Village language was discussed at meeting with linguist in Memorial Flat of Vasily Belov

Linguist and ethnographer Arina Medvedeva became a guest of the project “Cultural Conversation” implemented in the Memorial Flat of Vasily Belov. The lecturer told about preservation of the archaic culture and language in a modern village.

Arina Medvedeva’s interest in the history of language and traditions began in the academic schools of the Philology Department in Vologda Teachers’ Training University (now the Teachers’ Training Institute of Vologda State University). Her current adviser is Lyudmila Yatskevich, professor of the Russian Language Department, who has recently published the monograph “Kvasyuninskaya Proverb: the Language of Small Genres of Folklore”. And at the beginning of the 2000s, Arina was taught by famous professor, folklore expert Margarita Vavilova at the Philology Department.

Before the lecture, the museum employees managed to see some expedition video recordings and asked Arina Medvedeva who usually attended her lecturers, why she started to study traditions and to popularize them in her lectures. She answered, “A person looks for ideological and moral supports nowadays. And many people understand that our origins, tradition and folk culture are the most important cornerstones of modern times. The interest in the study of traditions is extremely great now both among the youth and the senior citizens whose “roots were diligently cut” in the Soviet times… Besides, not only our countrymen appreciate Russian culture. We often see representatives of different nations at the events of our Centre of Traditions “Gamayun”. We are also invited to other countries. A representative of the USA attended one of the latest workshops that was held on the shore of Ladoga Lake during two days.

But the interest in any topic often produces plenty of speculations. Sometimes it is difficult and sometimes it is just impossible to touch the primary source. A few people have a chance to go to villages, to talk with elderly women and our old people – bearers of the traditions – die… You need time, effort and sometimes special training to work with archives and researches. So the most actively used source now is probably the Internet where there are not only valuable materials, but also rather doubtful articles full of author’s interpretations and fantasies represented as real stories and tradition. As for me, I respect scientific methods of inquiry because they guarantee unbiased result to some extent”.

Making the program of seminars and meetings, Arina Medvedeva draws on her years of experience of life in the country, results of the expeditions and inquiry, researches in the field of linguistics, ethnography and folklore. Support of teachers and respected specialists inspires her. This is probably the reason why an invisible, but a very necessary bridge from science and serious researches to the wide audience is built at the meetings with her.

Participants of the meeting expressed their opinion about the event in the social networking sites. Here is one of them, “Yesterday’s meeting with linguist and ethnographer Arina Medvedeva inspired us to plunge into the world of literature about Russian traditions… Museums often offer modernized installations instead of acquaintance with antiquities. But there are really interesting collections of costumes and household articles, for instance, in the Museum “Peasant’s House” in Sizma. The Museum of Architecture and Ethnography in the village of Semenkovo also won the praise. The ethnographer’s stories about the expeditions are amazing. Thanks to the Monastyryok village in the Archangelsk region, the researcher learnt that the log houses could be two-storied, that some house spirits lived in the cuckoo clock and that the peasants, like we now, liked admiring the beauty from the balcony”.

The video and audio materials made in the Sheksna district and introduced at the lecture were amazing: lyrical songs, four-line humorous rhymes, fragments of conversations of the dialect speakers. It was extremely unusual to listen to singing “to the accompaniment of the tongue” (without any instrument, it was imitated by the voice) and folk dancing.

The lectures within the framework of the project “Cultural Conversation” in the Memorial Flat of Vasily Belov will be concluded in August with the talk of art critic and museum designer Yulia Veretnova.

Now she is the head of the Tour and Exhibition Department in the State Budgetary Institution of Culture in the Leningrad Region “Museum Agency” in St. Petersburg. The topic of the August lecture is “Peculiarities of Interpretation of the Writer’s Biography and Creative Heritage by the Example of Museum Practices of Russian and Foreign Literary Museums”.

The Memorial Flat of Vasily Belov continues a series of lectures within the framework of the project “Cultural Conversation”.