Contenu du sommaire : Les proverbes en Russie. Trois siècles de parémiographie

Family and Education According to the Eighteenth-century Collections of Russian Handwritten Proverbs The article is based on the unique materials collected in the Russian archives. These materials characterize Russian folklore heritage of the XVII-XVIIIth cc. The collections of handwritten proverbs of these times depict everyday life of Russian people at the early stage of europeanization before the Peter the Greaťs reforms. The author analyzes traditional morals, manners and interconnections of ordinary people. Author' s main deduction is that the concern for family, children, mental and moral education, skills training of the youth was a compulsory part of culture of working people, and it has been a basis of traditional Russian culture.

The Family Customs of Russian Peasants According to Vladimir Dal´ The monumental collection of Dal´s proverbs (more than thirty thousand) poses a number of questions. First of ail, are the majority of these expressions really proverbs? Do the sayings concerning gender and familial structure (woman, husband/wife, family, marriage, etc.), describe a world as patriarchal as is often assumed? Do most of them paint a very accurate picture of the traditions practised in the ritualistic peasant society of the second half of the XIXth century?

Food in Russian Sayings and Proverbs The article attempts to reconstruct the image of food as a social ritual and as nutrition, through the prism of Russian sayings. The products described in proverbs form a hierarchy in wich bread and other cereal preparations have the higher rang. Food also appears in sayings as a marker of social and familial relations.

“From an Empty Hole in a Tree...”: An Insight into Paganism From the interpretation of six basic paremiae is here intended an endeavour to reconstruct the reflection in the Russian language (lexicology, etymology) and folkore (paremiae etc., but also riddles, beliefs...) of a particular aspect of paganism. Thus successively appear: an ancient desacralized deity dwelling in the sanctuary of a tree hole; the priestess in charge of his cult – a seer and a prophetess; the believers, oscillating between a state of trance and one of the major functions of the god: possession.

Russian Proverbs : Status and Study The article defines the essence and status of proberb as an authentic verbal culture phenomenon as well as its principal and most important semantic, temporal, structural and other parameters compared to patterns of common speech and author's aphorisms. An approach of this kind is made due to présent the character and scale of pro verb form-contents mutation. Some specific features distinguishing proverbs from quasi proverb forms (e.g. sayings, author's aphorisms) on the one hand, uniting these facts of speech on the other are also noted by the author. At the same time the subject of the article includes the main stages of both Russian proverb collection and formation of Russian paremiology as a separate field of philological knowledge.

The Life of the Russian Proverb in a Megapolis The analysis of results of the experiment, based on the use of questionnaires and carried out among the students of Moscow institutes, allows us to maintain the view that ail the informants know actively the Russian proverbs in their systematic life and not only a set of definite proverbs. We call this phenomenon the Separate Proverb Fund (SPF). The greatest part of the SPF includes current proverbs (these proverbs are used by ail the informants or the greatest part of them). The specific character of the SPF of informants concerns not more than a hundred proverbs with unequal dispersion within the SPF. In current use of young people the proverbs continue their development not only in the form of différent variants, but also in the création of new proverbs according to definite patterns. In our work we cite new proverbs, current among the young people, but also variants with correct and incorrect changes of components (in the last case the so called 'corruption of the proverb' takes place).

Russian Paremiology as a Part of European Language and Cultural Space The article deals with the problems of connection between national and universal (resp. European) in Russian paremiology. The author stresses that the national spécifies of Russian proverbs lately tend to be overestimated by the Russicists who investigate the so called ‘linguistical conception (picture) of the worlď. The linguistical confrontation of Russian proverbs and proverbs of other languages shows, on the contrary, the quantitative and the qualitative predominance of general European proverbs compared with a small part of ‘pure' Russian. The article shows in examples the methodics of the differentiation of the national and international, genetical and typological in Russian proverbs, which have structural and semantical parallels with European proverbs.

Proverbs? Sayings? Jokes? The so-called ‘new Russian proverbs (poslovicy) and sayings (pogovorki)' very popular in the modem urban folklore in Russia, are analysed in the article. Several ways of their derivation from the ‘traditionaľ Russian proverbs are presented, as well as certain difficulties concerning the définition of their genre (could they be classified as proverbs, as sayings or as jokes?). The study permits to raise once again the question of the relevant character of the genre notion as to the folklore. The problems of classification of proverbs in general are presented in the study in the light of the analysis of ‘new Russian proverbs'.

Ippolit Bogdanovič or the Beginning of New Paremiologic Thought Poet Ippolit Bogdanovič (1743-1803) was considered by Soviet critics as a representant of 'official' folkloristics at Catherine the Great's time. Such a presentation has obscured for a long time the innovatory role that have played the unprecedented Russian Proverbs Collected by Ippolit Bogdanovič (SPb., 1785) in the development of Russian paremiology. As anonymous clerks in the western medieval tradition or poets of French Renaissance, Bogdanovič makes proverbs works of literature. But breaking off with the traditional alphabetical principle, Bogdanovič elaborates the principles of thematic classification and layes down the foundations of modem paremiology. The analysis of the distribution of proverbial items into the thematic sections shows that for Bogdanovič proverbs are not so much linguistic, as discursive units. It is not coincidence if V. Dal´, who criticized Bogdanovič's poetic treatment of proverbs, nevertheless does justice to his classification.

“Pošlost´”, Hegelian Syllogism and the Proverb: A Paremiological Approach to Vladimir Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark First published under the title Camera obscura in the Russian émigré journal, Sovremennye zapiski (1932-1933), Nabokov's novella, Laughter in the Dark amounts to a visual as well as literał enactment of the timeless proverb, Love is Blind. This proverb sheds considerable light on an understanding of Nabokov's novella, especially in the sense of being a parable on the blindly oblivious perils and tribulations deriving from the universal and, especially, Russian phenomenon of pošlost´. If this emphasis on philistine vulgarity defines the personalities and behavior of the central characters in the novella, Nabokov can be said to weave into his story a narrative enactment of the proverb-formula with a uniquely clever design based in Hegelian syllogism. In true Nabokov fashion, Laughter in the Dark thus reveals a strange combination of paremiology, rhetoric and moralistic reflection on the comedy of the human soul.