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Man and Culture
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Modern Yakut horror story as a genre of urban post-folklore

Gogolev Anatolii Ignat'evich

ORCID: 0000-0002-9694-7826

Doctor of History

Professor of the Department of World, National History, Ethnology, Archeology, Federal State Autonomous Educational Institution of Higher Education "Northeastern Federal University named after M.K. Ammosov

677013, Russia, respublika Sakha (yakutiya), g. Yakutsk, ul. Belinskogo, 58, of. 610

ai.gogolev@s-vfu.ru
Other publications by this author
 

 
Fedorova Aitalina Rodionovna

Junior Scientific Associate, Institute for Humanities Research and Indigenous Studies of the North of Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences

677000, Russia, respublika Sakha (Yakutiya), g. Yakutsk, ul. Petrovskogo, 1

aytap@mail.ru
Other publications by this author
 

 

DOI:

10.25136/2409-8744.2022.2.37822

Received:

08-04-2022


Published:

24-04-2022


Abstract: This article examines a special genre of Yakut oral literature – modern Yakut "horror stories". This new genre was formed on the basis of traditional folklore in the late Soviet period during the era of active Urabanization processes in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) and is a genre of modern post-folklore. Proceeding from the point of view that any folklore transformations are indicators of the dynamics of public sentiment, an attempt was made to look at this genre as a reflection of some social experiences that support and are reflected in certain plots that remain more stable. The sources of the study were data from a survey conducted in 2018, in which 213 respondents took part. With the help of the obtained materials, some quantitative data were revealed, as well as the most popular and frightening motives of the modern Yakut horror story according to the respondents. The review of the most popular plots is carried out, the characteristics and regional features of the genre are given. The author comes to the conclusion that the Yakut horror story, arising during the period of urbanization processes, is the result of the decomposition of rural communications, and the characters of the modern chthonic spectrum differ from the traditional ones in their simplified appearance and universality in relation to global culture.


Keywords:

Horror Story, yakut horror story, postfolklor, urbanization, chthonic characters, urban folklore, Yakut folklore, fear, folklore articulation, Yakutia

This article is automatically translated.

In modern Yakutia, oral folk stories are ubiquitous, in which archaic frightening folklore motifs are expressed, preserved in their living form to the present day. The genre we are studying is oral folk stories about the supernatural. The main purpose of such stories is to scare the listener, so the term "horror story" will be used for further designation. And if, in general, the rest of the folklore genres are leaving the modern culture of the Yakuts, then this segment, having transformed into a new post-folklore form, successfully exists in modern realities. It can be said that Yakut horror stories, on the one hand, due to their flexibility as a genre of folk art and not too rigid canons, and, on the other, due to their special proximity to universal, "archetypal" feelings and experiences, is perhaps the most stable part of the mythological tradition.

The term postfolklor was introduced into scientific circulation by S.Yu. Neklyudov to denote those genres of modern literature that have signs of archaic oral folklore, but at the same time do not fully fall under his criteria [1]. Thus, the modern Yakut horror story, being an oral, collective and anonymous genre, but at the same time having a format not peculiar to Yakut folklore, can be classified as post-folklore.

The study of horror stories as a genre was first conducted by Leningrad scientists O.N. Grechina and M.V. Osorina [2, p. 232]. Further, after the active collection of materials by writers and collectors of folklore, generalizing articles and monographs by S.M. Leiter [3-5], K.A. Rublev [6; 7] and O.Y. Trykova [8; 9] appeared, in which the Russian horror story is viewed through the prism of children's folklore. Among the modern authors, it should be noted A.S. Arkhipova and A.A. Kirzyuk, who conducted an anthropological study of Soviet urban folklore [10], as well as E.G. Matveev [11] and T.V. Savelyev [12] whose research is devoted to modern children's scary folklore of the XXI century. As for the question of the Yakut horror story, today this topic has not been fully reflected in the scientific literature. There are works devoted to traditional Yakut chthonic plots [13-16], but their modern oral interpretations have so far remained outside the scientific field, which is the novelty of the study.

