Intergenerational diachronic connection as a communicative discourse in the folklore tradition of Slobidska Ukraine

Abstract

Slobidska Ukraine is an area of late settlement, the folklore of which had been formed for over three centuries under the influence of various socio-historical factors. A significant role in the preservation of ethno-cultural information was played by the mechanism of intergenerational diachronic communication, which reproduced the genres of the entire folklore scope. The dynamic 20th century made its adjustments to the existence of tradition, as the destruction of monocentric rural institutions affected the ways of functioning of the authentic folklore, destruction of certain genres and rituals, their transition from the active form to passive, and further into an artificial plane of life. Our purpose was to mark, which links of the once powerful chain of “civil culture” had been damaged. what exactly caused these damages, and how in this closed system of the rural environment, where there was an awareness of meanings that were equally understood and appreciated by society, the line of misunderstanding and oblivion started to appear. Recollections of elderly people who were witnesses of social changes in Kharkiv Region in 1920–50, as well as documentary data were used as the material for the analysis. Modern functional methods – the development of sociological questionnaires, the involvement of the materials from our own field research – allowed us to create a factual basis for the research and determined the scientific novelty. The evidence of the oldest generation of traditions carriers showed the shocking consequences of the artificial transformation of the society in the 1920–30s, which included not only the destruction of folklore as a type of culture within a holistic social awareness, but also the intruding of a new socio-cultural conglomerate of “parallel culture” of club institutions, which was broadcast not diachronically, horizontally, as is customary in the oral tradition, but imperativelyhierarchically, i.e. vertically, according to the directives from the “above”. In the rural environment, a situation of shaky balancing between “traditional” and “pseudo-folklore” culture arose, not in favor of the first. Thus, the communicative functions, due to which the society’s objective perception of traditional meanings and its self-regulation were possible, was destroyed, and folklore became a field where various political forces were constructing new cultural meanings to the detriment of the traditional. In the conditions of the gradual disappearance of the music of the authentic tradition, with the aim of same understanding and appreciation within the community of its inherent cultural meanings, the communicative discourse can become a regulator and a corrective factor.