Poetics of Russian folk wedding. Word and subject environment in a Russian wedding

The theme of oral folk art in Russian literature is extremely diverse; there are numerous genres and types of folklore. All of them were formed gradually, as a result of the life and creative activity of the people, manifested over several hundred years. Currently, there are specific types of folklore in literature. Oral folk art is that unique layer of knowledge on the basis of which thousands of classical works were built.

Interpretation of the term

Folklore is oral folk art, endowed with ideological depth, highly artistic qualities; it includes all poetic, prose genres, customs and traditions, accompanied by verbal artistic creativity. Folklore genres are classified in different ways, but basically there are several genre groups:

1. Labor songs - formed in the process of work, for example, sowing, plowing, haymaking. They represent a variety of shouts, signals, chants, parting words, and songs.
2. Calendar folklore - conspiracies, signs.
3. Wedding folklore.
4. Funeral lamentations, recruiting lamentations.
5. Non-ritual folklore is small folklore genres, proverbs, fables, signs and sayings.
6. Oral prose - traditions, legends, tales and incidents.
7. Children's folklore - pestushki, nursery rhymes, lullabies.
8. Song epic (heroic) - epics, poems, songs (historical, military, spiritual).
9. Artistic creativity - magical, everyday tales and tales about animals, ballads, romances, ditties.
10. Folklore theater - raek, nativity scene, mummers, performances with dolls.

Let's look at the most common types folklore in more detail.

Labor songs

This is a song genre, the distinctive feature of which is the obligatory accompaniment of the labor process. Labor songs are a way of organizing collective, social work, setting the rhythm using a simple melody and text. For example: “Wow, let’s get a little more friendly to make it more fun.” Such songs helped to start and finish work, united the working squad and were spiritual helpers in the hard physical labor of the people.

Calendar folklore

This type of oral folk art belongs to ritual traditions calendar cycle. The life of a peasant working on the land is inextricably linked with weather conditions. That is why a huge number of rituals appeared that were performed to attract good luck, prosperity, large offspring of livestock, successful farming, etc. The most revered holidays of the calendar were considered Christmas, Maslenitsa, Easter, Epiphany and Trinity. Each celebration was accompanied by songs, chants, incantations and ritual actions. Let us remember the famous custom of singing songs to Kolyada on the night before Christmas: “Cold is not a problem, Kolyada is knocking on the house. Christmas is coming to the house, bringing a lot of joy.”

Wedding folklore

Each place had its own types of folklore, but mostly they were lamentations, sentences and songs. Wedding folklore includes song genres that accompanied three main rituals: matchmaking, farewell of parents to the bride and wedding celebration. For example: “Your product, our merchant, is simply a miracle!” The ritual of handing over the bride to the groom was very colorful and was always accompanied by both drawn-out and short cheerful songs. At the wedding itself, the songs did not stop; they mourned their single life, wished for love and family well-being.

Non-ritual folklore (small genres)

This group of oral folk art includes all types of small genres of folklore. However, this classification is ambiguous. For example, many of the types belong to children's folklore, such as pesters, lullabies, riddles, nursery rhymes, teasers, etc. At the same time, some researchers divide all folklore genres into two groups: calendar-ritual and non-ritual.

Let's consider the most popular types of small genres of folklore.

A proverb is a rhythmic expression, a wise saying that carries a generalized thought and has a conclusion.

Signs - a short verse or expression telling about those signs that will help predict natural phenomena and weather.

A proverb is a phrase, often with a humorous slant, illuminating a life phenomenon or situation.

A saying is a short verse addressing natural phenomena, living beings, and surrounding objects.

A tongue twister is a small phrase, often rhymed, with words that are difficult to pronounce, designed to improve diction.

Oral prose

The following types of Russian folklore belong to oral prose.

Traditions are stories about historical events in folk retelling. The heroes of legends are warriors, kings, princes, etc.

Legends are myths, epic stories about heroic deeds, people covered with honors and glory; as a rule, this genre is endowed with pathos.

Bylichki - short stories that tell about the hero’s meeting with some kind of “evil spirits”, real cases from the life of the narrator or his friends.

Byvalshchina - a brief summary of what really happened once and with someone, while the narrator is not a witness

Children's folklore

This genre is represented by the most in different forms- poetic, song. Types of children's folklore are what accompanied the child from birth until he grew up.

Pestushki -short poems or songs accompanying the very first days of a newborn. With the help of them they nursed and nurtured children, for example: “The nightingale sings, sings, pretty, and pretty.”

Nursery rhymes are small melodious poems intended for playing with children.

Stretch, stretch,

Rotok - talker,

Handles - grips,

Walking legs.

Calls - poetic and song appeals to nature and animals. For example: “Red summer, come, bring warm days.”

A joke is a short fairy tale poem sung to a child, a short story about the world around him.

Lullabies are short songs that parents sing to their child at night to lull him to sleep.

Riddle - poetic or prose sentences that require solving.

Other types of children's folklore are counting rhymes, teasers and fables. They are extremely popular in our time.

Song epic

The heroic epic demonstrates oldest species folklore, he talks about events that once happened in song form.

An epic is an old song told in a solemn but leisurely style. Glorifies the heroes and tells about their heroic deeds for the benefit of the state, the Russian fatherland. about Dobrynya Nikitich, Volga Buslaivaich and others.

Historical songs are a kind of transformation of the epic genre, where the style of presentation is less eloquent, but the poetic form of the narrative is preserved. For example, “The Song of the Prophetic Oleg.”

Artistic creativity

This group includes epic and song genres created in the spirit of folk and artistic creativity.

A fairy tale is a short or long epic narrative, one of the most common genres of oral folk art about fictional events and heroes. All this is folklore, the types of fairy tales in it are as follows: magical, everyday and reflect those ideas about the world, good, evil, life, death, nature that existed among the people. For example, good always defeats evil, and there are wonderful mythical creatures in the world.