It is also important that oral folklore is often an indicator of the social mood of society. This opinion is shared by some researchers of anthropology and folklore. Among them we can include, for example, A. Dundas [17; 18] and J. Viktor [19], among Russian researchers, A.A. Kirzyuk adheres to this approach [20]. Researchers in this approach suggest looking at folklore as a dynamically changing process that reacts to changes in society and constantly communicates with it. Thus, the mutual influence of the social life of society and folklore in the scientific community is commonly called folklore articulation.

In our opinion, the study of modern urban folklore in its dynamics allows not only to fix individual instances in their already formed form, but also to try to see the principles and mechanisms of their formation. In this article, our goal is to consider the modern Yakut horror story, determine its features and answer the questions: what are modern Yakuts afraid of and what ethnic motives are the most stable.

"Scary stories" in Russian science is considered to be a genre of children's folklore. Often the main motive of the narrative is a system of prohibitions. In the Yakut "horror stories", the ethnic component stands out very clearly, the objects of fear are not inanimate objects, but quite natural characters and archaic images from the same traditional folklore and mythology, and the main characters are not only children. The American anthropologist Margaret Mead pointed out in her writings that spiritual fears and the "natural" tendency of our children to animate the inanimate are actually instilled in them by their parents. She came to the conclusion that animating the universe is not intrinsically inherent in the child's consciousness. This is a tendency that he inherits from society [21, p. 213]. Perhaps in more traditional societies, segregation into children's and adult folklore is not so pronounced. Both groups are consumers of the same works in a more simplified and complicated form. So, the Yakut genre of horror stories is quite different from the Russian and all-Russian in that, in our opinion, it is not exclusively childish.

The survey materials were used as sources, in which 213 respondents took part. The questions concerned the main modern images of fear of the Yakuts, their belief or disbelief in the reality of the events described in horror stories, interest in this genre. Since the object of the study is a previously unexplored genre of urban folklore, in our opinion, it would be advisable to rely on data that most fully reflect the state of this genre and have a more widespread character. Since the modern Yakut horror story assumes a large range of different plots, their branches and variations, it was decided to identify the most common plots for analysis by means of a questionnaire. In this way, the survey method using expanded free answers seemed to us the most advantageous. Journalistic materials are also used as sources, since modern "horror stories" in the form closest to everyday understanding are more reflected in fiction and journalism. Thus, the sources for the study of modern chthonic motifs were the collections of Mikhailov D.D. "Scary Stories of Yakutia" [22], Reshetnikova-Osakovskaya A.V. "Scary stories told by Irina Mikhailovna Maximova" [23] and Sosin I.M. "Abaaahy tuhunan kapseenner" (Stories about evil spirits) [24].

If we conduct some content analysis, we will see that most of the recorded stories of this kind describe the events of the 70s and 80s. This period in the history of Yakutia is closely connected with the process of urbanization in the republic. S.Yu. Neklyudov and Ya.I. Gudoshnikov believed that it was the period of rapid growth of industrial cities and high rates of urbanization that lead to a change in mass consciousness due to the penetration of rural culture into cities [25; 1, p. 2]. This hypothesis is also confirmed by the example of the region we are studying. According to the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, the sharpest jump in the population growth of Yakutsk occurred just in the 70s of the twentieth century. (Population / Territorial body of the Federal State Statistics Service for the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). Yakutsk, 2022). This period became the beginning of the formation of urban folklore and modern Yakut horror stories. Thus, on the basis of the Yakut traditional culture, a unique post-folklore genre of Yakut "horror stories" arises, which in its content and characters is still globally ethnic, but has the form of a modern Soviet "horror story".

What is the Yakut horror story? This is a short story whose purpose is to scare the listener. As a rule, it has a three-act structure. In its morphological form, according to our observations, it does not differ much from the generally accepted "horror story", the specifics consist mainly in the content and characters.

