Buryat not fantastic prose: genre features of library material

This article summarizes a new material on not fantastic prose of Buryats from general archive fund of The Center of Oriental Manuscripts and Xylographs of Institute for Mongolian, Buddhist and Tibetan Studies SB RAS. We have summed up the results of work with folklore collections, given the characteristic of the library material on not fantastic prose, analyzed plot and genre variety of the revealed texts. The research is based on the records of different years stored in Institute's funds, starting from 1926 to 1983; most of them are expeditionary field data. It is concluded that myths, oral stories of mythological character, legends, and traditions of Buryats contain deep specific ties with the traditional way of life, religious beliefs and rituals, the history of the ethnos, they are a valuable source for studying the spiritual life of the Buryat society.