As a starting point, the present research work assumes that the main function of a text in archaic cultures is commemoration of a warrior or a ruler, which task can only be performed by a professional poet. The paper cites three key cases representing three ways of creating a commemorative text: an oral poem, an inscription in Ogham on a wooden stave and a Latin written record on tablets. In all three cases, the one who possesses the skill of capturing historical memories is a fili poet. The author traces the quasi-chronology of the saga sources and concludes that the collective memory of those who recorded the tradition linked the oral form with the earliest historical period (around 1^st c. AD), Ogham script – with 2^nd c. AD, and tablets with 4^th to 5^th cc. AD. This legendary chronology clearly corresponds with main stages of actual evolution of literacy in Ireland. However, the arrival of new writing techniques as new types of commemoration did not mean that the earlier methods of preserving information were abandoned, which is also confirmed by examples found in the texts. At the same time, the narrative texts fail to mention the historical method of recording the tradition (by writing on parchment), and this fact needs further investigation.

The purpose of this article is to consider the perception of the images of the Mari heroes (Lugovomar. “patyr-vlak”) by the contemporaries and the models of interpretation of historical legends and beliefs about them. The category of bogatyrs, often referred in modern culture as the concept of the “Mari national heroes” (Lugovomar. “Mari taleshke-vlak”) includes both legendary warriors (Chotkar, Chumbulat) and princes (Akpars, Mamich-Berdei, Poltysh). Narratives about the Mari heroes represent ideas about idealized past, the “golden age” of history and the struggle against foreign invaders. The thematic space of historical legends reflects the attitude of local residents to the war between the Meadow Mari with the Russian kingdom, opposition to the Kazan Khanate, etc. The cultural memory of the mythologized past is relayed by the actors of ethnocultural activism in commemorative practices, folklore holidays and educational institutions. These characters symbolize the local culture and ethno-territorial identity of various groups of the Mari population, in some regions there is a tendency towards their sacralization. The paper is based on the author’s field materials recorded in the places of compact residence of the Mari population mostly in 2015–2021 (the Mari El Republic, Kirov oblast).

The research question relates to the peculiarities of the implementation of the intergenerational dialogue about the family history: the author analyzes the marginalia of the late migrant V.K. Vins (b. 1942) as a response to the manuscript of his father, repressed Soviet German Labor Army soldier K.A. Vins (1905–1988). The manuscript is a summary of the history of a Soviet German family through the life of its breadwinner. The author of the memoirs presents himself as a German, a teacher of the German language, a father of a family and a Soviet citizen; and our research task is to identify the reaction of his son to this text through his marginals. It is revealed that there is a continuous dialogue between father and son, marks in the text perform different functions – from drawing the reader’s attention to lapidary fragments to enhancing the rhetoric of the father’s statements. Marginalia become a marker of V.K. Vince’s identity – in some episodes this identity corresponds to the author’s, in others it contradicts it. To expand the context of the study, the work draws on the son’s ego-documents, in which he sets out his own vision of the family history.

At the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries folklorists used to believe that folklore can be a historical source. But soon this belief was refuted, and any attempts to correlate folklore and reality began to look unscientific and even ridiculous for many years. Folklore texts began to be spoken of as stable structures in which the narrative pattern dominates the details. However, the corpus of folklore texts about recent historical events, such as the Great Patriotic War and the Holocaust, is still being formed in our time. Based on interviews dedicated to the memory of the occupation and collected during expeditions to Rostov-on-Don, the Bryansk region and the North Caucasus, we described two mechanisms by which the narrative of real events turns into quasi-historical folklore narratives. The first folklorization mechanism is adding specific details to evoke strong emotions in the listener and force him to pass the text on. The second mechanism that distinguishes the evidence from the quasi-historical folklore narrative is the “moral” message contained in the text. In such stories, the perpetrators always are punished, and the people who have acted right are rewarded.

On the example of analysis of oral folklore stories of the “Mythical Lover” plot circle, we show how the historical reality enters human experience, how it is reflected in the composition of narratives and how then they are remembered and retold, creating a special remembering group. The material is ten stories of different genres of oral folklore prose – mythological stories about sexual contacts with spirits, a story about evocation of forest spirit, stories about dreams, recorded by folklorists of St. Petersburg State University in the Vologda, Arkhangelsk, Kirov regions during the last 20 years from four women born in the 1930s. Not buried in accordance with the usual funeral ritual, those who died in the war do not leave the thoughts and feelings of their widows. The grief of military widows is doubly heavy. Meanings that were not articulated by the ritual emerge in the performance of storytelling. Collective storytelling (firstly, storytellers and empathetic listeners tell their stories for the first time at the moment of events; secondly, primary storytellers, their children and grandchildren have been repeating stories about the past for more than 80 years) restores vital tissue and carries such “orienting” concepts, as excessive pain, grief outside the ritual, unrelenting grief and the danger of “evil spirits” associated with them.

The publication is dedicated to the memory of the deportation of the Kalmyk people to Siberia (1943–1957). This is a part of the project “Everyone has their own Siberia.” It consists of a preface, the text of a biographical interview with the outstanding Kalmyk philologist G.Ts. Pyurbeev and the author’s commentary. The interview was recorded in December 2021; it was free-flowing, the text was transcribed without changes and authorized. The purpose of the publication is to show the memory of the Siberian childhood and the socialization of the Kalmyk boy in the 40s-50s in the USSR. It is important for the author to identify what plots, images and assessments are characteristic of the “generation 1.5” (Rumbaut) narrative about Siberia, to show the possibilities of a spontaneous story about a traumatic event in which trauma and its manifestations are “spoken out”. The text of the interview was analyzed using the method of hermeneutic analysis. The discursive strategies of the narrative testify to its positive nature of memory (according to J. Alexander). The texts of the interviews and comments will be of interest to all researchers of the deportation of the Kalmyks and the memory of this period.