In 2018, a survey was conducted, where 79.3% of the respondents were women, and 20.7% were men. The overwhelming majority of respondents are young: 61% are 18-25 years old, 33.8% are 25-35 years old, 3.3% are 35-55 years old, 1.4% are under 18 years old, 0.5% are 55-70 years old. Such a sample of gender and age groups is due to the form of the survey, which was conducted online. 93.4% indicated "Sakha" in the nationality column, 3.3% - "other", 1.9% - "KMNS", 1.4% - "Russian". Place of birth of respondents: 43.2% - in the city of Yakutsk, 34.7% - in a village, 10.3% - in another city of Yakutia, 9.9% - in a village, 1.4% - in another city of Russia [26].

One of the questions was aimed at identifying the most popular motives of Yakut horror stories: "Horror stories about whom or what have you heard most often?". Respondents were asked to give any short answer. The most frequent answers in descending order were: stories about uer (ghosts), stories about buildings (localities) with ghosts can also be attributed here; the motif about the ghost of a girl by the road was also very popular, it is often mentioned that she is in white, and sometimes an old woman is mentioned instead of a girl; the next most popular motif is "horror stories" about the ichchi – spirits of the area, where people do not honor the spirits of a certain space or place receive retribution; also popular were stories about chuechekke (brownie), as well as "horror stories" about shamans, udagankas or their burials [26].

The next question was aimed at identifying the most frightening and scary characters of Yakut folklore in the opinion of the respondents. The most popular answers are as follows: uer (ghost), ichchi (spirits of the area), the evil ghost of a woman, often in white, often on the road, abaas, shamans and udaganki, darietinnik (undead), chuechekke (brownies) [26].

Here it is worth noting some confusion in the definitions of certain concepts in modern culture, and about the difficulties that the author encountered when interpreting the data obtained. Russian Russian was the language of the survey for greater comprehensiveness, and most of the responses were also received in Russian. At this moment, there is a confusion of translation, since we can translate the word "spirit" into Yakut as "ichchi". E.K. Pekarsky defines this word as follows: "All objects and phenomena of nature that directly affect human well-being have their own ichchi. It has: rivers, lakes, water, wood, forest, stone, earth, every mowing area, road, mountains, gorges, whirlpools, etc. These creatures do not belong to the category of ayyas (deities), nor to the category of abaas, although in fairy tales they are called abaas in cases when they threaten any evil" [27, stb. 989]. By itself, the word "icchi" does not mean anything malicious, but the phrase "evil spirit" can already be interpreted closer to the concept of "uer" (ghost), since, apparently, it means the restless soul of a person. Separately, it is worth defining the term abaasy – this is a fairly broad concept, denoting everything unfavorable, hostile towards a person. Thus, when respondents indicate the word "abaasy", they can mean almost any character of the Yakut chthonic spectrum.

Next, it is worth considering in more detail those motives and characters that are equally common when mentioning popular and frightening motives. In both questions, the most popular answer was "uer", but since the details of the plot are not specified, we will miss this category as indescribable within the framework of one typical image.

The image of ichchi in the modern Yakut horror story most often identifies the spirit of nature, the area or a specific room that has been disturbed or offended by people. An example of such a classic story was recorded in the collection "Terrible Stories of Yakutia", which describes how young hunters behaved ignorantly, complained aloud about the meager catch and consumed alcohol, for which the spirit punishes them with clouding of reason, after which they shoot themselves [22, p. 26]. In such stories, ichchi often has no material appearance, and only in some cases the image is concentrated in the anthropomorphic figure of an old man or an old woman.

Also, a very frequent mention was the plot about uer, most often in the guise of a young woman. It is this motive that, according to the data we have received, is the most popular concrete image. It would be noteworthy to note that it is this image of the ghost of a woman that has the most stable details that remain fairly stable from story to story. The most frequent signs of this image are white clothes and long hair, also a frequent circumstance of the story is that the location of this ghost is often a road or a farce. An example of such a story can be found in the collection already mentioned above, where the restless soul of a young woman appears to travelers as a traveling companion [22, pp. 51-53]. It is interesting that most often this image of a woman is quite passive and does not pose a great threat to her witness, the very fact of her appearance is frightening.