Ballads are poetic songs, a genre of song and musical creativity.

Anecdotes are a special type of epic narration about comic situations in people's lives. Initially they did not exist in the form in which we know them. These were stories that were complete in meaning.

Fables - a short narrative about impossible, incredible events, something that was fiction from beginning to end.

A chastushka is a small song, usually a quatrain with humorous content, telling about events and incidental situations.

Folklore theater

Street performances were very common among the people; the subjects for them were various genres, but most often of a dramatic nature.

A nativity scene is a type of dramatic work intended for street puppet theater.

Rayok is a type of picture theater, a device in the form of a box with changing drawings; the stories told reflect oral types of folklore.

The presented classification is the most common among researchers. However, it is worth understanding that the types of Russian folklore complement each other, and sometimes do not fit into the generally accepted classification. Therefore, when studying the issue, a simplified version is most often used, where only 2 groups of genres are distinguished - ritual and non-ritual folklore.

The wedding ceremony accompanied one of the most significant events in a person’s personal life - the creation of a new family. It was a household ritual, almost always including church

wedding, which accompanied the transition of a woman from her family of origin to her husband’s family. This ritual reflects the powerless position of women and reveals the structure of the patriarchal family. According to its form wedding ceremony can be called an everyday drama, action, game, consisting of several episodes, carried out over quite a long time (from matchmaking to the wedding itself, sometimes 2-3 months passed). The playful nature of the wedding ceremony was felt by the people themselves - this was reflected in the terminology; along with “to celebrate a wedding” they said: “to play a wedding.”

A wedding is a single dramatic event consisting of three parts: a preliminary agreement about the wedding (this includes “matchmaking”, “conspiracy”, “drinking”, “handshake”, etc.), preparing the bride for the wedding (usually a “bath” and "bachelorette party") and the wedding itself (with its division into the morning before the wedding, a trip to church, church wedding, return from church and wedding feast, large and small “princely” or “red” table, “diversion” table) g.

The wedding usually began gradually. In spring and summer, when young people holidays led round dances, walked along the streets of the village or outside the outskirts, and tied the knot. On the festive evening, idle people sat on the ruins, looked at the walkers, judged and dressed them, and took note of what kind of brides there were in the village. And when the guy “comes of age,” they began to look for a bride for him.

There have also been cases when a girl herself comes to an agreement with a guy, the guy asks his parents to send matchmakers to match the bride. But much more often the parents arranged the wedding. The wedding had economic significance. It was necessary to take an assistant into the family and get working hands. And if he managed to marry his son to a rich woman, then the household could be improved.

Matchmaking should be considered the beginning of the wedding ceremony as such. The bride's parents were waiting for the matchmakers and tidying up the hut.

Matchmakers had to be able to carry on a conversation: it was considered indecent to immediately talk about the wedding. The matchmaking ritual required that the matchmaker sit in a certain place in the hut (usually under the matitsa - the main beam on the ceiling) and, starting to talk about the weather, about work, gradually move on to an offer to give the girl in marriage. If the parents considered the groom unsuitable for their daughter, they politely refused the matchmakers (saying that the girl was still young, or putting a pumpkin in the matchmakers' cart, etc.). If the groom was considered suitable, the conversation with the matchmakers continued. The girl should not have been present during the conversation between the matchmakers.

Having decided that the girl could be married off to the proposed groom, the bride was called to the upper room. Upon entering, the bride had to stand at the stove - this retained an echo of the belief that behind the stove was the patron of the family (“master”, “brownie”).

The parents talked to their daughter about matchmaking, named the groom and sometimes asked if she agreed to marry this guy. The parents made the decision to marry off their daughter, not taking into account the wishes of the bride, but following their own considerations and the formula established in everyday life: “if you endure it, you will fall in love.”

Already this initial part of the wedding ceremony outlines the powerless position of a woman who often could not expect joy in family life. Naturally, in many places, matchmaking ended with the bride crying - lamentations, sometimes taking the form of improvised poetic dialogues between the betrothed girl and her closest relatives - sister, mother, etc. The recordings preserved, for example, the expressive dialogue between the married sister and the bride, improvised after the matchmakers left. The bride asks her older sister:

Just tell me, dear sister, what it’s like to live among such small people.

The married sister, responding to the bride, talks about the hard life in her husband’s family:

Don’t wait too long, dear sister, You’re a bourgeois from your father-in-law, a dresser from your mother-in-law. They will squeal like an animal, They will hiss like a snake...

The sister says that you shouldn’t go to complain to your neighbors, because the neighbors’ sympathy is false, ostentatious: they will sympathize with your eyes, and then they themselves will laugh, they will tell everything to their father-in-law and mother-in-law, their husband, their sisters-in-law, their brothers-in-law.

You'd better come out, dear sister, you'd better come out in love, come and fall damp earth, To the sorrowful you are to the pebble. You wash away the melancholy, you little bastard, You and your mother are damp earth. After all, you know, dear sister, That the mother earth cannot bear cheese, That the pride of a pebble will not express. You will go to strangers,

Wipe away your tears and don’t show them to people.”

The picture of the life of a Russian woman, full of intense drama, is captured by this ancient tale.

Matchmaking started the wedding ceremony. This was followed by collusion and drinking and hand-slapping. This group of ritual actions was supposed to determine the very possibility of the wedding. It was not enough to give consent to the wedding, it was necessary to see what the bride and groom look like together (hence the custom of putting them side by side), give them the opportunity to talk to each other (“get to know each other”), and - what is much more important - agree on a dowry and money for a wedding. If parents and matchmakers fail to agree on this, the wedding may be upset. In all these rituals, the main role was played by the parents of the bride and groom, and the tatka was the matchmaker. The bride and especially the groom showed little of themselves in these episodes of the wedding action.

