Пересмотр прагматики обрядов невесты в бане: мотивы „столбичек новоточеный” в причетах и „крестом лежать” в инвективной купальской песне из русской и белорусской традиций XIX – начала XX века
Revision of the Pragmatics of the Rites of the Bride in the Bathhouse: the Motifs of “a Newly Rolled Stick” in Wedding Laments and “the Cross to Lie” in Kupala Invective Song from the Russian and Belarusian Traditions of the 19th – early 20th Centuri

Summary/Abstract: In this study, devoted to the analysis of Kupala song about Sopukha, an attempt is made to establish an internal logical connection between the folklore motifs contained in the song and the transcending semantics of the bathhouse, including an analysis of the pragmatics of the rituals of the bride and the women in the bathhouse. The motifs of “a newly rolled stick” in the Northern Russian bride’s laments and “lying in a cross position” in the Northern Belarusian Kupala song describe the healing and magical rites that were used to cleansing a woman after childbirth, getting rid of menstruation or restoring it. This song was chosen as the subject of the study due to the fact that it was mistakenly interpreted in folklore and ethnographic literature as the text directly describing the archaic religious rites of the Eastern Slavs, including men, thereby confirming the idea of the bathhouse as a pagan temple or a “sanctuary of the girl’s clan”. In addition to the semiotic approach, the analysis of the genre features of the song and its invectives was applied, which represents an innovation in the study of this song as an element of the traditional culture. An important result of the study is the formulation of new arguments against the purely mythological interpretation of the rite of the bride’s pre-wedding bath and the rite of farewell to krásota (“menstruation”, “menstrual blood”), according to which the bride symbolically loses her virginity.

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