The Peculiarities of the Existence of Ethnic Traditions in the Legends of the Russians and Buryats about Barguts

The article is devoted to the analysis of the structure of Russian and Buryat legends about the Barguts, which belong to the microlocal tradition (Barguzinsky district of the Republic of Buryatia). Comparative studies of the legends created by Russian settlers when settling in new territories compared to the legends of the indigenous peoples are considered important. The work aims to determine the peculiarities of the local tradition of the Buryats and Russians in the legends of the Barguts and the peculiarities of the reflection of ethnocultural features in the conditions of territorial interethnic contacts. The imagological method of analysis will make it possible to trace the process of formation of the image of the stranger (the Bargut) in the Russian tradition in comparison with the Buryat view of this image, and the hermeneutic method of interpretation of the narratives is also required. The legends tell of the Barguts, one of the Mongolian tribes that once inhabited this region. The sources of the study are archival records of Russian legends and field materials of the author of the work. In legends with a similar plot, the reason for the exodus of the Indigenous people of the region is a single motif, namely the appearance of a white birch tree in a coniferous forest, characterized by the opposition’ friend – foe’ by the color code ‘white – black’, the phytocode ‘birch – coniferous’. As part of the study, the structural characteristics of the legends about the Barguts in various ethnic traditions were determined. A variable transformation of the invariant of the exodus motif of the Barguts in the Russian tradition, which is connected with the legends of the Chudes, is revealed: they go away, bury themselves, dig themselves into pits, throw themselves off cliffs, drown themselves in rivers. The motif of the suicide of foreign, hostile people is the most important structural factor in the construction of Russian legends. In the Buryat legends, the stable motif of departure, and not mythological suicide, is connected with the historical events of the exodus of the Barguts, a closely related tribe, and their contemporaries. The most important conclusion is the identification of the phenomenon of folkloric local narrative, in which the content of ethnic and/or historical memory, transformation, and adaptation to a foreign cultural stereotype is manifested. Under the conditions of the cultural border, the ‘foreign’, which acquires an ambiguous meaning, almost becomes the ‘own.’

Russians, Buryats, ethnoculture, border areas, local traditions, motif invariant, motif variants, exodus