This cycle has ended wedding ceremonies the fact that, having agreed on the dowry, the time of the wedding, the bride was “drunk”, i.e., they sealed the wedding agreement by drinking vodka at an inn, or in a tavern, in the village or on market day in the city and handing over the bride “from floor to floor” (they shook hands with each other, grabbing the hem of their caftans with them - as they did when selling and buying horses). Sometimes the drinking and hand-clasping were accompanied by the lamentations of the bride, who reproached her parents for the fact that they “without gathering their wits, with reason” were giving her to strangers.

The second group of wedding ceremonies followed the handshake and ended on the day before the wedding. This group is entirely dedicated to the bride and her preparation for the wedding. The bride and her parents prepared everything that was missing in the dowry; the bride also had to prepare gifts for the wedding participants, especially for the groom’s relatives. The main rituals of this part of the wedding were “bathhouse” and “devishik”, celebrated on the eve of the wedding. In songs, lamentations, ritual actions performed in the bathhouse and at the bachelorette party, the theme of the tragic fate of a woman in her husband’s family is revealed to the greatest extent. The highlighting of this topic led to a contrasting opposition of girlish will to women's lack of rights, and consequently, idealization parental family

and the emphasized oppression of women in their husband's family. All this puts the image of the bride at the center of ritual poetry, with which the images of her girlfriends, girls who preserve their free will, contrast.

In the “bath” ritual, the bride said goodbye to the patrons of her family (see beliefs about the “bannik”) and, together with her girlfriends, wondered about her future fate (they tried lye to find out by its taste whether life would be sweet, splashed water on hot stones, to find out the character of the husband’s mother by hissing, etc.). Washing the bride in the bathhouse before the birthday party and wedding is genetically associated with ritual ablution - cleansing from sins before decisive events in a person’s life.

Leaving the bathhouse, the girl turned to her friends, inviting them to the house for a bachelorette party - “for the last party, for the brides’ bachelorette party.” Themes of farewell to one's home, parting with girlhood - a "free will", transition to the husband's family, lack of rights and suffering in patriarchal family

“Herringbone” is played out with songs and actions. They put it on the table, the bride sat in front of it, the girls stood next to her and sang pessho:

There is a Christmas tree on the mountain. Under the mountain there is a bright light...

The songs sung at the bachelorette party are thematically connected, and this allows us to talk about them as a part of a single whole, a poetic story about life in one’s own and someone else’s family, about a girl’s farewell to her family. Sometimes elements of the image of what they sang about were introduced into the singing of the nesen. Thus, the song “The trumpet blew early at dawn, Mashenka burst into tears (the name of the bride was introduced into the song) but with a light brown braid ...” was partially staged, which the girls sang to the bride sitting in front of the Christmas tree. The song talks about an “unmerciful matchmaker” who came to the bride, tearing her hair, combing her hair like a woman (“she braided a scarf for two”; girls wore one braid, women braided their hair in two braids and laid them on their heads, hiding them under a scarf or headdress dress); While singing a song, the matchmaker unraveled the bride’s braid and braided her two braids.

In many cases, the singing of songs by girls at a bachelorette party merged with the lamentation of the bride. The fusion (it even happened that the bride improvised her lament while the song was being sung) was facilitated by the common theme of lamentations and wedding ritual lyrics. Lamentations provided rich opportunities for expressing the bride’s feelings and experiences; they contained a variety of details that revealed

typical life circumstances. The lamentations of poetically gifted people who have learned to improvise since childhood are especially expressive. The creative freedom in creating the lamentations was very great.

The girl’s experiences, her nervous, tense state intensified the emotionality of the lamentation. With great sincerity, the girl talked about what she felt, what she was going through; It often happened that the bride, wailing, cried real tears.

The parable, like the song, provided the basis for a dramatic depiction of farewell to girlhood. Such, for example, is the lamentation and farewell to “red beauty.” "Red Beauty" - girl's ribbon - headband.

The bride is looking for “beauty” and asks to return “to her wild little head.” The bridesmaids answer the bride for her “beauty”, saying that she cannot return - the bride “has not washed her white face”, “has not brushed her head”. The bride is washed, combed, and then “beauty” returns - the ribbon is put on the bride’s head - but now it “does not stick to her wild little head”, the girl is matched, she has to go to strangers.

Similar game moments in various variations were found at devipshiks. In addition, the devipshik included rituals that had the meaning of buying off the bride from her relatives (they were attended by the bride’s brother, matchmaker, sometimes the groom, who in some places was allowed to participate in the devipshik, etc.).

Devipshik actually ended the preparatory part of the wedding ceremony. The day after the party, a wedding was celebrated.

The morning after the wedding, on the wedding day, the bride began to lament again. On the morning before the wedding, she said goodbye to her father and mother, this also often took place in an impromptu ceremony. If the bride's parents died (or one of them died), the bride, accompanied by her girlfriends, went to the cemetery and lamented at the grave.

After farewell, the bride began to be dressed for the crown. For magical purposes, amber was placed around the bride’s neck, pins were stuck into the dress - with similar means they tried to protect “from the evil eye” and the evil power of the sorcerer.

When the bride was dressed, she was seated at the table and awaited the arrival of the groomsmen, who, together with the matchmaker, directed the further wedding game.

The arrival of the groomsman to pick up the bride introduced specific folklore material into the wedding ceremony - the so-called groomsmen's sentences, which widely used the metaphorical imagery of riddles. Demanding that the bride be given to him, the friend in folding rhyming sentences said that the hunters had set traps for catching martens, nets for catching whitefish, etc. Images of a precious fur-bearing animal, expensive fish and the like were symbols of the bride. The dialogue between the groomsmen and the girls guarding the bride and not letting her out is entirely based on allegories. The girls asked riddles to their friend, demanding a bride price. The friend had to solve these riddles and give the girls food and money. He had to buy the bride also from her brother. Having bought the bride, the groom, with various magical precautions, took the bride to church: in some cases, this involved a staged pursuit of the bride and groom.

