Russian Chastushka (Ditties) vs Spanish Flamenco Verses: the Experience of Typological Comparison

Abstract

The fate of folk genres can be completely different in different peoples and historical periods: some disappear without a trace in the manuscripts, others reach the later epochs on the pages of a small number of surviving books and others develop, go out into great stages and conquer entire countries. This is the destiny of flamenco which consists of three elements, that is music, poetry and dance and became the cultural practice of southern Spain during the 19th century. In that same century in Russia, the genre of chastushka was formed. Like the flamenco couplets, it flourished in the vulnerable and precarious social layer of the urban population formed by the peasants deprived of land who went to earn a living in the cities. The synchrony of the global socio-political processes, one of which and also the most key throughout the 19th century was industrialization, suggests that in some social groups in different countries could arise and develop similar forms of art so it is interesting to compare milestones in the history of flamenco copla and chastushka, analyze themes and their lexical content. The aim of the paper is to discover similarity and difference between two folk genres at a certain historical stage of their existence. As an analytical basis, collections of texts and scientific research in Russian and Spanish are adopted from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 21st one.

Keywords

• chastushka
• copla
• flamenco
• hondo
• couplet
• folklore
• folk song