The Concept of “Path-Road” in Russian Wedding Speeches

The article analyzes the concept of the “path-road” in Russian wed ding speeches. The work uses published and archival materials from the 19th — late 20th centuries, which poetically embody the idea of the road and the movement of wedding participants. The content of the speeches reflects the attitude to the road characteristic of Russian traditional culture as a whole, the perception of the road as a locus of danger, scary and unclean. The path-road of the wedding train is interpreted in the speeches as a journey to another world. As a rule, a description of the road is constructed by combining a formula for movement and a list of spatial objects, which are divided into several semantic and thematic groups (forest, mountain, swamp, water, cosmological, plant and animal element groups, as well as groups of elements with the meaning of ‘vast, endless, boundless space’ and with the meaning of ‘populated areas, developed, inhabited space’). In mythopoetic representations, these landscape elements for the most part mark a foreign, dangerous space; in texts, they are used with epithets that form its qualitative characteristics (frequent: steep, high, dark, dense, swampy, long, clean). The idea of danger is enhanced by including in the description elements of the plant and animal worlds, which give the narrative additional expressiveness and emotionality. Being in the space of the road is associated with danger for travelers and is presented as a test; in poetic texts, this usually means a deterioration in physical condition, suffering material damage (the themes of freezing or hyperthermia, loss of voice, hunger, torn clothes and lost crosses are realized). The analyzed descriptions combine the ideas about the road as a dangerous, unclean, risky locus and the ideas about that part of the life path of the ritual’s participants that is associated with the process of their status transformation.