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We begin our study by investigating a question that absorbed us for many years as we studied Russian rural women’s culture. As fieldworkers in Russian villages, we were constantly learning from the misunderstandings that arose between ourselves and rural women. We wondered how those gaps in understanding had affected the conclusions of previous generations of scholars of Russian folklore. In fact, we wondered whether earlier Russian scholars had paid any attention at all to what we thought was central, that is, the gendered organization of Russian village life. Our research revealed, significantly, that gender figured only peripherally in Russian scholars’ analyses of folk culture until the 1980s.1 Ethnographer Tatiana Bernshtam wrote that until she published her book on prerevolutionary rural youth culture in 1988, the study of the sex and age structure of Russian society had not been taken seriously. Scholars who had addressed the subject earlier in the 1980s had, without proof, claimed that the more “developed” a society was, the less important gender became as a category (the Soviet/Marxist view); prerevolutionary scholars had noted sex and age as organizing categories in ritual, but had treated the subject as a natural outgrowth of biology and had confined themselves to description. In contrast, Bernshtam (1988, 3, 6) herself viewed sex and age categories as an essential, organizing part of the world view of village dwellers: as she put it, for villagers sex- and age-defined roles were a crucial part of the social structure.2 The prerevolutionary scholars Bernshtam refers to as (at best) describing gendered practices were ethnographers,3 but among folklorists the degree of misunderstanding of folklore’s gendered nature was more pronounced. Early scholars did not concern themselves with gender at all until they began to pay attention to their informants as people, as individuals. For nineteenth-century folklorists, “the folk” was a shapeless mass without individually identifying characteristics. For example, Aleksandr Afanas’ev, the Russian Grimm, whose collections of folktales are considered classics, recorded only where tales  Traditions of Patriarchy and the Missing Female Voice in Russian Folklore Scholarship 23 were collected, not from whom. Regional and national characteristics were of interest to these scholars, but folk texts were supposed to represent the whole people rather than just one teller (Pypin 1856, 49).4 The change came in the 1860s and ’70s, when folklorists first sought out individual peasant performers in their search for the most talented singers and tellers among the peasantry. In so doing, they hoped to increase the quality of their collections—and perhaps partly to present an antidote to negative portrayals of peasants in journalistic accounts (Frierson 1993a, 163, 168, 173). They depicted these peasants as noble savages, village intelligentsia who preserved timeless works of invaluable national worth. In this context female performers of folktale and epic sometimes fared badly. Women’s performances of those solo genres were deemed to lower the worth of those genres and either lead to or signal their ultimate demise. Meanwhile, women’s preservation of other genres (lament, folk song) was lauded. The result was an incomplete picture of what women did perform and preserve, and why they chose to do so. Thus, until the late 1980s, due to the specific agendas of folklorists, the story of women’s contributions to folk tradition had not been told accurately and fully. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian folk culture studies, belles lettres, journalism, and popular literature commonly depicted rural women as quintessential “sources” of tradition, and implied or stated that female villagers provided great service to the Russian people by preserving national folk “treasures.” Yet at the same time, Russian scholarship asserted that men were the proper guardians of certain genres, while women’s imperfect guardianship tarnished this precious cultural wealth. It seemed the women themselves were caught in between: they were given the heavy burden of representing the nation yet ultimately failed to do so. Their failure was inevitable, given that the task was to guard patriarchy’s invented view of its origins. As rural women’s knowledge was colonized by scholars, their own voices were rarely heard; their own knowledge was misread. Our own experiences in Russian villages, the work of contemporary Russian ethnographers , and a critical approach informed by Western feminism allow us to propose an alternate interpretation to the question of women’s contribution to folklore tradition. Below we engage in dialogue with the scholarly canon from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, focusing on the four genres of...

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