Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities

Russian Folk Religious Imagination Project

Project Director
Dr. Jeanmarie Rouhier-Willoughby
Professor of Russian, Folklore, and Linguistics
University of Kentucky

Project Co-Director
Dr. Mark Richard Lauersdorf
Associate Professor of Languages and Linguistics
University of Kentucky

Project Home: http://rfri.rch.uky.edu/

Project Description

The "folk" and intellectual views of folk material play a profound role in Russian cultural history. The German Romantics argued that the folk conveyed the true essence of a nation's identity, a stance adopted in 19th century Russia. Beginning in the late 1930s, the Soviets held up the folk as heroes who conveyed the ideals of the socialist state. Both of these conceptions persist until the present day and present an attitude that differs significantly from many contemporary civil societies, where the folk are typically viewed as poor, backward people that need to be enlightened. Throughout 19th- and 20th-centuries, folk culture and "high" culture have come together in Russia in a significant way. Thus, it can be argued that in order to understand Russia, one must study the conception of the "folk" and their belief systems. Russian religion is no exception in this regard; to study Russian religious belief without a consideration of the folk conceptions is to overlook one of the most important sources for Russian religious ideas.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, scholars have undertaken the study of folk religion in earnest, but there is as yet no comprehensive study of the interrelations between various folk genres and religious belief. Typically folklorists study either oral literature (e.g., legends and songs), or folk ritual and iconography. This separation of genres inhibits full understanding of the complexity of the religious belief system. Our multimedia critical edition, the "Russian Folk Religious Imagination" (RFRI), features an innovative cross-disciplinary approach combining the study of legends on saints and biblical figures, songs and religious rituals, and folk iconography into a single research project designed to integrate text and multimedia into a coherent whole. There has been a paucity of in-depth research and publication in this area, due to the official policy of atheism in the Soviet Union. Folklorists collecting data on this topic often could not publish their findings, and the material has languished in archives and private collections. Even when published editions did exist, they quickly went out of print, so that specialists elsewhere were also unable to do extensive research on Russian folk religion. Our web-based critical edition will provide unprecedented access for scholars and students of folklore and of Russia to materials they could not previously obtain without extensive archival work or field research.