L'autre monde et ses figures dans les Contes de l'enfance et du foyer des frères Grimm et les Contes populaires russes d'A. N. Afanassiev

摘要

Folktales contain beliefs and worldviews of traditional societies, among which the idea that another world exists next to the world of humans, both worlds being interwoven and able to communicate with each other.This theme is at the heart of the main conceptions of the universe developed by the Indo-European peoples, and expresses the humans' feeling of being surrounded by unexplainable powers. It will be analysed in the Grimm brothers' Household Stories (1st edition 1812-1815) and A. N. Afanas'ev's Russian Folktales (1855-1863). Both collections, which aim at gathering productions of popular poetry - Afanas'ev following the model of the Grimms - will be studied in the original language. Other texts, such as European medieval romances and visions, will complete this study.The approach followed is a comparative one and has to do with cultural anthropology, in so far as the chosen corpus allows to compare two aspects of European thought and culture of the 19th century: the theme of the otherworld will serve as an indication of popular mentality.The occurrences of the otherworld will be listed in order to obtain a typology showing the main trends of each cultural area and the oicotypic variants in the representation of this theme, concerning as well the stylistic means as the narrative. The study will therefore also deal with the question of the genres to which the different texts belong.