The next in terms of the number of mentions is the story about a haunted house. Such a story occurs both within the framework of urban folklore, where an apartment can be meant by a house, and its rural interpretation, where a ghost appears in an abandoned or hunting house. A similar story is described in the Yakut language in the collection "Abaaahy tuhunan kapseenner", where the skeptical Soviet protagonist has to spend the night in the forest in an abandoned house, where he meets ghosts [24, pp. 18-22]. We can combine such plots with the following feature: the events often described take place on a hunt, in an old house, after moving to a new home, after the death of a tenant, etc. That is, events never arise out of the blue, but describe some shocks or places that are sacrally dangerous, bringing a person closer to death.

We single out stories related to the shamanic cult as a separate category. These are horror stories in which the main images of the frightening are shamans, udagankas, their burials or places and trees whose spirits they became after death. Shamans in the Yakut traditional culture had their own special place and also after their death they were buried in a special way [28, p. 71], and their soul, according to their views, could turn into a uer. Usually, scary stories associated with the shamanic cult describe the taboo about the inviolability (material and spiritual) of shamanic aerial burials and its violation [23, pp. 191-193].

Having considered the typical variants of the most popular motifs, we can highlight some special features: (1) epic and "wonderful" characters from Yakut folklore are practically not mentioned by respondents, apparently they do not withstand the realities of modernity and are preserved weaker; (2) the most preserved were not personal and rather universal images, which can be found analogies in global culture; (3) we can observe mentions as frightening characters of those traditional images that are not supposed to be malicious in the classical version (shamanic cult, ichchi, chuechekke), perhaps the frightening factor here is not so much the level of danger of a particular character, but the very fact of supernatural phenomena and their reality.

77% of respondents have heard scary stories from friends [26]. Such a situation can be explained by the communicative function of a horror story, when the feeling of fear is a kind of unifying factor of a common experience, which is why this genre is more readily transmitted through informal horizontal communications. Being a post-folklore genre that arises during periods of active urbanization, "horror stories" arise as a product of the decomposition of rural communications in urban conditions.

A feature of the structure of this genre is that at the beginning of the story, a link to the original source is a mandatory part: "my grandfather told me this story", "this story happened to my friend in the 1980s in Yakutsk." This beginning of the tie is functionally aimed at enhancing the realism of the events described and defines them practically as "evidence", and not an already formed independent story. This, in our opinion, is one of the most important features of the Yakut horror story – greater confidence in the truth of what is happening. According to our survey, 59.6% of respondents believe in the existence of the supernatural and 33.3% find it difficult to answer [26].

With regard to modern well-established motives, it is worth noting that even conducting a primary analysis, it is possible to determine the social experiences declared in them. So, we can assume that most of the stories are based on the "prohibition/retribution" system, when characters accidentally or intentionally violate traditional prohibitions, thereby demonstrating the loss of cultural knowledge. Perhaps, in such stories we can observe the public experience of the loss of traditional culture and fear of it, this is indicated primarily by the fact that taboos are violated as a rule by ignorant young people or a bias is often made on the fact that Soviet times are described.

Separately, I would like to reflect on the most popular plot – the girl in white. Such an image of a young woman is inherent not only in the Yakut culture, it is a fairly common image for Anglo-Saxon, German, Russian and even Southeastern folklore [29]. It is noteworthy that the cause of a woman's death is often described in sufficient detail – an unhappy marriage, violence, unrequited love, betrayal, etc. Such circumstances emphasize the fact that this character is a victim of a patriarchal society, this can explain the fact that he is mainly to men. It can be assumed that this popular plot hides the social experience of the unequal position of women in patriarchal societies. This question could become a topic for a separate study in the future.

Thus, very complex and traditionally religious characters naturally disappear from folklore usage, so, for example, when describing the most popular and frightening motives, according to the survey data, specific folklore characters rarely appear. We can observe a tendency to mix some images, and a bias towards the fear of the abstract, the unknown. There is a kind of superimposition on the traditional existing forms of other images that remain tenacious and acceptable in the modern realities of the XXI century. And these are exactly the characters to whom we can draw analogies in the global globalizing culture.

References
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17. Dundes, A. (1971) On the psychology of legend. In W. Hand (Ed.). American folk legend: A symposium. Berkeley, Los-Angeles: University of California Press. Pp. 21-36.
18. Dundes, A. (1993) Series editor's preface. In G. Bennett and P. Smith (Ed.). Contemporary legend: A folklore bibliography, IX-XIII. New York and London: Garland.-340 p.
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First Peer Review

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The list of publisher reviewers can be found here.

