Death in Russian riddles and interpretations of dreams: language and cultural codes

The riddle and the interpretations of dreams as the oldest genres of the Russian folklore demonstrate a system of both regional (dialect) and all-Russian (broader-Common Slavonic) symbols, which reflect the national originality of the Russian speech culture and create a “network” of its specific codes. The stability of specific codes is often associated with the mental and psychological immutability of the ethno-cultural representations. The article proves a phenomenon of the language (speech) memory as a special mechanism for creating and preserving symbolic conditions that make up the people's cultural tradition. On the example of the texts of riddles and interpretations of dreams about death, the metonymic substitutions of the names of death by the names of objects, different phenomena, and persons, who represent it in traditional folk communication, are shown. The illustrated typical mythological-poetic conditionality includes the following: the tree - death, the bird - death, the canvas - death. The article contains riddles found in the collection by V. Mitrofanova and interpretations of dreams from collections of the 19th and 20th centuries. Our research is also based on the Russian North expedition materials put together by the staff of St. Petersburg State University during their trips to the northern regions.