Разкази и разказвачи
Stories and Story-tellers

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to emphasize on the multiple options for the scholar for documenting folklore narratives, treated here as a specific dialogue situation, influenced by the pre-set objectives and selected methods. The reasons for choosing this topic are: the book “Stories and story-telling in Bulgarian folklore” by Albena Georgieva, published in 2000, and one record from the village of Stob (Kyustendil Region) that elaborates on storytelling as a cultural phenomenon, including the subjective criteria for evaluating the quality of a story and a story-teller. There is, of course, the controversial issue of applying literary terms, such as “genre” and “text” to oral tradition. But if we examine narratives as a specific type of text, we also bring up the question for the text-source and the text variations. The source itself is obviously the imaginary framework behind unique variants that are recorded on the spot, while the variant is nothing, but a direct result of scholar’s personal understanding of folklore narrative as a text. For example, one should go outside the default festival context of storytelling, in order to examine it as a distinguishing element of everyday life. Moreover, it is questionable, whether variants are regional, local or family ones, as we can definitely speak of personal style – namely, the specific approach of the mediator between text and audience, which defines the so called “text” not according formal genre characteristics, but by matching context with the respective content. The core of a story is only used as ingredient for producing new variants, but folklore text cannot be fixed, and this is illustrated by one legend from Stob: “St. Nicholas was wandering through the Holy Lands, he fell asleep under a tree and had a visionary dream about a dispute between God and the Devil – the very next day Constantinople appeared at the exact place, predicted by the dream.” At a later stage, the story-teller remembers there was such a story, but it is unknown who is the saint and which is the city, so the names were chosen “by default”.

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