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The previous two chapters examined the discourse of magic as a reflection of a woman’s position in society: her social power. Here we take a step back to pose a different question: how is knowledge about the other world framed discursively and transmitted , and when and why do people speak about their interactions with spiritual forces? Here (as we did in chapter 3) we focus our attention on the storytelling itself, in addition to the content of the stories. In what ways do such narratives show others and ourselves who we are? The idea for this chapter came early in the birth of this book. It seemed essential to us to address the question of how we heard all these stories and why the stories themselves— not just the “information” they “report”—should be of interest to those who want to understand Russian village women. In essence, the chapter was born because we saw that scholars were taking women’s stories of the supernatural and extracting little more than “belief” from them. By contrast, the stories gave us important insight into the ways that narrative itself can shape how people view the world and their place in it. When people told us stories about a spirit living in the home (domovoi), or the dead coming back to interact with the living (revenants), we saw that they were telling us how they related to their families, to the rod, and to us. They were performing a relational identity. Scholars classify narratives people tell about their experiences with the supernatural as memorates. This genre is known in Russian as bylichka (pl. bylichki) or mythological story (mifologicheskii rasskaz).1 Russian collectors distinguished the bylichka from the myriad of other life-narratives that people tell because these mythological tales recount encounters with the supernatural world, and the collectors saw this as evidence of ancient belief systems. Eighteenth-century scholars, who set great store by the importance of ancient Greek mythology for world culture, tried to create an analogous mythological system within Slavic culture (Zinov’ev 1987, 382). Although bylichki were not yet named as such  Constructing Identity in Stories of the Other World 255 by scholars, in the early nineteenth century they served as sources of information about the otherworldly characters of Russian folk belief. Generally, nineteenth-century collectors wrote down not the texts but only the information that people told them—for example, when one could see a forest nymph or how one could identify a witch. Some collectors utilized retold (not verbatim) bylichki as illustrations of villagers’ beliefs (Kolchin 1899, 1–59). Many scholars used these superstitious tales as evidence of the backwardness of the people, and expressed hope that their belief in the supernatural would soon die out under the influence of progressive ideas (Zinov’ev 1987, 383). The first to mention the word bylichka—which is a folk term meaning a story about something that really happened—were the brothers Sokolov, in their Skazki i pesni Belozerskogo kraia of 1915 ([1915] 1999, 78). Together with N. E. Onchukov, who in his 1909 study Severnye skazki mentioned a related genre, the byval’shchina (a fabulate with an involved plot, told for entertainment purposes) (1909, 37), these scholars viewed bylichki as supplementing the genre of the fairy tale, and that view predominated in the early twentieth century even as scholars began to identify some of the characteristics of the genre. Still, bylichki continued to be viewed primarily as informational rather than artistic texts, until the work of E. V. Pomerantseva, who in a 1968 article asserted that the bylichka had an aesthetic function as well as the predominating informational function (1968, 275). A later collector, V. P. Zinov’ev, further emphasized the aesthetic characteristics and function of the bylichka during the 1980s. Both he and Pomerantseva proclaimed that the aesthetic function was overtaking the informational one, since, they asserted, people no longer believed in the bylichka they told (Zinov’ev 1987, 382; Pomerantseva 1968, 287). Zinov’ev wrote that if the narrator claimed belief in the recounted events, he or she did so to intensify the aesthetic effect of the story on the listener: it was one of the rules of the genre (1987, 386, 394). It was politically important for Soviet folklorists to claim that people told such stories mainly to entertain, because to assert the opposite would have implied that the rural population was still backward and that the Soviet education system had failed to change their world view...

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