The article by Boris Lvovich Riftin (1932–2012), the largest Russian sinologist, is devoted to the analysis of epic motifs in medieval Chinese literature, primarily in Sanguozhi Pinghua or Records of the Three Kingdoms in Plain Language (18th century). Based on his research, the author comes to the following conclusions. A certain number of epic motifs are used in the analysed literary relic, and many of them have been preserved in oral traditions till the present, while others have not yet been discovered in living existence (a false rumor about the death of the hero, the hero’s battle with the demon king, etc.); some motifs in a transformed form are used only at the beginning of the narrative (for example, the hero’s visit to the underworld). Most of the epic motifs found in the Pinghua text appear in a diluted form and play no significant role in the plot. It is quite possible that the author did not use some epic motifs of folk tales from the Song–Yuan eras, because he created a work in which folk legends and history were combined. A hundred years will pass, and Luo Guanzhong will develop this direction, strengthen the connection of his narrative with the historical chronicle and thereby further distance himself from the folk epic.

The article presents the results of a study devoted to a comprehensive study of the practices of performing Karelian epic runes in the 19th– 20th centuries. The objectives of the work are to summarize the work of previous researchers, identify, systematize and describe the methods of performing epic runes, and introduce into scientific circulation little-known information about runosinging to the Russian audience. The material for the study was rare and inaccessible (or only partially accessible) to the Russian-speaking audience sources with metadata of collectors of Karelian folklore: archival collections on both sides of the Russian-Finnish border, published collections of Karelian runes, travel essays of collectors-travelers. A frontal analysis of the entire set of methods of epic runosinging and its systematization were carried out for the first time. It has been established that in the Karelian tradition there were two main ways of performing epic runes: solo singing, which could be either male or female, and two men singing, which is divided into two variants: ceremonial performance of the rune, which implies alternate and joint singing of verses of the same rune, and a “singing competition”, i. e. alternate performance of different runes in order to identify the best runosinger. Solo singing and ceremonial singing of the rune by two men could be accompanied by playing the kantele, which is an exception to the tradition. In the later period of its existence, singing accompanied by kantele was brought to life by the rune stage performance.

From the Russian folklore, ideas about the Chuds – an ancient people, as well as their name, were borrowed into foreign oral traditions. In the Komi-Permyak language, the word Chud’ underwent not only a phonetic (chud, pl. chuddes), but also semantic transformations. The authors of the article were attracted by the development of the meaning of ‘evil spirit, demons’ in this word. We analyze hypotheses explaining this semantic shift, and also characterize the current state of the oral tradition. The work highlights mythological and linguistic factors of two types – both those that contribute to the convergence of the images of the Chuds and chuddes, and those that prevent their contaminations. As in Russian dialects, in the Komi-Permyak language there is an “attraction” of the word Chuds to other loanwords with the initial component chud- (chudo, chudotvorets, chudichchyny ‘to wonder’, etc.). As bilingualism spreads, adjectives such as chudlivöy, chudsköy, etc. are incorporated into this morpho-semantic field, which are used in mythological chrononyms denoting the ancient era when the Chuds lived or when evil spirits were more active than they are now. In the Komi-Permyak language, the number of nominations based on the component chud increases (banya chud, kuznecha chud, övin chud, etc.), the word develops special demonological meanings (‘spirit of the bathhouse’, ‘spirit of the house’, ‘spirit of the forest’, etc.). Among the northern Komi-Permyaks, the word Chud in the meaning of ‘ancient people’ is included into a special mythological and ritual traditions presupposing the collective commemoration of ancestors, and stands in a series of special names for the dead (vazh otir, pöris’ otirrez, etc.), capable of punishing for the absence of the required rites. Such mythological ideas are one of the factors that prevent the mixing of the images of the Chuds – the ancient inhabitants of the region and the chuds – evil spirits in this territory.

The article provides a brief overview of periodical and serial printed products of Kursk linguofolklorists over the last 30 years. It is noted that in the mid-90s of the 20th century, a laboratory for the study of the language of folklore study was established at Kursk State University; and at the same time, the publishing activity of the laboratory began. The tasks of the periodicals “Folklore Lexicography” and “Linguofolkloristika” are described. The first one published materials for the dictionaries of the language of folklore that were being prepared for nine years, and the second one discussed various problems of the folk-song word in folklore works of different genres. The collection “Lingvofolkloristics”, which is still being published, is a collection of researches in a number of areas in the study of the language of oral folklore: folklore semantics, folklore lexicology, folklore lexicography, folklore dialectology and cross-cultural lingvofolkloristics. Serial production, which we understand as a set of publications identical in genre and/or structure, differing in the material of description, is represented by a number of concordances created on the material of lyric songs recorded in the 19th century in different regions of Russia, and a series of lexicographic complexes of non-ritual lyrics and fairy tales. The article states that the laboratory’s database of factual sources is replenished with a series of collections of folklore texts from the Kursk region.