Reflection of the Folk Epic and the History Tales in the Oldest Monuments of Slavic Literature: to the Methodology of Identification
The paper is dedicated to the methods of separating the elements of oral origin in written monuments. Its aim is to overview the methods which are known in science drawing on the corpus of the Slavic literatures of the early Middle Ages, and to determine the extent of their implementation from the viewpoint of the modern scientific knowledge. Science traditionally utilizes the source study analysis of the origin of various information in narrative monuments (first of all, about early history); the analysis of genre features of entire monuments (for example, of an epic nature) and individual fragments; the comparison of plots and motifs presented in written monuments, with folklore plots and motifs; the identification of stylistic and lexical features that bring together a written monument or its fragments with folklore. At the same time, studies of recent decades have shown the weaknesses of a straightforward simplistic approach to the identification of folklore elements in medieval Slavic literature, the likelihood of the bookish origin of many plots and motifspreviously categorically classified as folklore. Attention is drawn to the narrowness of the boundary separating literary creativity from oral-epic (the absence of conscious authorship at the early stages of development of literature, common for the early literature and folklore mechanisms of assimilation of the reality to the ideal and exemplary). All this encourages researchers who focus on the oral sources of Slavic literature to adjust their methodology and take into account the achievements of colleagues - above all, this refers to the need for more rigorous research of texts of foreign origin that were or could have been sources for Slavic bookmen. More precise criteria for separation of the elements of the oral tradition from written monuments can only be based on the combination of philological methods (the study of the features of epic "speech") and source studies (the separation of elements that are not known to have a book prototype in the oldest works of historical content).