The author of the article puts a "review" in the title, but I would like to ask right away: what actual problem is the researcher trying to solve with a review? With this formulation, the problem is not obvious, and, in fact, there is no need to conduct any scientific research to make an overview. Therefore, the author should still decide which problem he is addressing and how he intends to solve it. Moreover, we are talking about the genre of urban post-folklore, which in itself can be considered as a subject for research. Meanwhile, the author's appeal to the phenomenon important for the development of ethnic culture – the "modern Yakut scary tale" deserves attention. At the beginning of his work, the author focuses on post-folklore, appeals to the point of view of Neklyudov, reveals some features of this phenomenon. He gives an argument in favor of why the "Yakut horror story" becomes part of the post-folklore. In general, it can be said that the author copes with the need for a wide range of research, since the urban post-folklore is affected, and any phenomenon of urban culture should be considered in the large-scale context of socio-cultural transformations of the meanings and values of the city. Of course, the author has chosen a not entirely trivial object for this – a modern Yakut scary tale, but the final result may be all the more interesting, especially if it has heuristic significance and will reveal the essence of the original concept. The author presents the results of the analysis of the relevant scientific discourse, shows the origins of the appearance of horror stories as a genre, correlates it with children's folklore and with the system of prohibitions, which, as is known, are quite common in the children's subculture. At the same time, the author shows that the horror story appears as a result of a symbiosis of folklore and mythology. I see this message as the key idea of the study, and from a methodological point of view, such a construction gives hope for the depth of understanding of the material. Curiously, in his work, the author even conducted a survey in which 213 respondents took part (here the author needs to blame a typo in the text: the word "respondent" needs to be corrected). As can be understood from the characteristics of this study, the questions posed in it concerned the main modern images of fear of the Yakuts, their faith or disbelief in the reality of the events described in horror stories, and interest in this genre. The probability of obtaining valuable information for the article increases, however, the survey does not replace the need for qualitative research, which would be more appropriate in the context of the issue under consideration. The survey can only reflect the general opinion on the perception of horror stories, and this general opinion in relation to the designated case does not really matter, because understanding horror stories is an individual process and, one might even say, person–centered. In this regard, the author should provide convincing arguments as to why the choice fell on the survey, and not on an in-depth interview, for example. Questions arise about the empirical research itself: whom the author interviewed specifically, on what basis exactly these respondents came to the author's field of view, on what principle the selection was carried out, what the questionnaire was, how the operationalization of key concepts, for example, the same horror story, was carried out. That is, it is important to understand what the author of the survey is for and how relevant its results are to the topic. I do not see such a connection and I am sure that a survey of random people does not give a clear picture, moreover, it can significantly distort it. It is not clear from the content of the article what the review of horror stories is, what are the patterns of their genre nature. The lack of up-to-date literature (for example, on folklore, on childhood culture, etc.) makes it difficult to appreciate the mastery of the topic. Thus, the article is not ready for publication yet and needs to be finalized.

Second Peer Review

Peer reviewers' evaluations remain confidential and are not disclosed to the public. Only external reviews, authorized for publication by the article's author(s), are made public. Typically, these final reviews are conducted after the manuscript's revision. Adhering to our double-blind review policy, the reviewer's identity is kept confidential.
The list of publisher reviewers can be found here.

