Boulder Stones in Legends about the First Inhabitants of the Region: Dynamics of Ethnocultural Tradition in Northern Prikamye

摘要

This article is devoted to the traditional mechanisms of semioticisation of natural landscape, which are considered with reference to revered boulder stones of Northern Prikamye. The approach chosen by the author is determined by modern trends in the study of the cult of stones, more particularly, the shift from the search for “traces of paganism” to other possible models that influenced the existing mythological ideas and practices. The author closely examines two ethno-local traditions functioning in Komi-Permyak District, Perm Region, i.e. in Yusvinsky and Gainsky Districts. The research material includes ethnographic facts and folklore texts of the nineteenth — early twenty-first centuries, including the records of ethnographer L. S. Gribova and new field data, some of which have not been published before. In one of the cases, in the village of Arkhangelskoe, Yusvinsky District, two competing etiological interpretations of the boulder are found. The Christian explanation (the stone is the “saddle” of prophet Elijah) is gradually replacing the “heroic” version of the appearance of the stone (the “saddle” that fell from the bogatyr’s horse). The main subject of the storytelling is multiple movements of the boulder in space, overcoming the natural immobility of the stone and serving — along with stories about the healings of people — confirming its “miraculous” properties. The second case was recorded in a remote, inaccessible part of Gainsky District. There, boulders serve as a materialised memory of the first inhabitants of the region — brothers-bogatyrs / strongmen. There are contaminated plots in which the local hero Pera replaces St Stefan Permsky floating on a stone. The criterion for the special semiotic status of the stone, its separation from the neutral landscape, is the appearance of its own name (oronym). Apparently, the forms of veneration of the three stones described in the article, known from the evidence of the nineteenth century onwards, did not develop until the settlement of these territories at the end of the sixteenth — first third of the seventeenth centuries, in a situation of contacts with Russian peasants. Taking into account data from over a century allows the author to show the flexibility of the Komi-Permyak tradition aimed at mythologising boulder stones.