S.N. Schil’s folklore heritage

Abstract

The paper tells about two hand-written collections of folk songs, “Songs of Milenino village” (1923) and “Reed-pipe. A collection of children’s folk songs” (1924), collected and arranged by S.N. Schil. Both manuscripts were being prepared for publication in the 1920s, but had not been published. “Songs of Milenino village”, collected in summer 1916, provides 434 prikazki , among which there is a distinct thematic group of those dating from the World War I, as well as 299 jumping, wedding, circle dance songs, lullabies, military songs, songs of literary nature, etc. All of these are properly attributed and provided with seven indexes: a thematical index, an index of personal names, a song type index, a formal index (according to the type of narrative), indexes of local words and of local dialect. Songs are classified as “non-rhymed stariny” (with a ramified hierarchy according to the text cohesiveness type), rhymed songs of the new type, songs developed from chastushki , songs of literary nature, children’s songs, etc. The “Reed-pipe” collection (the final draft), prepared for lifetime publication, contains 160 songs collected by other people. S.N. Schil had supposedly been commissioned with it in the 1910s, as she was a well-known children’s author, but due to financial troubles of the publishing houses the collection was never published. A review of folklore collection of the archived documents is also accompanied by short biographical, historical and literary comments