Demonology in Contemporary Ukraine: Folklore or ?Postfolklore??

The "Death" of Folklore?
    Twentieth-century Ukrainian and Russian folkloristics sustained an early-nineteenth-century fallacy about the death and transformation of traditional, agricultural folklore. It grew in proportion to collected materials: the more texts folklorists collected, the more anxious they became about folklore's fate. At the end of the twentieth century this fallacy became unusually popular. In February 2006, at the First Congress of Russian Folklorists, held in Moscow, the fundamental issues in folk theory were widely argued, with little consensus: Is folkloristics a separate discipline? How does it differ from ethnography, anthropology, and related disciplines? Should Soviet methodology be disregarded completely? The only point of broad agreement, it seemed, was that traditional village(FN1) folklore was dying out and a new type was replacing it. Contemporary Russian folklorists suggested terms such as urbanized folklore, postfolklore, and anti-folklore to describe contemporary folk culture, and they received majority support. For example, the Russian folklorist Sergei Neklyudov claims that:

The twentieth century appears to be the period of the final receding of classical agricultural folklore, which is being pushed out by the folklore of other social groups, including social l[y] marginal [individuals] ... the texts and facts of the traditional agricultural culture are becoming a part of the life of ethnographical museums. This concerns, first, epic genres (historical songs) and fairy tales. Those genres are labelled "non productive," or "incapable of creating new forms." (Kargin and Neklyudov 2005:18, 21, my translation)

    Neklyudov also discusses urban folklore as a substitute for traditional agricultural genres and texts, and states that the death of village folklore was hastened by urbanization in the 1970s. The disappearance of small villages and towns caused the disappearance of agricultural oral tradition. Large cities absorbed small towns and developed their own oral traditions (Kargin and Neklyudov 2005:20). Aleksandr Panchenko, another prominent Russian folklorist, seems to agree with that statement, and cites urbanization as a major factor in the death of village folklore. He argues that because urbanites are now a majority of the Russian population (villagers being only 26.7 percent), traditional village culture is marginal and bound eventually, to die (2005:87).
    The concept of "postfolklore" can be traced to a 1995 article by Neklyudov, entitled "After Folklore," published in the prominent Russian folklore journal Zhivaya Starina. In this article, Neklyudov argued that the period of classical and archaic folklore is finished and that contemporary folklorists are faced with a new, so-called postfolklore:

Contemporary urban folklore does not exist as a pure repertoire of texts. It is a semiotic ensemble of lower, officially unsanctioned cultures, such as prison folk art, graffiti, tattoos, clothing, hairstyles, decorations and gestures.... All of this context is inseparable from oral folklore. (1995:3-4)

    Ten years later, in "Third culture. Folklore. Postfolklore," Pozdneev concluded that:

The contemporary state of folklore can be characterized as a system of circles which goes from the center out: in the center we have archaic genres; farther out, new genres. The old archaic genres are narrowing because new ones are circling around. (2005:305)