On the wedding day, the part of the ritual that preceded the wedding contained elements of magic to the greatest extent and was associated with superstitions. The amulets and magical actions preserved in this part may have appeared on the site of pagan actions that accompanied marriage and were carried out with the aim of protecting people from evil forces hostile to them. In the preceding parts of the wedding, there are almost no cult elements, since the conclusion of the marriage contract and the farewell of the bride to her maidenhood are essentially of an economic, social and everyday nature, very weakly connected with religious beliefs.

On the very day of the wedding they took place magical rituals of two kinds. Some of them were intended to protect the bride and groom from possible harm (from the evil eye, from the harmful effects of evil forces). Others were supposed to ensure fertility, well-being, wealth, preservation of love, etc. (so-called “incentive” magical rites).

Magic rituals and reflection of superstitions in wedding game were a natural expression of the state of culture of the village (and city) of feudal Russia.

Superstitions and magical rituals in the wedding game were combined with church rite wedding The wedding ceremony in the church was, as it were, a church version of everyday customs that gave the husband unlimited power over his wife.

The wedding train rode from the church singing songs, making noise and shouting: a matchmaker rode ahead, standing, dancing on a cart, waving a red handkerchief. After the wedding train arrived at the groom's house, the wedding feast began. The treat served on the wedding day was called the “grand prince’s table”; in the morning next day- “small princely table”. This name was associated with the fact that the newlyweds were called prince and princess in songs, in conversation, and in sentences. The wedding ended with a farewell meal - a “diverting table”, or “diverting tables”.

After returning from church, rituals were performed to test the newlywed’s patience and ability to work (she, for example, was forced to sort out tangled yarn, sweep the floor that had been deliberately littered, etc.). The bride gave gifts to the groom's relatives and guests, and carried wine; the guests presented her with money, etc. When the grand prince's table began, the young people had to sit silently, eat little and drink little, while all the guests made noise, shouted, and drank until they were completely intoxicated.

This final part of the wedding contained a large number of erotic rituals, which were usually supervised by the matchmaker.

The wedding feast was accompanied by the singing of a special type of songs: majestic and corrugating. These songs were sung to each guest individually, and, depending on the circumstances, they either glorified them or shamed them, portraying them in a funny way. Guests to whom such songs were sung had to give gifts to the girls who sang. Songs for friend and matchmaker were especially popular among majestic and reproachful songs; The praises of the newlyweds, their parents, married guests, widows and other participants in the wedding feast are widely known. A characteristic feature of greatness is a hyperbole of happiness, wealth, prosperity predicted for the one to whom the song is sung; idealization of beauty, property status of a person, which initially had magical meaning . The songs embodied the peasantry's ideas about ideal conditions life, ideal beauty and human potential. These songs spoke of deep, true love bride and groom. They sounded like a beautiful promise, happy life , reflected the dream of a happy family. The songs said that the bride went to

long journey and hears the priest calling her; but the bride does not respond to this call, she does not respond to the call of her mother, but when her dear friend, her young husband, called her, she responded and came to him. In the song they sang: “It’s not the scarlet ribbon that clings to the heart, Ivanushka presses Maryushka to the heart...”. The wedding ceremony is a complex event, in

different parts

in which different participants are brought to the fore. At the beginning of the wedding, these are the parents of the bride and groom and the matchmakers; in the middle and partly in the last part - the bride and her bridesmaids; in the latter - the groom and the matchmaker, who supervised the wedding. As for the groom, his role in the wedding ceremony is extremely insignificant. His image only embodies the idea of ​​who will be to blame for the difficult fate of women; by himself he does not perform any important rituals. The wedding does not tell about his experiences and fate; the main person around whom the actions of the entire ceremony unfold is the girl-bride. BASIC IMAGES OF A WEDDING RITE The grouping of all the most important rituals around the bride and the concentration of most wedding songs and laments around the theme of women's destiny naturally led to the fact that the image of the bride became mainly wedding poetry. This is the image of a pure young girl who did not know grief in her parents’ home, forcibly, against her will, given into a dissenting husband’s family. The song creates appearance, with a brown braid (see in the “Lyrical Songs” section). The image of the bride is similar in lamentations - they only emphasize the suffering of the girl - “a bitter, bitter woman”, doomed to live “in strangers.” Wedding song, lamentations, verdicts of friends consistently develop the image of the heroine folk wedding- brides. Sometimes the beautiful girl would go for a walk with her friends, she would live in her mother’s hallway and have fun; as she said goodbye to the red beauty - a free will in her maidenhood - the bride’s “playful little legs broke, her white hands drooped, the light in her clear eyes darkened, her mind became clouded in her head”; and the maiden returned from the church as a young princess; A a girl will come in

in someone else’s family - “beauty will fall from the face of a white man,” he will “get up before dawn to work,” he will go to bed later than everyone else, he will live unrequitedly, “he will not utter a word.” The image of the bride, given in development, is outlined at different stages of life's journey. Her image is also shaded with deeply poetic symbols, identifying the girl being given in marriage with a white swan, a small gray bird, a swallow, a migratory quail, a white birch tree, an apple tree, a broken kalinka, and mowed green grass. Some of these symbols not only depict the bride, but also reveal her fate (grass being mown, a swan being separated from the herd and driven away by falcons in a foreign direction, etc.). If in the ritual itself the role of the groom is extremely insignificant, then in wedding poetry he is depicted quite expressively. The groom is a good fellow, a young prince, to whom the girl is given. He is the master over his wife. Unlike the image of the bride, the image of the groom in wedding poetry is drawn statically. Like the bride, he embodies the idea of ​​ideal beauty. Stately, curly, white-faced with falcon eyes, he is portrayed as a strong and courageous destroyer, destroyer girlish beauty

Wedding songs create expressive images of the groomsman and matchmaker. The images of the groomsman and the matchmaker are depicted in songs and in the lamentations of the bride.

