Legends of Folk Hagiography about St. Nicholas the Miracle-Worker and Their Siberian Texts: Threshing with Fire

Abstract

In the oral tradition of the Eastern Slavs, stories about miraculous threshing with fire are well known (AaTh 752A, SUS 752A). Folk hagiography often associates with the name of St. Nicholas the Miracle-Worker. The article presents the results of a study of Siberian texts of such legends (including folk prose plots not taken into account by the indexes) in comparison with variants of similar narratives of the European territory of historical Russia. It was found that, along with the plot forms common to the East Slavic tradition, Siberian texts contain special versions of this plot, which are the result of contamination and mixing of folklore forms in the conditions of Siberian existence. Unknown in the texts of other territories, the contaminated versions of the Siberian stories about the miraculous threshing acquire special interest against the background of the fact that the Siberian versions of Russian fairy tales, as researchers have established, generally have a strong tendency to plot contamination and the complexity of the stories. Previously, these processes were traced on the material of fairy tales (Matveeva, 1990) and novelistic tales (Kuznetsova, 2019). The Siberian variants of contaminated plot forms of legendary fairy tales presented in the article make it possible to consider contamination as an increasingly universal creative device in Siberian storytelling.