    He describes the beginning of the twenty-first century not as "post-folklore" but as "postfolklore culture," where all traditional genres are secondary, brought in from literature (306).
    Thus, we see a strong tendency in contemporary Russian scholarship to believe that traditional folklore is yielding its place to a new type of mass culture, or to a "postfolklore." Let us assume for the moment that such conclusions are realistic and look back two hundred years to picture folklore's development through the eyes of nineteenth-century East Slavic folklorists. Based on the disappearance of folkloric forms reported by present-day scholars, we would hope that our predecessors, who first began to record traditional folklore at a time when it was supposedly alive and well, were much more optimistic about its prospects.
    Surprisingly, almost two hundred years ago, the first Ukrainian folklorist, Mykola Tsertelyev, claimed that traditional folklore as classically conceived was already disappearing. He claimed that dumy (Ukrainian epic folk songs) were mere remnants of a much larger, more systematic, pre-Slavic, heroic mythology (1818:124). It is important to note that this claim concerned sone of the most fundamental and widespread Ukrainian epic songs. Twelve years later, Mykaylo Maksymovych (a collector and editor of Ukrainian epic songs) called dumy and historical songs the "gravestones" of an earlier tradition (Kirdan 1974:63). Other Ukrainian folklorists, fieldworkers, and editors of the nineteenth century (e.g., Platon Lukashevich and Panteleymon Kylish) expressed disappointment that the epic tradition was dying out, and that its performers were not nearly as good as they once were.
    The story would repeat itself later, when scholars turned their attention from epics to prose, and specifically to fairy tales. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when Slavic (specifically Russian and Ukrainian) folklorists began to collect and to systematically analyze tales, most of them published their anthologies with prefaces warning their readers to hurry up and collect the remnants of a great tradition of fairy-tale telling. Mikhail Azadovskiy, for instance, divided tellers into modern and archaic professionals. He claimed that classic tales could be found in their original, clear forms only in the anthologies of Afanasev (the first tale anthology in Russia) or the Brothers Grimm. He also claimed that twentieth-century fairy tales were influenced more and more strongly by realistic details and events of everyday village life. Azadovskiy called the first decade of the twentieth century a new stage in the lives of the fairy tale and its tellers (1936:24, 27). This claim is reminiscent of Nekludov's notion of "postfolklore" a century later, in which a new stage of folklore's development coincided with the turn of the millennium. Both scholars, a century apart, announced traditional folklore's metamorphosis, if not its death.
    What we have, simply, is the fact that the claim of the death of traditional Ukrainian folklore was made half a century before the serious recording and study of it began. Folklore was announced to be dying in Ukraine before the discipline of folkloristics was even born!
    Having examined folklorists' attitudes in the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries, let us next cite one representative example from the middle of the twentieth century. One of the most active collectors of the Ukrainian prose tradition, Mykhaylo Gyryak, in his extensive research of Ukrainian tales in East Slovakia, mentioned that industrial development in East Slovakia had a great impact on the Ukrainian folk tradition there: "The reduction of this tradition occurs in every conceivable way. The intensity of fairy tale telling has decreased as well" (1983:180). In the villages where he worked, Gyryak found over 100 narrators who knew and could tell tales, and he published several collections of these tales. In the same area, fifty years before Gyryak, another Ukrainian folklorist, Volodymyr Hnatyuk, had found only twenty narrators. Astonishingly, given these numbers, Gyryak chose to announce a reduction in the tale-telling tradition, when arithmetic shows that he found five times more narrators than did his predecessors.
    This is just one example of a tendency among Slavic folklorists, in various historical periods, to panic. Strangely, a fallacy created by folklorists about the death of tradition has grown stronger over time, regardless of actual evidence from fieldwork and new anthologies. This attitude encompasses prose, epics, lyrics, rites, and traditional rituals. Folklorists from the Rylsky Institute of Art Studies, Folkloristics, and Ethnology returning from field trips will often say things such as, "There are wedding songs in that village, but we must hurry up, because only the old sing them--the young there cannot sing," "We collected some funeral rituals there, but they are not nearly as interesting as the earlier ones," or comments to the effect that only old women know the traditions and will die soon without passing their stories to a new generation.

Devolutionary Premise among the Folk
    The "devolutionary premise" (Dundes 1969)--the idea that tradition is dying--is actively supported not only by folklorists, but, first and foremost, by performers themselves. We encountered the same belief that traditional folklore is dying out among the population of Ukrainian villages. Very frequently, members of folk communities will, after recounting many stories, claim that they know nothing at all and that there are no folk performers surviving in the village: "You should have come three, five, ten years ago. So and so would be alive, he was a great narrator. These days no one performs. People do not communicate any more," "People only watch TV these days," "We had a woman here many years ago: she was a witch, but now she is dead," "Go to the other end of the village, there are some old people there who might know something." When we collected folklore during the Orange Revolution in Kyiv's Trade Union Building where people gathered to rest and sleep, the first reaction we heard from performers was, "You should have come yesterday, we had a great man telling stories here. But he is gone now." We were told the same thing three days in a row! In a village in central Ukraine everyone referred us to a 102-year-old man, probably because he was the oldest, and ironically enough he was the only one who did not know any folktales.
    The story of "the vanishing, great performer" has become part of the folklore of storytelling. By a century or a day, separated by space or time, the folklorist will always miss him, because he exists simply as a part of the storytelling tradition. Today, the "golden age of folklore" is a fallacy supported by folklorists, and the "great performer at another place and another time" is one created and supported within traditional communities.

