The Russian army in the mirror of the soldier's folklore (18th - first half of the 19th centuries)

The article analyzes the possibilities and prospects of using folklore sources to study the perception of the world of Russian soldiers in the 18th - 19th centuries. The authors give a brief description of historiographic tradition of applying to these sources. It is concluded that there are some factors that led to a certain neglect of the later folklore texts on the part of folklore pundits. Other reasons caused the guarded and cautious attitude to the soldier’s folklore from historians. Following the principles of comparative-typological school in folklore studies, the authors argue that the direct “reading” of folklore and its illustrative usage in a historical narrative is non-productive. The authors justify the opinion that the work with this kind of sources should require a complex of methodological instruments, such as dealing with theoretical advances in the area of folklore studies in relation to the historicism of folklore, the application of the methods of anthropology and the verification of folklore data by information from other sources. Applying the above methodological principles, the authors reconstruct on the basis of folklore sources the specific elements of the soldier’s perception of the world, i.e. a higher level of greater historical concreteness, changes in spacio-temporal view of the world, the image of an ideal monarch as the head of the national armed forces, the idea of an army as a sort of military corporation, and the soldier’s comprehension of Russia as a new concept.