The matchmaker is the groom's accomplice, unmerciful to the bride. She persuades her parents to give the girl to strangers; she comes to a bachelorette party, combs the bride’s hair like a woman - “she pulls out the Russian headscarf and braids her hair into two braids.” But in reproachful songs she is portrayed satirically: a “sparse-toothed liar” who has lost shame and conscience, a crafty deceiver riding a chicken into a wedding feast.

A contrasting image of the matchmaker is given in a song of praise, which praises the matchmaker for her courtesy and knowledge of wedding affairs. This contrast in depicting the image of the matchmaker is associated with the entire nature of the wedding game.

Images of other participants in the wedding drama (even the parents of the bride and especially the groom) are rare, episodic, not so much in themselves as in relation to the bride, they set off her image, speak about her fate as a girl and in marriage (cf. images of parents in lamentations ). This emphasis in wedding poetry on the images of the bride and groom as the central ones, and with them the images of the matchmaker and groomsmen as the images of the wedding organizers, is due to the very content of the ritual. Wedding poetry focuses mainly on problems of family life that are of great social importance. This issue remains unchanged in all versions of folk weddings, and they are very diverse. Sometimes, even in neighboring villages and hamlets, weddings were celebrated differently. The great variability of wedding rituals makes it extremely difficult to distinguish their regional types - one can only schematically divide a wedding into northern and southern. But both northern and southern Russian weddings retain the same problems of the wedding ceremony and only vary the images of the main wedding characters. Northern and southern weddings are primarily distinguished by the nature of their emotional overtones. Weddings in the northern regions are more tragic: they are characterized by almost continuous laments from the bride, sometimes even overshadowing the ritual song. Elements of ancient magic in a northern wedding are preserved more clearly, and the groomsman to a greater extent takes on the features of a sorcerer, a sorcerer who protects the bride from the evil eye, damage, etc. In southern weddings, the groomsman is the organizer of the buffoonery game.

Northern wedding

- a tragic action in which the buffoonish verdicts of the friends and humorous and satirical songs often recede into the background. In a Southern wedding the tragic element is weakened; the element of jokes in the friends’ sentences is emphasized;

Songs with the theme of happy love and humorous songs are more common

temporary years,” talking about the Slavic tribes, she said that the Drevlyans did not have marriages, and the girls were kidnapped near the water. The custom of kidnapping also existed among other tribes. Thus, the Radimichi and Vyatichi organized games between the villages and during them kidnapped their wives. With the creation of the powerful Kyiv state, with the introduction of Christianity, wedding rituals in Rus' acquired other forms. The ritual included a church wedding, and the everyday rituals preceding and following the wedding changed significantly. The same chronicles, mentioning princely weddings, note that they were accompanied by feasts and included various ritual actions. But it is unlikely that the wedding ritual that existed in Russian life before the strengthening of the Moscow state was identical to the wedding known in the records of the 18th-19th centuries.

A comparison of the image of the bride from the wedding ceremony with the images of girls and women captured in ancient chronicles, stories, and epics reveals their deep difference. Such different images could only arise in different living conditions. Indeed, living conditions have changed significantly throughout history. The patriarchal family system gradually developed and strengthened, in which unconditional paternal power was established - the power of the head of the family. In such a patriarchal family, a mandatory hierarchy of its members was created. The family was headed by the father; his mother followed him; then sons, daughters, daughters-in-law (sons' wives), grandchildren, granddaughters, grandchildren's wives, great-grandchildren. This was the so-called large paternal family, and in it the position of women was son's wife, or grandson, or great-grandson - it was extremely difficult. She had almost no rights.

The severity of the woman’s position was further aggravated by the fact that the church affirmed in people’s minds the idea of ​​the primordial sinfulness of women. “Baba is a vessel of the devil,” the churchmen asserted.

The legal status of a woman, finding no protection anywhere, and the attitude towards her as a sinful being from whom all evil comes, gradually became stronger in public and family life. Unwritten laws of social and family behavior, which humiliated and enslaved women, apparently took shape over quite a long time, displacing previous customs and family laws, reflected in ancient writing and oral epic. By the 16th century The new rules of family life were clearly defined. And when, in the middle of the 16th century, the chronicles and hagiographic literature were revised and put in order, rules were drawn up that were binding on everyone, and the relationships and responsibilities of family members were fixed. Along with the Makaryevsky menaion cetras, which gave a set of lives, and sets of chronicles, books such as “Stoglav” were created, which gave answers to questions about the rules public life, about religion, rituals, etc., “Azbukovnik” and, finally, “Domostroy”, which legitimized new forms of everyday life for that time. “Domostroy”, among other things, formulated what a woman’s behavior should be, how she should be treated, and what her ideal image could be from the point of view of this time. Subsequently - and very soon - literature created the image of a meek patient woman running a household, Juliania Lazarevskaya; some other images of women in literature of the same period are close to it

The image of a folk wedding bride cannot be compared with the images of Juliania and others like her. But he is connected with them by the very formulation of the question of the life and position of a woman in the conditions of Domostroevsky rules of household use and public relations. The Russian wedding, as a complex ritual that reflected the family and living conditions of a certain historical era, took shape in Muscovite Rus' and persisted even in the 18th and 19th centuries. the most important features rituals of that time. In the wedding ceremony one can find remnants of kidnapping, buying and selling, and other forms (and in some cases elements) of ancient marriage rituals.