Folklore in Ploske
    To show that village folklore not only is not dying, but also underlies contemporary urban texts, we will refer to our own experience(FN2) in collecting traditional agricultural folklore in a small village in central Ukraine. Traditional folklore narratives collected in Ploske and surrounding villages refute folklorists' common claim that traditional folklore is dying out and being replaced by "postfolklore." Ancient motifs are actively utilized by story-tellers, and the notions and beliefs behind them influence not only contemporary folk forms, but also the life and behavior of people at all social levels.
    For ten years we have carried out extensive research in the village of Ploske (located in the Chernihivsky region of central Ukraine), and this work has provided us with interesting and unexpected materials that are very important to the study of the life of contemporary prose narrative tradition. We collected prose narratives from contemporary narrators with video and audio equipment that show very clearly that, at least in this community, folklore is as alive as ever, and its performers and audience are very enthusiastic about, and active during, artistic communication. Even repeated recordings of the same story from the same performer in different communicative situations have each had their own character and charm.
    Ploske is a traditional Ukrainian folk community. Community and traditional life play a great role in the process of saving and transmitting oral prose over long periods of time, and in the development of narrators. A booklet about Ploske written at the end of the nineteenth century by its priest Trifon Stefanovsky describes nearly every possible aspect of life in the village, and is particularly helpful in understanding some of the origins of the traditions and thinking of Ploske's residents. The booklet itself has become part of the village's folk tradition, and some historical legends from it have become a part of Ploske's oral tradition. We first heard about it in the 1990s, during our first field trip. None of the libraries or archives in Kyiv had a copy, and villagers kept referring us to other villagers for a copy. When we became quite skeptical about its existence, they showed us the booklet but did not let us borrow (or even touch) it to make a copy; however, they allowed us to photograph the pages. The relevant parts of it are reproduced, with their permission, in our book (Brytsyna and Golovakha 2004:viii).
    According to Stefanovsky, Ploske was founded at the beginning of the sixteenth century and existed for a long time as a very small settlement formed by a few independent families. Its first appearance as a village on a map occurred in the second half of the seventeenth century (1900:5-6). Contemporary Ploske is a large, widespread village with over 1000 residents, fifteen kilometers from Nyezhin, the nearest town. Over the last century, Ploske has kept many aspects of a traditional way of life: interior decoration of village houses prominently features icons and handmade towels and linens, and many villagers use traditional stoves for cooking, despite the fact that Ploske has gas lines. This traditionalism influences people's spiritual life, increases the spread of folklore, and helps to preserve the folk inheritance.
    In our fieldwork we used various techniques for collecting narratives together with their contexts. We utilized a "vacuum-cleaner" approach: all texts, regardless of their possible value, were recorded by the field worker. We did not use questionnaires or finding lists, although when conversing with performers we did ask about specific plots. Typically we would not ask "have you heard a story about ...," but rather, "have you heard about ..." (treating demonological prose not as stories but as real-life events).
    We also have materials for comparative analysis, collected over a century ago in Ploske by the Ukrainian folklorist O. Malynka, and so we can see the life of this community's folk prose in its historical dynamics and compare its state among active and passive bearers at the end of nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Malynka's anthology holds an important place among the materials collected by Ukrainian folklorists at the turn of the twentieth century. His book was the starting point for our fieldwork in contemporary Ploske.
    Malynka also used a "vacuum-cleaner" approach in his fieldwork. His anthology has forty-eight prose narrative texts from Ploske, among which thirty are Märchen. Unfortunately Malynka did not record biographical information for the texts he collected. (He recorded only the name of the place where the text was recorded, and sometimes the first and/or last name of the performer.) This lack prevents us from making any assumptions about his narrators. Even with poor biographical information, however, Malynka's material provides a clear picture of the state of the folk narrative tradition in Ploske at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Scholarly Attitude to Folk Demonology
    Oleksandr Malynka is one of the few Russian folklorists who bothered to collect demonological narratives. Despite the popularity of demonological plots and motifs within folk communities, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ukrainian folklorists for all practical purposes ignored folk demonology in their scholarly analysis. Demonological legends were actively collected by Ukrainian folklorists (Ivan Nechyi-Levitsky, Volodymyr Hnatyuk, Borys Hrynchenko, and Oleksandr Malynka) only during a relatively brief period at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Even then, such texts were analyzed only in the context of the folk pagan beliefs of Old Slavs. Folklorists also overlooked the bearers of this tradition, concentrating their attention, instead, on epic singers and taletellers. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, scholars' limited interest in demonology ("low" mythology) can be traced to their competing interest in the atavistic rudiments of "high" mythology. For example, house demons, forest demons, and mermaids were analyzed as links to ancient gods. To nineteenth-century folklorists, recorded demonological texts did not seem fully developed and a esthetically valuable: they thought of such texts as "damaged," although they did serve (in their opinion) as remnants of an earlier "high" mythology.
    Another factor that led folklorists away from interest in demonological traditions was their "love of the folk." During mid- to late-nineteenth-century Ukrainian Romanticism, scholars preferred to collect only the "best" samples from "professional" performers, and so demonological texts became an unpopular genre. The rare attempts by Ukrainian folklorists to collect everything (the afore-mentioned "vacuum-cleaner" method) provoked negative responses from their colleagues. For example, Malynka used this method in his fieldwork, but was actively criticized at the time by Hrynchenko and Hnatyuk. They argued that his texts were far from perfect, and Hnatyuk described some of them as "damaged, uninteresting and lifeless" (1902:42).
    Hnatyuk's comment is ironic given that Malynka's recordings are much more valuable to contemporary scholars: they give a clearer picture of the actual life of folk tradition in the community at that time and allow objective comparative analysis with today's situation in the same community. Ukrainian writer and folklorist Ivan Franko, in his article "Bel parlar gentile," (originally published in 1909), pointed out that folklorists should study folklore more widely, pay more attention to non-popular prosaic genres, and create new approaches for the study of folk tradition and folk communication (1984:9). Unfortunately, his ideas did not receive strong support at the time and folklorists completely ignored demonological prose in favor of epic singers, and later, tale recordings.
    During the twentieth century, the situation worsened still further. Soviet Ukrainian folklorists ignored folk demonology even in their fieldwork. A great number of folk anthologies were published, which included tales, songs, children's folklore, and rituals; but demonological prose was neither collected nor published, mainly because such texts had never received the status of an independent genre. Questions about the contemporary status of rural and urban demonology were not a priority for Ukrainian folklorists until the 1990s. As a result, we have materials both from the late nineteenth century and from the late twentieth/early twenty-first centuries that prove that folk demonology is still actively functioning, but these bodies of material are separated by a gap of over 100 years.
    On our first expedition to Ploske, we found quite a few texts that corresponded, almost word for word, with texts collected by Malynka. We also found performers whose artistic talent ranks them with famous Ukrainian narrators of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Texts recorded from Mykaylo Trush (a performer of fairy tales), Motrya Perepechai, Evdokiya Kompanets, and others provided enough material for our recent anthology of contemporary Ploske narratives (Brytsyna and Golovakha 2004). Traditional beliefs preserved in Ploske (e.g., belief in witches, the return of the dead, or the domovyk [household ghost]) together with thoroughly artistic performances, and the existence of a permanent audience, allow Ploske to be regarded as a traditional folk community--one which can not only speak for itself but which also typifies contemporary folk communities of central Ukraine.
    Our materials, collected at the turn of the twenty-first century (we recorded over 300 prose narratives, most of which are demonological legends and tales), testify that the folk prose tradition in Ploske did not decrease over the twentieth century, despite the strong belief of most folklorists of the second half of the twentieth century that traditional folklore genres are dying, with the number of knowledgeable performers continuously decreasing. Approximately 90 percent of the texts are demonological legends; the rest are divided between Märchen (approximately twenty-five texts) and anecdotes (fewer than ten texts). There were also many oral history texts, which we excluded from our anthology.