In the journal "Man and Culture" "Modern Yakut horror story as a genre of urban post-folklore", which conducted a study of the features of the creation of modern urban legends of the Yakut people as a socio-cultural phenomenon. The author proceeds in studying this issue from the fact that in modern urban culture, the genre of horror stories is a fairly popular type of oral folk art, since they allow people to experience basic emotions based on fear. The relevance of this study lies in the fact that modern Yakut horror stories are based on traditional characters and events of the folk epic and are a very interesting subject to study, although they have received due attention in the scientific community. Thus, by creating such urban legends, on the one hand, and conducting their scientific analysis, on the other hand, it becomes possible to preserve myths and legends as part of traditional ethnic culture. The scientific novelty lies in the analysis of the emergence and formation of such a layer of modern ethnic culture as a horror story, in particular the Yakut horror story. The purpose of the study is to examine the modern Yakut horror story, determine its features and answer the questions: what are modern Yakuts afraid of and which ethnic motives turn out to be the most stable. The methodological basis was a systematic approach containing descriptive, historical, semantic and comparative analysis, as well as a survey and questionnaire of respondents. The author of this article relies on domestic and foreign studies of Yakut spiritual culture and folklore, as well as the genre of "horror stories". The studied works of such anthropologists as M.Mead, O.N. Grechin, M.V. Osorin, A.S. Arkhipov, A.A. Kirzyuk, A. Dundas, J. Victor served as the theoretical basis of the study. The empirical basis of the study was the results of a questionnaire and the collections of Mikhailov D.D. "Scary stories of Yakutia", Reshetnikova-Osakovskaya A.V. "Scary stories told by Irina Mikhailovna Maximova" and Sosin I.M. "Abaaahy tuhunan kapseanner" (Stories about evil spirits). The analysis of empirical data obtained from a survey of 213 respondents conducted in 2018 on their attitude to horror stories and belief in the reality of their images and plots gives practical significance to the study. Having conducted a bibliographic analysis of scientific works devoted to the problem of studying oral folk art, the author expresses the opinion that the emergence of the Yakut horror story was a response to the spiritual crisis of society and the rupture of traditional social ties. In his research, the author pays attention to the study and definition of the term children's horror story, scary story. According to the author, these are "mythological stories about terrible and terrible things that happen at the will of creatures, objects and phenomena endowed with supernatural properties and elevated to the rank of demonological characters. The storytelling has a specific purpose – to evoke in listeners the experience of fear necessary for the self-affirmation of the child's personality." In his work, the author also explores the background and history of the emergence of horror stories as a layer of oral folk art. The Yakut horror story appeared in the 70s of the twentieth century under the influence of the process of urbanization and the associated departure from traditional beliefs. According to the author, the prerequisite for the appearance of the phenomenon of modern horror stories was the public experience of the loss of traditional culture and fear of it, this is indicated primarily by the fact that taboos are violated as a rule by ignorant young people or a bias is often made on the fact that modern realities are described. After conducting research and interpreting the results of the survey, the author notes that the most frightening characters are nature spirits and evil ghosts, and the most popular motives are insulting nature spirits and subsequent punishment, desecration of shamanic graves or invasion of abandoned houses inhabited by ghosts. The author also states that many plots and characters are no longer a unique Yakut phenomenon, but have similar features to the folklore of other peoples. Summarizing the results of his research, the author comes to the conclusion that the Yakut horror story cannot be defined solely as an attempt at child socialization and creativity. This genre of oral folk art demonstrates strong tradition-preserving properties, as it preserves traditional motifs and characters. The reason for the emergence of horror stories in Yakutia was scientific and technological progress, urbanization and a change in the spiritual orientations of the people, a departure from the traditional form of life and a transition to a new one. Despite globalization and urbanization, traditional beliefs and religious shamanic practices are strong in Yakutia, and the fear of the irrational is still part of mythological thinking. It seems that the author in his material touched upon issues important for modern socio-humanitarian knowledge, choosing for analysis an urgent topic, consideration of which in scientific research discourse helps in some way to change the established approaches or directions of analysis of the problem addressed in the presented article. The results obtained allow us to assert that the problems of studying modern folklore are of undoubted scientific and practical cultural interest, which requires a scientific approach and analysis. The conclusions drawn by the author allow us to state that such an experience can serve as the basis for further research. The material presented in the work has a clear, logically structured structure that contributes to a more complete assimilation of the material. This is also facilitated by an adequate choice of an appropriate methodological framework. The bibliography allowed the author to outline the scientific discourse on the issue under consideration (29 sources, including foreign ones, were used). Without a doubt, the author fulfilled his goal, received certain scientific results that made it possible to summarize the material. It should be noted that the article may be of interest to readers and deserves to be published in a reputable scientific publication.