It is known that monogamous marriage, which characterizes the Russian family system, was historically preceded by pair marriage, and even earlier by group marriage. Although these forms of marriage disappeared in ancient times, their remnants were preserved in individual ritual actions. It can be assumed that they are genetically linked to the rituals that occurred in some places, forcing the groom and his “retinue” to spend the night in the bride’s house on the eve of the wedding with her and her girlfriends, and on the wedding day, before the newlyweds were taken to bed, to lie down on their bed. the groom, during the wedding feast or before it, all men kiss the bride covered with a scarf, etc.

Remnants of bride kidnapping are preserved in the custom of “racing” the bride and groom’s cart (when the bride and groom are going to church) and in the staged chase of the groomsman taking the bride away (such a chase was sometimes combined with a fist fight between the groom’s squad and the bride’s relatives).

The very arrival of the groomsman for the bride, when they locked the gates in the bride’s house in front of him, did not let him into the house, hid the bride from him, can also be interpreted as symbolic actions that were once generated by the rite of kidnapping.

The ritual of buying and selling a bride, which occurred in ancient times, not only remained as relics, but with the development of trade transactions, it received development and a new interpretation in some wedding customs. Thus, the “purchase and sale” of a bride becomes one of the main elements of the rituals preceding the wedding itself (collusion, hand-waving, drinking). And at the wedding itself, the rituals of ransoming the bride from the girls, from the brother, and giving gifts during the wedding feast may also be genetically related to ancient forms marriage ceremony.

Some images of folk poetry are associated with the vestigial elements of a wedding. In songs and especially in laments and sentences of groomsmen, there are often images of the groom’s attacking squad taking away the girl; These are the same images of hunters looking out for game or beast. The image of bargaining, during which merchant matchmakers buy a girl, is also a popular image in wedding poetry. Some other images and symbols of songs, lamentations, and sentences were also generated by ancient forms of marriage. All these images, preserved by folklore thanks to the disappearance of the ancients marriage customs

, lost the original direct meaning of the story about the actual kidnapping or the actual bargaining of the bride and acquired the meaning of an artistic, to some extent allegorical depiction of the conclusion of a marriage union by the families of the bride and groom. Wedding rites and ritual poetry, as an integral complex of the most ancient forms of marriage rites, developed and varied in the cities and villages of Russia in the 18th-19th centuries. This ritual gave a powerless woman the opportunity to talk about her fate, her feelings and experiences, to reveal great mental strength

and rich poetic talent.

As can already be seen, ancient cults were present at the wedding in their material (objective) expression and in the form of poetic images of folklore. In ancient times, the main function of wedding folklore was utilitarian-magical: oral works contributed to a happy fate and well-being. But gradually they began to play a different role: ceremonial and aesthetic.

Wedding poetry was deeply psychological and depicted the feelings of the bride and groom and their development throughout the ceremony. The role of the bride was especially difficult psychologically, so folklore painted a rich palette of her emotional states. The first half of the wedding ceremony, while the bride was still in her parents' house, was filled with drama and was accompanied by sad, elegiac works. At the feast (in the groom's house), the emotional tone changed sharply: in folklore, the idealization of the participants in the feast prevailed, and fun sparkled.

Matchmaking was conducted in a conventional poetic and allegorical manner. The matchmakers called themselves fishermen, hunters, bride - whitefish, marten. During the matchmaking, the bride's friends could already sing songs: ritual ( "We came to PashechkaThree matchmakers at once...") and lyrical ones, in which the theme of the girl’s loss of her will began to be developed ( "The viburnum boasted...").

Conspiracy songs depicted the transition of a girl and a young man from the free state of “girlhood” and “youth” to the position of a groom and a bride. In the song "Along the Danube..." a young man on horseback walks by the river. He demonstrates his beauty and prowess to the girl and asks save his horse. But the girl answers:

"When I'm yours,

I'll save your horse...

And now I'm not yours.

I can't take care of my horse."

Paired images-symbols from the natural world appear in the songs, for example Kalinushka and the nightingale ("On the mountain there is a viburnum in the circlegu stood..."). The motive of the trampled maiden will is being developed (the bride is depicted through the symbols of the pecked berries, caught fish, shot down coons, trampled travushki, broken grape sprigs, trampled green mint, broken birch trees). song "They didn't blow the trumpet early ondawn..." they could sing at the wedding, at the bachelorette party and on the morning of the wedding day. This ritual song marked the upcoming, ongoing or already completed ritual of unbraiding the braid. Conspiracy songs began to depict the newlyweds in the position of the bride and groom, idealizing their relationship: the bride lovingly combs the groom’s hair brown curls, the groom gives her gifts. In conspiracy songs there were no monologue forms; the songs were a narrative or a dialogue.

In the songs of the bachelorette party, monologue forms appeared on behalf of the bride. She said goodbye to free will and her stepfather's house, she reproached her parents for giving her away in marriage. Thinking about her future life, the bride imagined herself white swan, caught in the herd gray geese, who pinch her. The mother or married sister taught the bride how to behave in the new family:

"You wear a dress, don’t wear it out,

You endure grief, don’t tell.”

If the bride was an orphan, then a lament was performed: the daughter invited her parents look on her orphan's wedding.

Songs often contain the plot of crossing or transporting a bride across a water barrier, associated with the ancient understanding of a wedding as an initiation ( "Sunday early Blue sea gamelo..."). The groom catches either the drowning bride herself, or gold keys from her will (“You are my friends, my dears...”). The image of girl friends was depicted as a flock little birds, flocked to to the canary enclosed in cell. Her friends either sympathized with the bride or reproached her for her broken promise not to get married. The bachelorette party was full of ritual and lyrical songs.

The culmination of the entire wedding ritual was the wedding day, on which the marriage took place and the young family was glorified.