Demonology in Contemporary Ukraine
    If we turn our attention from scholarship to the actual life of Ukrainian folk demonological prose in the last century, we see an interesting picture: folk demonology is still a favorite genre of Ukrainian folk performers and their listeners today, with its active bearers present in both traditional agricultural and contemporary urban communities. Independently of researchers' interests and political orientation, demonological legends survived and have been passed to new generations. During the fieldwork that we performed in Central Ukraine (in both villages and cities) we collected all the plots recorded by our predecessors a century ago and many more that were not represented in the anthologies of the nineteenth century.
    During our fieldwork we communicated with more than fifty performers, twenty of whom can be characterized as active. Most of our volunteer performers were older women who were not highly educated. They were the easiest to involve in artistic communication, knew much about tradition, and--most importantly--were evidently and convincingly sincere. Folklore is an organic part of their existence, and they perform not so much for outside listeners as for themselves and their neighbors. Whenever we would ask about a particular demonological plot that was recorded in this community a century ago, we would receive not only that text but variations as well (e.g., the witch turning into a cat or dog, the witch turning into a wagon wheel, the lingering death of a male witch, and the appearance of a house demon as a portent). All of these texts were familiar in their entirety to a majority of our respondents. They would swear that they saw the witch's tail and even touched it, felt the breath or touch of the hobgoblin, or heard his voice. They would point to their neighbor as the subject of the demonic action (e.g., "a dead mother came to my neighbor's children," "a whirlwind at the crossroads blew my neighbor away," or "my neighbor was a witch"). The materials collected in Ploske demonstrate that village traditions have been preserved and passed down to current generations.
    All the traditional demonological personae and plots and motifs recorded in the nineteenth century are well known in the village today as part of the active repertoire of its inhabitants. Despite the absence of interest in the genre from researchers, demonological prose continues to be an important part of the spiritual life of the village.

Legends: The Witch Wheel
    Demonological legends (e.g., of house demons, hobgoblins, witches, dead souls, mermaids and other creatures of "low" mythology) have always been very popular among Ukrainian folk performers and their listeners. In contemporary Ukrainian agricultural folk communities, demonological beliefs are as popular and alive as centuries ago.
    For example, we recorded the traditional demonological legend in which a wheel turns into a witch after a man puts it on a fence (five versions from different performers). This plot is present in every anthology of the late nineteenth century and is well-known among contemporary performers in agricultural communities. Here are two examples of this legend plot, recorded in Ploske in the summer of 1994 during a conversation we had with villagers about witches and witchcraft. The texts were recorded in the presence of a few performers, and the stories were told in this order:(FN3)

Here is how it was ... no ... like this ... they go through the street ... it is midnight.... Well, the wheel was coming (it is what I heard from my mother). The wheel was rolling along the street (you know--from the carriage?). People took it and impaled it on the stake (the fence looked different then, not even a fence really, but a twisted wattle. Stakes were there and between them twisted wattle). Well, they took the wheel and on the wattle impaled the wheel, right through the hole. When they woke up in the morning, there was a man.... Here we are. Different things happened. But who knows.... (Told by Natalya Lutsenko, born in 1926. Brytsyna and Golovakha 2004:253)

A long time ago people told this story ... well, so, they come: well, girls and boys, young people come home from the club. And the wheel is rolling. Then one boy took the wheel and impaled it on the (earlier we had twisted wattles, walled fences), impaled the wheel on the stake. When he returned home his mother was gone. Woke up in the morning--the mother was not at home. When everybody woke up they saw that the mother is sitting on the stake, he hung his own mother.

