in the East Slavic Folklore

Abstract

The article explores the concept of the will in the East Slavic folklore. The main criterion for selecting the material is the frequency of the word “will” and corresponding lexical word family in different genres — epics, funeral, recruitment and wedding lamentations, lyrical songs, proverbs, and spiritual poems. The folklore component of the concept of will is considered in the totality of all semantic and plot information, taking into account synonyms, antonyms, epithets, predicates, and associative series related to the word “will” and its derivatives. The words of the lexical word family will reveal a wide range of meanings that generally coincide with the meanings of words in literary languages and dialects. Among them, in most genre projections of the concept of will, there are two poles, one of which collects positive meanings, such as the idea of the will as someone’s own right to choose as well as physical liberty, which is identified with the life itself. The other pole collects negative meanings: the idea of the will as the power of the alien, the older or the stronger one; redundancy of freedom and willfulness up to disobedience and immorality. However, in some genres such bipolarity is broken: in proverbs, negatively assessed meanings of will come to the fore, while spiritual poems render will in negative terms, as a centre of the sinfulness of a person and of the entire profane world.

Keywords

• folklore of the eastern slavs
• epics
• funeral
• recruitment and wedding lamentations
• lyrical songs
• proverbs and spiritual poems.