In the morning, the bride woke up her friends with a song in which she announced her bad dream: snuck up on her Damn woman's life. While the bride was dressing and waiting for the groom's wedding train, they sang lyrical songs that expressed the extreme degree of her sorrowful experiences ("How the white birch tree was shaken..."). Ritual songs were also filled with deep lyricism; in them, marriage was depicted as an inevitable event ( "MatushWell, it’s not dust in the field..."). At the same time, songs of a different content were sung in the groom’s house, for example: with a squad of young men, he sets off from his wonderful tower behind gray ducktsei-beautiful", the groom floats on river on boat, pulls arrow to the knee and lets in into the brimstone duck ("Oh, Ivan hasthe mansions are good...").

But then the wedding train arrived. Guests in the house. This is depicted through hyperbole: they broke down the new hall, melted a couple of gold,They released the nightingale from the garden and made the beautiful maiden cry. The bride is consoled by the groom ( "There was no wind, there was no wind- Suddenly it inspired...").

At this time, scenes were played out, based on the ransom of the bride or her double - maiden beauty. Their execution was facilitated by wedding sentences, which were of a ritual nature. The sentences also had other functions: they idealized the entire situation and the wedding participants, and humorously discharged the difficult psychological situation associated with the bride’s departure from her parents’ home.

Sentences are rhymed or rhythmic poeticChinese works. For example, in the Kostroma region, after the arrival of the wedding train, a scene of carrying out Christmas trees - virgin beautyYou, which was accompanied by a large sentence. Christmas tree was carried out by one of the bride's friends, she also pronounced the verdict. There was improvisation in the construction of the verdict (however, the core was the same. The verdict began with an introductory part in which the furnishings of the upper room were fantastically and sublimely depicted. Epithets were used that idealized the surrounding objects:

...I go up to the table, I go up to the oak table.

To tablecloths to brass.

For copper drinks<медовым>,

For sugar dishes.

For gilded plates.

For chiseled forks,

To the damask knives,

To you, pleasant matchmakers.

Then the greeting was said to the commuters. Their idealization could take an epic turn: they were on their way to pick up a bride clean fields, green meadows, dark forests... The difficult journey of the groom's train was conveyed by hyperbole. Hyperboles were also used in another epic part - in the story about how the girls mined and decorated Christmas tree:

...They trampled on my shoes,

They tore my stockings,

They broke the green Christmas tree.

The gloves were torn,

A ring was broken...

Herringbone was the main character. They said a hymn to her, at the end of which candles were lit on her:

…Our maiden beauty is good

She's dressed up in a variety of ways

Hung with scarlet ribbons.

Various bows are undressed,

Decorated with precious stones,

Wax candles are placed.

The ribbons are red,

Various bows turned blue.

The stones on the roads were spilling,

Beskovs the candles were lit.

Here's one last word for you:

Give me a gold ring.

I'll say some words of heels -

Give me a silk scarf.

The matchmaker who has a red shirt -

Place a five-ruble note;

And in blue - Put it differently...

Each giver extinguished the candle. When all the candles were extinguished, the girl who pronounced the sentence turned to the bride. She spoke of the inevitable parting with beauty and of the bride's loss of her girlhood forever. Christmas tree They carried her out of the hut, the bride cried. The psychological parallel between herringbone edgehundredth and the bride.

The sentences compositionally consisted of a monologue, but addresses to the ritual participants led to the emergence of dialogical forms and gave the sentences the character of a dramatic performance.

The most solemn moment of the wedding was the feast (princelytable). Here they sang only funny songs and danced. The ritual of glorification had a vibrant artistic development. Great songs were sung to the newlyweds, wedding officials and all guests, for this ygrits(singers) were presented with sweets, gingerbread, and money. The stingy ones sang parodic magnificence—corruption songs that could have been sung just for laughs.

Great songs had a congratulatory character. They honored and glorified the one to whom they were addressed. The songs portrayed the positive qualities of this person to the highest degree, often through hyperbole and idealization.

The images of the bride and groom poetically revealed various symbols from the natural world. Groom - clear falcon, ravenhorse bride - strawberry-berry, cherry, viburnum-raspberry, yagoyes currants. The symbols could be paired: dove and darling,grapes and berries.

The portrait played a big role. The groom has such beautiful curls,

What kind of curls are these?

The sovereign wants to favor him

The first city - glorious St. Petersburg,

Another city - stone Moscow,

The third city is White Lake.

As in many love songs, the mutual love of the newlyweds was expressed in the fact that the bride combed the groom's hair brown curls("Like the moon has golden horns...").

Compared to the songs that were sung in the bride’s house, the opposition between one’s own and someone else’s family changed diametrically. Now the father's family has become a "stranger", so the bride fatherI don’t want to eat bread: it is bitter, smells of wormwood; A Ivanov bread -want to eat: it is sweet and smells like honey.

In songs of greatness, a general scheme for creating an image can be seen: a person’s appearance, his clothes, wealth, good spiritual qualities. So, for example, depicting Tysyatsky, the song pays a lot of attention to his luxurious fur coat, in which he I went to God's church and married my godson. A single guy is depicted on a horse in all his glory, capable of even transforming nature: the meadows turn green, the gardens bloom. Svaa - white, because she washed her face with white foam delivered because of the blue sea. The greatness of a family is reminiscent of carols: the owner with his sons - month with stars housewife with daughters - clear sun with rays("U green pine gate..."). The greatness of the widow was special - it expressed sympathy for her grief. This was achieved with the help of symbols: an unfenced field, a tower without top, canopy without any overhead, marten coat without dragging, gold ring without gilding.