[Listener: Old people told this story]

Well, old people told this, those things happened back then, is it the truth or not truth? ... Perhaps, there is really something there. (Told by Maria Vashenok, born in 1940. Brytsyna and Golovakha 2004:252-53)

    Here is the same plot, recorded by Malynka in Ploske in 1902:

One girl was a witch. She got angry at one boy and decided: "I will show you!" Once this boy was coming from the party, and the girl, since she was a witch, turned into a wheel and started to chase him. He got the wheel and impaled it on the stake. In the morning people were surprised to see, that instead of the wheel the girl was hanging on the stake. (1902:272)

    This plot exists in Ploske only as passive knowledge. No performers believed in the truthfulness of the recounted events. They all referred to the story as a doubtful, archaic plot.

Legends: Witch in the Form of a Dog
    Another traditional plot, in which a "witch-dog" or "witch-cat" tries to harm a cow and is struck by a stick, is widespread in the villages where we performed fieldwork. We recorded the following text from Motrya Perepechai in the summer of 1994. It is presented as a sample of living belief, of ancient origin, in the possibility of a witch turning into a domestic animal, a belief that was also widespread in medieval Europe:

Brytsyna: Did you hear that a witch can turn into a cat or a dog, and then a boy hits her and in the morning he sees the neighbor?

Perepechai: Of course, why not, of course, I heard and it was fair. Right here we have a street, and we were taking our cow for sale (not with this husband, but with the first one). We are taking the cow for sale (we got up really early), at two in the morning, hitched the horse to the carriage, taking the cow. And from this street the doggy, little one! Comes out and begins to bother us, no way of getting rid of him. We could not stand it any more, do whatever you want, this dog... And ... Vasyl (he [has since] died already): "I will show you, I will hit, that is the only way!" And a nice, there was a nice stick on the carriage, and he hit the leg of the dog like this. The dog barked sadly and went away. Well, we sold the cow and came back, and there we heard that somebody broke the leg of the old Dzheresy [the neighbor, whom they suspect of being a witch]. Do you understand? Somebody broke old Dzheresy's leg! [Told by Motrya Perepechai, born in 1923. From Brytsyna and Golovakha 2004:138-39].

    A key difference between the preceding witch-as-wheel texts and the following witch-as-dog texts is that the latter lack "epic distance," i.e., distance between the event of a story and the claimed life of its performer (Myshanych 1986:74). In the witch-as-dog texts, the performers recount the events from a first-person perspective.
    We also recorded, from numerous performers, advice on how to keep a witch from harming you or your cow. The most popular suggestions we received included the following: do not share salt or sugar with your neighbor; watch for things that break in your neighbor's hands; do not open the door to anyone who arrives while you are frying fat. We also received suggestions on how to treat house demons: be very respectful toward them; ask them "Have you come to bring bad or good news?"; and try not to anger them). A number of Ploske villagers claimed to have witches as neighbors, but these claims were mutually inconsistent and we were never able to locate a purported witch, although several of the collected stories, mention one Ploske man in particular as a good ("white") witch.

Audience and Repertoire
    The contemporary audience in Ukrainian folk communities demands demonological legends and receives them with greater interest than other folklore (especially stories about witches, ghosts, and dream interpretations). Demonological legends, therefore, are an ideal starting point for the study of the traditional worldview of their bearers. Texts themselves become a bridge to villagers' traditional mindsets. Among urban bearers of tradition, demonological knowledge exists as a set of superstitions, mythical beliefs, and analogies, but in villages they function as fully organized texts, some of which correspond completely to the recordings of the late nineteenth century. The Ukrainian village today offers a range of demonological plots and allows the researcher not merely to hear the story but also to sense the presence of house demons (said to have hairy hands and to speak in heavy whispers), to converse with dead souls, to see dragons flying down chimneys, or to touch a witch's tail. All the senses are involved in the oral transmission of demonological legends in a contemporary Ukrainian village. Here is part of the text recorded from Motrya Perepechai in 1994. The performer is recalling her experience with the house demons:

I am lying down. Tyap-lyap, tyap-lyap. I am thinking, "I thought I locked the door? Maybe someone snuck in during the day and I did not notice." It touched my hand with his very hard hands and I know, I know that I have to ask him. He touched me--tsap, tsap, first one hand, then the other (when I go to bed, I put my hands in a special way, so that they would rest). His hands were hard. I got so scared that I don't remember how I asked, "Did you come with bad news?" "With bad," he answered. Two weeks later my husband left. So. You see, with bad news. And the house demon touched my hands. It's true. It was very scary. (Brytsyna and Golovakha 2004:145)

