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« 2022. # 2 (164)

The Ethnology Notebooks. 2022. № 2 (164), 349—364

UDK [398.21(=161.2):316.64(=1:477.82-2)”193/194″]: 930.2 

DOI https://doi.org/10.15407/nz2022.02.349

BETWEEN POLES, GERMANS AND «SOVIETS»: FOLK NARRATIVES ABOUT ANTI-UKRAINIAN ACTIONS NEAR LUTSK

CHIKALO Oksana

  • ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1636-3397
  • Candidate of Philological Sciences,
  • Senior Researcher,
  • Institute of Ethnology
  • of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine,
  • department of folklore,
  • 15, Svobody Avenue, 79000, Lviv, Ukraine,
  • Contacts: e-mail: chikalooksana@gmail.com

Abstract. Subject of study The article analyzes folk tales that reflect the folk vision of historical events and modern social life in Volhynia in the late 1930s — early 1940s. Narratives are considered through the prism of personal experience of narrators — participants and witnesses of the tragic events of this period.

The purpose of the publication is to analyze oral stories about anti-Ukrainian punitive actions around Lutsk, which took place in the first half of 1943 in Volyn, to consider basic concepts, and thus the plot-motive fund, illustrating the popular interpretation of socio-political processes and life during World War II.

The object of the research are folk narratives recorded during field surveys of the area around Lutsk (2019). These are folk tales about punitive actions against Ukrainians carried out by German units, Polish police or settlers from the so-called «sites», as well as works about national liberation struggles in Volhynia in the first third and middle of the twentieth century, which are still carried by participants and witnesses to that struggle, as well as their descendants.

The article synthesizes the methods subordinated to the purpose of exploration: structural-semiotic and structural-typological, which allow to analyze folk narratives as a set of constituent parts and their semantics. The interdisciplinary method made it possible to attract materials from other scientific disciplines: history, ethnology, ethnopsychology, statistics. The use of the achievements of these industries allows us to reveal the peculiarities of the reproduction of historical events through the prism of the folk epic. An indispensable method is field research, which made it possible to record narratives about the events of the Second World War in Volhynia and made it possible to find out the peculiarities of the existence and distribution of folk tales on this topic.

Keywords: narrative, folk tale, concept, theme, motive, semantics, narrator, ethnostereotype.

Received 5.05.2022

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