Great songs can be compared to hymns; they are characterized by solemn intonation and high vocabulary. Of course, all this was achieved through folklore means. Yu. G. Kruglov noted that all artistic means “are used in strict accordance with the poetic content of glorified songs - they serve to strengthen, emphasize the most beautiful features of the appearance of the one being glorified, the most noble features of his character, the most magnificent attitude of those singing towards him, that is serve the basic principle of the poetic content of great songs - idealization" 3.

The purpose of reproach songs is to create a caricature. Their main artistic technique is the grotesque. At the groom's there's a grove on the humpgrew up, the mouse made a nest in my head; at the matchmaker's back - lovetsa, well...-- bread bin, peritoneum - swamp; buddy around the ska shopsfeces, pies With dragged shelves, wandered around the under-counter and got micepitchfork; thousand sits on a horse, like a crow, and the horse under him - likecow. Portraits of reproach songs are satirical, they exaggerate the ugly. This is achieved through reduced vocabulary. Corruption songs achieved not only a humorous goal, but also ridiculed drunkenness, greed, stupidity, laziness, deception, and boasting. Clueless matchmakers go for the bride - We went into the garden, poured beer over all the cabbage, prayed to the vere (pillar), and worshiped the tyn. Sometimes in reproachful songs there was an ironic quotation of verses from majestic songs (for example, they copied the refrain “Good friend, handsome friend!”).

All works of wedding folklore used an abundance of artistic means: epithets, comparisons, symbols, hyperboles, repetitions, words in an affectionate form (with diminutive suffixes), synonyms, allegories, appeals, exclamations, etc. Wedding folklore affirmed an ideal, sublime world, living according to the laws of goodness and beauty.

Lamentations. Recorded in 1978 from Rakia Tazhetdinova (born in 1910) in the village of Aminovo, Kunashaksky district, Chelyabinsk region.

Lamentations (You will cut the hay, my father). Recorded in 1990 from Rosalia Sultangareeva in the city of Ufa. In this version of senglau, the bride’s plaintive words are addressed to her own father.

The wedding ritual, as is known, absorbs fragments from all eras of the development of the culture of the people: from the most ancient beliefs and magical actions to patterns of ceremonial behavior developed in modern times.
Bashkir wedding ritual- a multi-stage folk drama in which the worldview and mental characteristics of the people, their original musical and artistic culture, and the specifics of their economic and everyday life were refracted. It represents one of the brightest creations of the national collective spirit. The Bashkir wedding has great typological similarity and substantive similarity with traditional wedding Tatar, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Turkmen peoples, echoes certain motifs of Altai, Mongol-Buryat, North Caucasian wedding rituals. There are many semantic parallels with wedding ceremonies peoples of Europe (Finns, Sami, Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, peoples of Great Britain and Ireland)

1. As Rozalia Asfandiyarovna Sultangareeva emphasizes.
The Bashkir wedding ritual is a Central Asian-Turkic type with a richly ornamented multi-genre poetic repertoire and with a pronounced national flavor and nationally-specific motifs (fights for bed, ceremonial receipt of named cattle, ritual beatings, and so on).

2. Since ancient times in Bashkir culture, marriage, education both physically and spiritually healthy offspring were considered a matter worthy of a real person who cared not only about his personal well-being, but also about the fate of his people.

Bashkir wedding fragment from the film "Turks of Russia"

To prepare this page, materials from the site were used:
http://lik-kuzbassa.narod.ru/bashkirskiy-fol.htm, http://vatandash.ru/index.php?article=259

Thirty years ago it was impossible to imagine a wedding without songs. And almost all modern weddings have their own sound accompaniment: instead of grandmothers, DJs and other brethren sing. However, live “music” somehow breaks through, either in the form of grandmothers or in the form of song competitions. Which confirms the statement of the famous researcher of Russian folklore V. Anikin - “Songs occupy the most important place in the wedding ceremony.”

Wedding songs are different from all other songs related to life (of course, we won’t mention the funeral rites anymore). These songs literally belong to the ceremony and are never performed outside the wedding ceremony. Functionally, wedding songs, magnifications and lamentations are very important - they seem to illuminate the weight of the ceremony, making it understandable, marking the most important points and milestones of this impressive and long event. Among all wedding folklore, songs carry legal force in a sense, being performed and confirming precisely the legal (as we would say now) side of the event.

In addition to this actual and factual meaning, wedding songs undoubtedly carried and continue to carry an aesthetic function. They differ from other songs in their eloquence, often in their allegory and special narrative style.

Another type of wedding art is grandeur. Greatness is a genre of song praise, and not only the bride and groom, but also future relatives were praised. However, there is no need to be disingenuous - most often it was the bride and groom who were praised, over-praised and even praised. The examples of greatness that have come down to us demonstrate their direct connection with spell magic, which helped to feel well-being, wealth and other material and mental benefits that had already arrived, existing right here.

Later, magnifications from incantatory magic turned into expressions ideal image moral behavior, spirituality, beauty, material wealth without any connection with magic and magical conspiracies.

Lamentations occupied a very special place. These are such sad, sometimes very sad, examples of folk art. Lyrical narratives that touchingly described the experiences of the bride and her friends, parents, and other wedding participants. The functional significance of lamentations was completely subordinated to the ritual. The bride necessarily imagined her upcoming marriage as a forced departure from her parental family, as an action that was performed against her will. Hence the sadness and anxiety and, of course, lamentations. This was done from the same magical motives that controlled wedding songs: thus the bride and her new family hoped to avoid the revenge of the host family's ancestors.

Other researchers of Russian folklore suggest that lamentations were often a reflection of the true experiences of the bride at the moment of separation from her parental family.

After some time, the lamentations transformed and began to only partially follow the ancient magical ritual, but acquired the function of directly expressing the feelings of the people who take part in the wedding. However, the essence and most obvious distinctive feature of lamentations lies in the name itself. People are wailing in a state of confusion.