Motif of the Grateful Dead in the Legends of Folk Hagiography about St. Nicholas the Miracle-worker: Folklore and Handwritten Booklore

Abstract

Relatedness of Old Russian “Tale of a merchant who bought a dead body and became tsar” as of end of the 17 c. with a folklore tradition — a story about a grateful dead man — has long and rightly been noted by all its researchers. However, the presence in the text of the Tale of details about the monastery of St. Nicholas the Miracle-Worker, in which the burial of the dead body of a Christian bought by the hero was made and which is not mentioned anywhere else, remained unclear. The paper presents the results of a comparison of the book-handwritten version of the plot with the folklore stories about the grateful dead well known in the oral tradition of the Eastern Slavs (AaTh 507; SUS 507 = АА 507А, В, С). It was found that some of the folklore versions of similar legends are connected by folk hagiography with the name of St. Nicholas the Miracle-Worker. The study allows us to assert that not only the plot of the Tale, but also the detail about the monastery of St. Nicholas the Miracle-Worker in it is nor abstract nor literary, as was supposed, but a folklore source. Determining the source and grounds for the appearance of this detail in the Tale makes it possible to better understand the mechanisms of the process of folklorization of Russian literature of the 17th century noted by researchers, one of the manifestations of which was the design in the book-manuscript tradition of “The Tale of the merchant who bought a dead body”.