The article explores the possibility of applying text clustering methods for the analysis of folklore material. Using the Stylo program, two chastushka corpora of 239 and 645 texts are analyzed. These texts were collected during a folklore expedition by the Centre for Typological and Semiotic Folklore Studies of the Russian State Humanities University in 2021–2023 in the Birsky District of the Republic of Bashkortostan. The article describes the principles of text clustering, based on the graph of the principal component analysis; and the most frequent words collocations analysis. It is shown that these collocations differ from collocations with the same words in everyday speech (compared to the main subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus). The use of Stylo reveals that the formed clusters reflect the most characteristic lexical and syntactic structure for a specific quantity of texts. For example, combinations of the negative particle «не» (not) with verbs in the couplet speech prevail over combinations with nominal forms, which are more typical for everyday speech. Combinations like «а + я + глагол» (and +I + verb) and «а + я + местоимение» (and + I + pronoun) prevail over the combination «а + я + служебные части речи» (and + I + function words), combinations with «на + существительное» (on + noun) or «на + прилагательное /местоимение + существительное» (on + adjective/pronoun + noun) prevail over the combination «на + местоимение» (on + pronoun), and the combination «в + существительное» (in + noun) prevails over the combination «в + местоимение» (in + pronoun). The identified trends demonstrate their stability and are observed in the analysis of both the corpus of 239 texts and the corpus of 645 texts. The article demonstrates the division of the corpus of 239 texts into texts with the pronoun «я» (I) and those with address forms. Three common variants of constructing address forms in couplets are highlighted: the introduction of an “”unreal addressee,” the description of a stereotypical situation, and the involvement of the listener.

Chastushka’s – four-line folk ditties, usually humorous, sung in a lively manner, were widely spread during the 20th century. It is believed today that these ditties are the only genre of traditional folklore that still productively and actively exists nowadays. Chastuska’s formal features and its content allow it to exist not only as a spoken genre, but also on TV, on the Internet. Although researchers admit that Internet ditties significantly differ from traditional oral ones, they are still classified as folklore. However, this idea seems doubtful to me. I suggest categories of the Internet ditties. Some of them seems to be folklore due to their pragmatics and ways of transmission, but there are also some ditty-styled short poems. Authors of these poems use the form of the ditty as a means of expressiveness rather than a sign of folkloric nature.

The tradition of keeping songbooks emerged in the late 18th century and was particularly popular in Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries. Notebooks with songs, texts of classical literature, wishes, and messages were maintained by schoolgirls, military personnel, soldiers, prisoners, and various other age and professional social groups.

The Centre for Typological and Semiotic Folklore Studies of the Russian State University for the Humanities contains several documents composed in the 1930s – 2000s: girls’ albums and songbooks, soldiers’ notebooks, a samizdat (self-publishing) songbook from the parish camp of the Church of St. Cosmas and Damian. The manuscripts reflect the main features inherent in this kind of parafolklore writing. The main place in them is occupied by songs (ballads, romances, pop songs, songs from films, parodies of hits), sententiae, (wishes, counsels, conclusions and other), album stamps, artistic elements (decals, drawings, magazine clippings); in the girls’ notebooks there are also elements with an emphasis on performativity and communication (texts for fortune telling: “chihalki”, “ikalki”).

The article will examine a collection of songbooks: genre composition and characteristics of the repertoire of manuscripts, features of their compilation and design, pragmatics, typological designation of documents.

The publication presents prison songs and poems from the typewritten text of Yu.P. Yakimenko’s memoirs “On prisons and camps: memories” (the document is stored in the collection of memoirs and literary works of the Archive of GULAG History of the Memorial* Society). The texts from memoirs provide insights into the peculiarities of the existence of certain prison songs and poems in various labor camps across the USSR. The author records the song repertoire of Soviet GULAG prisoners, the contexts of songs and poems emergence and transmission. The compositions of Yakimenko from the source are also published, both individually authored and co-authored with other prisoners.

The article is dedicated to the first-ever publication of the Russianauthored text by P.G. Bogatyrev and R.O. Jakobson, “Folklore as a Special Form of Creation”, previously only known in Russian through a translation from German. Based on both published and previously unpublished archival documents (correspondence, meeting minutes, editorial materials), the history of the unfulfilled publication of this theoretical manifesto is reconstructed, along with the discussion responses from Soviet scholars, which Yuri Sokolov planned to carry out in the journal “Artistic Folklore” in 1930.

Another part of the article is devoted to textual analysis. The work by Bogatyrev and Jakobson, initially written in Russian and later published in German, allows us to consider its widely known Russian text as a reverse translation. However, the text submitted by the authors to the Soviet journal initially differed slightly from the text intended for translation into German for publication in the Festschrift in honor of Professor Schreiner (1929). In turn, forty years later, the translation from German to Russian (1971) was made not based on this publication but on the second edition of the German text prepared for Jakobson’s collected works (1966). A comparison of the two Russian and two German versions allows us to see how changes accumulated at each stage, resulting in a series of minor but meaningful discrepancies between the original and translated Russian texts of this influential work.