Mythological tradition of the Severny kommunar village (Sivinsky district, perm region): ideas and beliefs about the household spirit

The article examines the folk beliefs associated with the household spirit living in a house that are typical of the territory of the named district. The research is based on records of dialectal speech of Russian residents of the village of Severny Kommunar in the Sivinsky district of the Perm region collected by teachers and students of the Faculty of Philology of Perm State National Research University in June 2019. The study aims to compare these beliefs with the common Slavic folk tradition and mythological ideas of the Russians living in the Perm region. The analysis made it possible to establish that in the village of Severny Kommunar, there is still preserved a well-developed set of ideas about the household spirit that includes many Slavic beliefs. The specificity of the beliefs of this territory consists in three aspects: firstly, two-component lexemes (grandfather-boggart, neighbor-father) act as nominations of the character and not as ritual appeals to him; secondly, there is a motif that the household spirit can take the form of a child (boggart baby); thirdly, there is a belief about the simultaneous presence in the house of two house spirits with opposite characteristics (a male patron spirit living in the residential part of the house and a harmful female spirit living in the cellar). The study also allows us to see two key trends regarding the folk mythological tradition of the inhabitants of the village: first, there is an active influence of the mass media on the demonological ideas in this territory; second, there takes place a serious reduction of these beliefs (for example, the household spirit gradually loses its distinctive characteristics and either turns into a character that scares children or begins to be perceived as a representative of ‘evil spirits' in general).