Legends: The Return of the Dead
    Villagers also informed us how to act toward dead souls and how to interpret dreams. Traditional plots on this topic are very popular among contemporary performers. For example, many of the plots we recorded were about a dead relative or neighbor appearing in a dream to request a favor. The most interesting texts we collected in Ploske are stories about a dead mother's return. This plot is well known in Ukrainian and Russian demonology and was recorded by many nineteenth-century Ukrainian folklorists, despite the prevailing scholarly distaste for demonological materials.'
    The following three texts were recalled by the informants during conversations about folk demonology. They deserve special attention because the first two informants have a university education (rare for this community) and the third, a milkmaid, has the most common profession for women in this village. All three enthusiastically performed the traditional plot as an event from real life. The first text was told by Olga Yarosh, a high school teacher, in May 2002:

One girl told me a long time ago (she is not from our village), that after her mother died (she was twelve at the time) she kept coming back every night at twelve. She was coming and coming night after night. It got to the point where she said, "I am afraid." So, an old woman told her: take an old cloth (when it turns twelve), take water and an old cloth and wash the floor (not from the door into the house but from the center of the house toward the door). You have to begin to wash the floor as the mother comes. Wash it backwards. The girl did it. And the mother said: "That's it. I will not come any more." And she never came again. That is the story. (Brytsyna and Golovakha 2004:248-49)

    The next narrative was given by Valentina Yerko, another school teacher, in the summer of 1994:

One girl's mother died. She died and the girl was left all alone. She was very sad, almost sick, and all the time was crying after her mother. All the old women kept telling her that her mother feels bad: don't cry, because something bad will happen to you. But she was crying. And one day her mother came to her. The girl was very pleased; to see her mother. She was not afraid of the dead mother, she was talking to her, told her about her problems, happy days. But then ... the girl began wasting away. She was getting pale in her face, got ill a lot, nervous; but the mother kept coming. And then she told--I do not remember to whom--but she told them. They said, "It is not the mother coming to you, it is a devil come looking like your mother. You should not talk to her. Because the dead should be dead, lie in their place and not come to the living. She is going to suck the life out of you." "What should I do?" the girl asked. She was frightened. "I know," someone said, "when the time comes and your mother appears, you have to wash the floor. You have to start at the moment when she appears. Wash from the door to the table." The daughter did it. As the right time came, she began to wash the floor. The mother appeared, just stopped at the door and asked with horror: "What are you doing?" The daughter said: "I am washing the floor." "But it means you are washing my steps away." And the mother disappeared, and never came back again. The girl got better. I heard this story being told. (Brytsyna and Golovakha 2004:249-50)

    The third was told by Maria Vashenok (a milkmaid) in August 1994:

My godmother came from Ivano-Frankovsk and said that her friend (they worked together) told her a true story. [Her friend's] mother died and left three children. The girl was thirteen or fourteen, and with two little sisters. Her mother came every single night for four years, and brushed their hair every night. I [Vashenok] asked if she was not afraid her mother came? "No, I wasn't. The only thing our mother told us was, 'Do not look at my back as I leave.' I always looked away. Then my neighbor asked me, 'Does your mother come to you?' 'No, she does not.' Our mother had told us not to tell anybody: 'If you do, I will not come anymore.' But our neighbor said, 'I think she comes, because I saw how she was flying out through the chimney.' Then I got scared. 'When she leaves take a look at her, turn and take a look.' Well she came twice more and I looked at her back and it was empty. From the front it was my mother and from the back like an empty barrel. And I turned and looked and she did not come any more." I asked if the story was a truthful one and she said: "It happened." Only God knows if it happened? (Brytsyna and Golovakha 2004:250-51)

    These three versions of the same traditional plot contain demonological motifs with symbolic meanings that warrant closer examination. The dead mother motif was used by various twentieth-century Slavic scholars to explain some pagan beliefs of ancient Slavic tribes. One of their most fundamental conclusions was that, in the Old Slavs' traditional understanding of death, dead souls could not return, and any apparent return of the dead is an action by demonic forces. In contemporary texts, a house demon, whirlwind, or witch often fulfils the function of the devil. Any of these can "visit" a home in the guise of the family's dead relative or friend.
    According to the Old Slavs' traditional beliefs, dead souls cannot cross water once they have been brought to the other world. (In some parts of pre-Christian Ukraine, bodies were floated down rivers rather than being buried). The belief that the devil flies down the chimney in the guise of a dead relative is very common in Slavic mythology as well. Typically, the devil would fly down the chimney of a widow who was crying loudly for her dead husband. The examples presented contain ancient traditional motifs and are tightly connected to pagan Slavic mythology. At the same time, these texts represent common contemporary beliefs widespread in both agricultural and urban communities: one should not cry for a dead relative because it makes the soul restless; water protects the living from the world of the dead; the dead can take your health, and even your life if you think too much about them; people who died unnaturally cannot find rest and will keep returning. These are perfect examples of traditional demonological texts that are actively performed in a natural context in contemporary communities and are well received by listeners.

