Belarus folklore studies in the context of ideas and practice of socialist realism

Communicated by Academician Alexander I. Lokotko

Based on the great factual material, the article retraces the formation of ideological, social and cultural attitudes and regulations that implemented the socialist realism methodology in theory and practice of the Belarus folklore studies. In the 1930s, the socialist realism established itself as an ideology of the folk art studies, as a result of which it virtually lost its independence and entered the system of new conceptual coordinates in social dialogue. The article broadly examines the establishment of an extensive and inherently unique project known as the “Soviet folklore” in the academic and cultural discourse of Belarus. Belarusian folklorists were claimed to be incorporated in the process of finding and representing the works of the new socialist folklore art authorized and ideologically defined by those in authority. The strategies of adherence of intellectuals to the social realist discourse during the period of 1930-1950 included various forms of compromise between science, traditional culture holders, mass recipients of the Soviet culture and the authorities. The article states that the methodological crisis in social realist science has expressed itself through the unification of folklore and the established canon (i. e. the corpus of texts of explicit ideological modality), the elimination of the whole layer of uncensored folklore texts from the scope of the study; the ignoring of the dialect nature of traditional culture in collection and editing practices; the blurring of the research subject in folklore studies due to the legitimized role of an active amateur artist, as well as amateur art and punli-cation integrated to the research paradigm. The article employs new facts from the history of folklore studies that prevent the one-way interpretation of the specific features of the Soviet period folklore studies and expand the problem field of the modern science.

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