Interpreting the Past, Postulating the Future: Memorate as Plot and Script among Rural Russian Women

This article focuses upon the oral prose genre known in Russian as bylichka (pl., bylichki) or mythological story (mifologicheskii rasskaz). The term identifies a story about a supernatural event that really happened; whether told using a first- or third-person perspective, bylichki imply a certain immediacy of experience. In Soviet Russia, researchers claimed that people told these stories for aesthetic purposes, but did not believe them. Conversely, other researchers in Russia and the West have tended to emphasize the relation of narrative content to belief systems. We agree that bylichki are inextricably connected to belief, but emphasize that the content and artistry of these stories are also linked to immediate social settings. Based on three decades of fieldwork in Russian villages (1978–2009), we examine the ways and reasons these stories unfold in specific conversational contexts, considering how narrators interpret past experience, claim particular social roles in the present, and offer vital cultural information (including prescriptions for future action). As narrators negotiate differentials in cultural knowledge among their interlocutors, they shape the content, form, and performance of their personal experiences, creating oral memoirs that instruct others as they construct the self.