At present, we regard folklore in a variety of ways, often attributing to it something expressly rustic, archaic, and of late, conspicuously semiofficial. During Soviet times, folklore was viewed suspiciously, as a "bourgeois nationalistic vestige." Now that we seem to be awakening from a long mythological spell we often hear about mock folklore, awkward artless imitations having nothing to do with genuine folkways and detrimental to scholarly studies of folklore. Hence, a person, however learned in the field, setting off to record folk songs and rites, and ask people to donate something to a museum is viewed by many like an operetta caricature of a professor, especially when that person is interested in "local color."
Prof. Natalia Shumada, Maksym Rylsky Institute of Folklore and Ethnography, met me with "Are you a coffee lover?", explaining that she was in the process of putting together a Coffee Lovers Party. Her next remark was, "Why interview me? I’m a plain ordinary woman; you won’t make a good story with me." After that we had coffee and I found myself wondering who was interviewing whom. She wanted to know everything, primarily what I liked and disliked. Eventually, she told me that her professional hobby was spotting Ukrainian dialects where and whenever she could, basically in small talk. She was always on the lookout for both "authentic" and "urban" folklore, the latter mostly in the form of anecdotes appearing in response to some funny irregularities in speech or writing. She also remember the last genuinely blind kobzar (traditional Ukrainian blind kobza-playing minstrel). The man had done all this and had wept with emotion when performing a ballad at a congress of Slavicists. She remember a resident of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) tell her after the war, "So you’re from Kyiv. Yes, I know, people have plenty to eat there." She took it with mixed feelings. As an offense and an acknowledgment that her native land was rich in the gifts of nature, including culinary talent. She said a resolute no to posing for the camera, saying she was scared to look in the mirror and hated showing her ID card with a photo taken when she was younger. Then she said I could turn on my recorder as she had just remembered a good wedding song.
LOOKING FOR THE REAL THING
"I haven’t seen a single TV program with genuine folklore. They show what we call folklorism or staged presentation adapted to the audience. I remember recording folk songs outdoors when it started to rain. We went to the village club. The old ladies began singing again and my audio engineer hissed in a stage whisper, “Softer, ladies, it's too strong for the equipment.” Then we had a break and an elderly woman came up, “Please let me shout real loud, just once.” Things like that are edited out of video films, but maybe they should be left, just to make the whole thing authentic. Those women were right in their own way: the louder they sang, the better. At a wedding, every song is performed to accompany a certain ritual and one has to sing at the top of one's voice to be heard through the laughter and clinking glasses. Rendered "functionally," the whole thing acquires a new aesthetic quality. You can’t film a folk dance the way it’s performed in real life; it won’t have the desired effect on the audience as every dancer dances the way he or she chooses. There is no choreographic standard when every pas is well rehearsed and everyone moves in unison, smiling at the audience.
"I prefer amateur performers. Once we were shooting on rural location for a documentary. A group of old women appeared all dressed in the same "costumes" made at the local club. They looked horrible! I asked if they had real folk garments they wore on festive occasions. They hurried home and returned wearing clothes that would honor any local history museum. Where did they get them? From their hope chests. Who made them? Mothers, grandmothers, mothers-in-law. Why did they keep them? They were surprised: Why? We’re going to die one day, aren’t we? That’s how we’ll be dressed in the coffin. We’ll have to appear up there wearing our family clothes.
"It was easier for Paradzhanov. He viewed all this as part of an overall exotic picture and chose what he thought would produce the best effect. If he showed everything the way it’s done traditionally, his movie would not have had that epic touch, where everything is just a little overstated. I think that Mykolaichuk’s "Babylon-XX" has less emphasis on style. In Ukrainian folklore every genre has its niche, its proper place. There are all those juicy male songs and the erotic theme becomes especially pronounced toward the end of the wedding party, which is perfectly understandable. There is markedly less juicy humor or eroticism in maiden and women’s circles, and nothing of that kind is ever presented in public. I am a woman of old morals. What I see in today’s shows reminds me of primitive savagery. Being in a different phase of history, we return to that syncretism from which art originated. In my time the strongest "argument" in a women’s fight was a gesture; a woman would turn from her adversary and pick up her skirts, which was more offensive than a string of expletives. I remember something I saw during a village wedding ceremony. The bride’s mother put clean linen sheets in front of her daughter: a pure maiden on a clean road in life."
YOUR OWN PATCHED CLOTHES ARE BETTER THAN NEW
BUT STOLEN
"We have been separated from the school of mythology for too long, so I use original texts in my lectures on the pre-Christian period. I also quote from Hrushevsky, Sosenko, and Ohiyenko. My younger colleagues, even those for whom I act as a consultant, are very categorical. We only have records from later periods, what we kn0ow about the earliest human settlements is basically so many assumptions. The only thing I always tell my students about is the cults of the Sun, Fire, and Rain. I say to them that I think concretely and always let them come to their own conclusions. For example, no one seems to have bothered to interpret the legend about the fern. And the idea is simple, really. The sun, in its apogee, radiates its strongest energy. This energy is so powerful it makes everything on earth burst out blossoming, and even the fern, this non-flowering plant, turns into a magic flower made of sunbeams. This legend is a poetic summary of the ancient solar cult which pervaded Indo-European culture.
"I don’t think that any line should be drawn between primeval Ukrainian folklore and its Christian elements. There are diffusive processes in all cultures, and their interpenetration is especially evident in folk rites. The clergy seems to have put up with the notion, because no canons can utterly destroy that which is inherently traditional. Take spring rites. Time for Lent. No one is supposed to sing or dance, and yet there have always been the vesnianka and hayivka spring carols (mostly in the countryside) and parish priests looked the other way. Then came Easter and those very songs could now be performed even beside the church. The twentieth century brought totalitarian ideology which tried to ruthlessly destroy everything running counter to its dogmas, especially under Stalin. At the dawn of civilization human sacrifice was not ordered by a group of people at the very top. It was absolutely voluntary. Wives followed their deceased husbands to the grave, hoping to join them in the world of the dead. If a young maiden was to be drowned to evoke a rain, the girl had to do it of her own free will. After all, did not Jesus Christ sacrifice His Son who volunteered to suffer for the sake of the human race?
"I have lived to see so many changes, so much has been turned upside down in terms of concepts and values that now, in the evening of my life, I become more cautious in approaching even textbook, long-established notions. One thing I will never accept is violence. In any form. In Ukraine, democracy is truly manifest in only one way. We are free to express our ideas. But there are so many ways to silence people. I am planning to finish work on a Ukrainian folklore study guide. Virtually everyone who can direct such studies are my former students. In other words, I am not limited in what I want to state in my book, but there is the financial side that may cause a great many problems."
Photo:
Natalia Shumada on an expedition
to collect Ukrainian spring folk songs, 1967







