Mikhail Prishvin’s northern travelogues as pretexts for Yury Kazakov’s essay “Kalevala”

The article is the first to examine essays by Mikhail Prishvin and Yury Kazakov about Karelia from the point of view of literary continuity. The system of textual echoes suggests the chapter “Mourner” from Prishvin’s book In the Land of Unfrightened Birds: Sketches of the Vygovsky Region (1907) and the chapter “Sunny Nights” from his book Following the Magic Kolobok (1908) as pretexts for Kazakov’s essay “Kalevala” (1962). A comparative analysis showed important similarities in the texts written by both authors. The unifying images and motifs include not only the North as the location, but also the episodes of meeting female storytellers, a journey to them by water, and the usage of folklore texts. At the same time, the texts of the two authors are very different stylistically. Prishvin’s sketches are a widely developed narrative rich in ethnographic details, while Kazakov’s “Kalevala” is a compact and expressive sketch. The story of events and people in Kazakov’s text gives way to conveying impressions and creating lyrical tension. The conducted analysis concretizes our understanding of the ways to develop the image of Karelia in the twentieth-century Russian prose and the variability of this image created by different authors in different historical periods. It also enables to identify the images of female storytellers as a topos in the literary representation of Karelia.