Fairy Tales/Märchen
    Although most of the narratives we recorded in Ploske were supernatural legends, we also found a living fairy tale/Märchen tradition in the village. For example, the traditional Ukrainian tale "Spotted Chicken" (AT 2022 B) is a very interesting example of change over time. It is one of the most popular children's folk tales, and is published in all the major anthologies. Ukrainian folklorists are convinced that this plot survives in communities only because of the book versions. Scholars claim that the traditional, cumulative plot died out and is no longer transmitted orally. On our first two trips to villages in the Chernihivskiy region, we heard only the short, so-called book version, and despaired of finding the ancient, traditional plot. But then, as we became more and more familiar with the performers, we elicited the traditional, cumulative version from Olga Trush, a performer in Ploske. Her text is longer and has more details than the same plot recorded in Ploske in the nineteenth century. Intriguingly, Malynka recorded two versions in Ploske in 1902: short and long, which means that even the short version, well-known among contemporary performers in the village, may very well be a part of the oral tradition, not merely borrowed from literary sources (Brytsyna and Golovakha 2004:214, 285, 287).
    When discussing Ukrainian fairy tales, we must mention Mykola Trush. We recorded ten fairy tales from this Ploske performer, all of which were popular in Ploske in the nineteenth century, according to Malynka [Brytsyna and Golovakha 2004:57-132]. Trush heard tales from his father and told them to his three grandchildren (even the youngest one could retell these stories to us). When no children were among his listeners, he did not like to perform them, or simply shortened their plots. Another performer, Dokia Kompanets, heard tales from her grandmother and told them to her grandchildren. Her sister Litovka also heard and remembered the same tales, but, having no grandchildren, did not tell these tales herself. Trush's half-sister and her daughter told us very interesting texts, including a longer version of "Spotted Chicken." The natural telling of fairy tales today requires not only the presence of a strong family tradition of tale telling, but also requires the presence of children within the family. Family heritage and young listeners, then, have become necessary components in the preservation of fairy tales. It has become less of a community genre and more of a domestic, "family use" genre. Our materials show that the most active fairy-tale tradition is observed in those families where they have been performed through generations.
    When discussing the popularity of one folk genre or another in a particular community, we must remember the vital role of the listener who "demands" certain information in the communicative event. The life of the genre in the community depends not only on the presence of knowledgeable performers, but equally on the presence of the listeners. For example, in contemporary Ukrainian folk communities, children compose the audience for fairy tales, and in the twentieth century the fairy tale certainly became a genre for children--even a genre intended for one's own children and grandchildren. In other words, it is a family tradition.

