'And Still That City Stands Invisible': Pavel Mel’nikov’s In the Forests as Ethnographic Text

• In Event: Folklore in Literature: The Function of Narrative

Abstract

Beginning in the 1850s, the writer Pavel Mel’nikov collected ethnographic materials amongst Old Believers’ peasant communities in the Nizhny Novgorod region. Later, based on these materials, he wrote his multivolume novel In the Forests (V lesakh) under the pen name Andrei Pecherskii. Some scholarship conceptualizes literary texts about the peasantry as a manifestation of the voyeuristic gaze of the educated classes. My paper will view In the Forests as a collectively composed text resulting from direct or indirect interactions between Mel’nikov and the peasant communities he studied, in which the peasantry made active decisions about what to share or keep hidden. This paper explores the ways in which the folk legends of Kitezh and Belovod’e were retold and reimagined by Old Believers as tools of survival under new economic and political threats to their communities and explains how Mel’nikov later wove them into the narrative structure of his own text.

Author

• Isabella Palange, U of Wisconsin-Madison