Folk tradition in historic «Tale of Buslay Novgorodets» by Nickolay Polevoy

This article is a research on folklore tradition in N.Polevoy's historical prose of 1830s. The author traces the influence of bylina on the image of the main character, and also its reconsideration in an ideological concept of the narrative, thus establishing a correlation of Buslai's image with the concept of «History of Russian People» by N.Polevoy. Poetics of bylina and Christmas story not only forms the ideological concept of the narrative, but also influences the specificity of the historical story genre.