The Impact of Literacy and Mass Media
    When discussing the functioning of Ukrainian demonology in the late nineteenth century, we must remember that the Orthodox church strongly opposed the spread of such tales in villages. We have an interesting example, from the end of the nineteenth century, of a village priest's attitudes toward demonological beliefs. In his booklet on Ploske, Stefanovskiy expressed the hope that literacy might destroy villagers' darkness, their belief in witches, and their fear of the supernatural (1900:69). His attitude towards folk demonological beliefs was typical and conformed to the official church's attitude toward atavistic pagan demonology.
    More than a hundred years have gone by since Stefanovskiy authored his booklet. We now face the almost complete absence of illiterate bearers of folk tradition. Among all of the informants with whom we worked over the last decade, only one woman could not read or write. Has Stefanovsky's dream come true? Fortunately for us, and for tradition itself, it has not. Instead, published sources have found a place in the system of traditional beliefs. The very fact that references to books, newspapers, and magazines are a prestigious part of contemporary folk communication, and that highly educated members of the community are considered by the others to be the best tellers, is clear evidence that folklore has found a way to survive and to function in an era when published sources and mass media seem to occupy the minds and spiritual life of I our contemporaries. As Alan Dundes has pointed out, the wide spread of literary sources, far from harming folklore, has a beneficial impact because it speeds up the process of oral transmission and widens the objects of folk narration (1980:17).
    Pavlo Alepsky, traveling through Ukraine in the seventeenth century, wrote in his diary of his astonishment that, in Cossack Ukrainian villages, most people (including most women) were literate. Literacy, therefore, at least in some parts of Ukraine, predates the collecting of folklore in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Of course, the almost universal literacy of the twentieth century has led to a special respect toward published sources and created a new type of folk tradition bearer. Our fieldwork shows that within the traditional community, the most respected members are those who read the most, and the most respected sources are published ones. Thus, villagers would refer us to newspapers or the Bible for a better understanding of oral tradition. It is common in Ukrainian villages today for the performer to ask the folklorist, "Why don't you just read the story in a book?" Fortunately for the folklorist, the performer will usually tell the story anyway, and in a version clearly from traditional oral sources. There are other examples, too numerous to catalogue, of television and newspaper connections to traditional folk plots.
    Slavic folklorists paid more attention to the attainment of full literacy within traditional Ukrainian folk communities than they did to a different change that more strongly affected those communities, namely the fact that most Ukrainian villagers obtained access to television by the 1970s. Today even the poorest family has a television in its house, and this affects the communicative process dramatically. Television probably has a greater influence than books or magazines on the spiritual life of traditional communities. Folklorist Linda Dégh, analyzing television in the context of folklore, concluded that in "the course of fifty years' existence, television has created new traditions and along with other media has contributed effectively to the need to update the definition of folklore" (1994:37).
    Ukrainian mass media today is one of the principal channels for oral communication and traditional folk knowledge (especially of demonological plots). When Brazilian soap operas became popular in 1994, it was impossible to get any information from villagers while they were on. Village cats, dogs, and cows received Brazilian-flavored names, and even the harvest was to some extent neglected. In his recent report to the Congress of Ukrainian Studies, the Ukrainian folklorist Krasikov mentioned that the nicknames of many of his village correspondents, as well as the names of their domestic animals, are connected to North and South American soap operas. During the events of the Orange Revolution (November-December 2004) most of the jokes that we recorded in Kyiv's streets from the participants of the revolution (regardless of their origins and social group) were taken from the Internet, television, and newspapers. Respondents from a small village in the Ivano-Frankovsky region of Western Ukraine repeatedly gave us printouts from websites in response to our requests for anecdotes, something that happened when we collected folklore from Vinnitsya students and Simferopol workers as well.
    It is quite understandable why email and SMS (Short Message Service, or text messaging between mobile phones) have become so popular among performers. Among the moral rules that are strongly followed in traditionalist communities are prohibitions against using obscene language in front of women and children and against discussing certain sexual matters. In villages we had difficulty collecting anecdotes from male performers whom others described as masters of story-telling because our group of researchers consisted of women and a teenage boy. Men categorically refused to tell "dirty" anecdotes to us.
    By contrast, during the Orange Revolution we collected many anecdotes via SMS. A typical performer would refuse, beyond a certain point in the anecdote, to speak the remainder, but would offer instead to send the text (via SMS) to our mobile phone. Email and SMS (as well as graffiti writing) are Ways to transmit certain texts to a wider range of "listeners." Performers are relieved of responsibility for face-to-face communication and gain a certain moral latitude, which otherwise would be restricted by traditional mores.
    Village folklore's adoption of new media contradicts the claim that village folklore is dying out. Some of these media (email, SMS, graffiti) are used to pass traditional knowledge, while others (newspapers, TV, websites) are used to receive information. "We live in the world of modern legends, modern magic, modern irrationalism. Anyone who does not like them, should turn off the television" (Dégh 1994:53).

Conclusion
    Since the early nineteenth century in Ukraine, alongside a living folk tradition, a fallacy has existed about its death. Paradoxically, Ukrainian suspicions of the death of original folklore predate the establishment of folkloristics itself as a discipline. Scholars have enjoyed playing this game with one another, resulting in dramatic conclusions about the twentieth-century birth of a postfolklore on the ruins of traditional, agricultural folklore. The observations presented in this article highlight that the devolutionary premise--despite all proof to the contrary--persists both in scholarship and among the folk themselves. Even though the evidence indicates that many genres of traditional oral narrative are alive and well, post-Soviet folklorists have decried their loss and pointed to a putative replacement with postfolklore, a value-laden term that disparages what we see in the present as not "real" folklore, as something fundamentally different (and less than) the authentic folklore of the past.
    Our fieldwork, however, shows that the addition of a "postfolklore" distinction to folkloristics is simply unnecessary. If we consider the anthologies of Afanasev or the Brothers Grimm to be the only real fairy tales, then we are not approaching folklore at all because they have been succeeded by 150 years of brilliant performance. If present-day rural Ukrainians use SMS services to transmit traditional stories, or if they incorporate television into their traditional narratives, it is not evidence of the death of folklore, but rather of its continuing growth, vitality, and adaptability. History seems to repeat itself with each new generation of folklorists: they gladly announce themselves to be the last eyewitnesses to a living folk tradition. Perhaps there is no need to hurry up at all. Each field trip will lead to a performer, and in each community a younger generation will one day turn into competent, older performers.
ADDED MATERIAL
    Inna Golovakha-Hicks
    Ukrainian Academy of Sciences
    Kyiv

Footnotes
1. Throughout the article, the word "village" is effectively equivalent to "rural" as understood in the West.
2. The first expedition was performed in 1994 by Olesya Brytsyna, Andriy Brytsyn, and myself. Repeated extended expeditions (as well as short visits) were conducted over the next decade: in 1995 (by Olesya Brytsyna conducting the students of Humanitarian Lyceum and Slavic University), in 2000 (with Olesya Brytsyna and the American folklorist Natalya Kononenko), and in 2002-2003 (by Olesya Brytsyna and myself).
3. All translations from Ukrainian are by the author.

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