Dmitry Balashov as a folklore collector: from scholarly inquiry to literary mastery

The article deals with the expedition records of D. M. Balashov made in 1957-1960s in the north of Karelia and in the Murmansk Region. They are currently stored in the Scientific Archives of the Karelian Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The subject of the study is not the folklore texts themselves, but the accompanying comments, reports and remarks of the performers and the collector. The entire array of these auxiliary data covers several thematic areas: information about storytellers with detailed verbal literary portraits; information about history, life, and culture of the region; scientific hypotheses, comments on texts that help to understand the range of the scholar's research interests. Some remarks and mini-essays were not previously published. It is concluded that the skill of D. M. Balashov as a writer began to take shape during his expedition trips, long before he started his professional literary career. Balashov felt cramped within the framework of purely research work, therefore many accompanying comments already have the features of a literary text: the reports contain landscape sketches, depict some scenes of people's everyday life, and create the vivid images of storytellers with whom the future writer communicated. Acquaintance with the folk traditions of the Russian North influenced Balashov's literary worldview. Archaic images and motifs of northern Russian folklore were later reflected in a series of his historical novels about ancient Russia.