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Skripnik , Ganna (ed.): Etnografіchnij obraz suchasnoї Ukraїni. Korpus ekspedicіjnih fol'klorno-etnografіchnih materіalіv [An Ethnographic Image of Modern Ukraine. Corpus of Expeditionary Folklore and Ethnographic Materials]. Tom 1–10. 2016
As documented in mainstream ethnographic texts and fieldwork records, and evidenced at folklore festivals, women in Croatia do not play folk music instruments. If someone mentions some exception, it is usually explained as the very latest practice, as an example of transformation of tradition into the contemporary. Therefore, this paper will describe a number of exceptions from the past, covering a range of historical periods, social contexts of music-making, music fields and genres, and types of instruments played by women. The reasons for woman players being either confirmed or kept silent by a particular discourse will be analyzed, as well as broader social footholds which supported (and/or restricted) their presence in public practice. They have appeared as a family member, a Croatian Woman, an emancipated woman, a custodian (savior and reviver) of local tradition, a member of "the fairer gender", a jocular replacement, a shameless female, and as a mannish woman.
Lechner Ödön rajzai a szegedi városházához
Ödön Lechner’s Drawings for the Szeged Town-hall
The paper is about the set of drawings and documents by Ödön Lechner and Gyula Pártos for the Town-hall of Szeged dated to 1881–1883 (Hungarian National Archives, Csongrád-Csanád County Archives, Szeged [MNL CSML], Collection of Building Plans and Documents of the Municipality of Szeged, marked Lecher Ödön, Pártos Gyula: A Szegedi Városházhoz készített tervek, rajzok és iratok, [Plans, drawings and documents for the Szeged Town-hall], XV.2b. 45. d.-49.d). The elaborated theme includes ground-plans, rosette, baluster and skylight plans, detail plans of staircase and main cornice, plan of the roof of the main staircase, 37 drawings of ornamental sculpture, window pillars, window frames and rail chains, painter’s stencils signed by Ödön Lechner, two façade versions, tower detail, details of the main portal, drawings of the vault around the clock, of the ornaments of room doors and cornice elements. The building logbooks, list of submissions to the competition with code-names and the contracts signed with the building contractors are also valuable sources.
In addition to eighty drawings of diverse sizes and techniques, the collection includes the construction documents, accounts, correspondence, building logbooks, planning competition calls, and a colour plan for the tiling of the Szeged Town-hall now in the Architectural Collection of the Kiscelli Museum of the Budapest History Museum (inv.no. 117). I evaluate the drawings both within the conception of an architectural work and also as separate graphic sheets, and try to describe their background in terms of the history of architecture, art and ideas.
I am led to conclude that the Szeged Town-hall was the first project to manifest Lechner’s ambition to lay the groundworks of a national architecture based on the more abstracted and universal basic forms of folk art but keeping abreast of European tendencies. The drawings are invaluable in that they add more information to the chronology of Lechner’s artistic career and lend stress to the fact that folklore and local history researches, the intellectual approach, the synthesis of local and international achievements, a thorough knowledge of the history of ceramics, the redefinition of traditions played at least as important roles in creating the concept of a building as individual intention and creative imagination.
The paper was supported by the Ernő Kállai Art Historical Research Grant.
In folklore research the notion and the meaning of “humour” are generally unclear and underdeveloped. Proverbs are usually considered as “witty”, therefore they seem to be “humorous”. But, in fact, the vast majority of proverbs are not humorous. “All proverbs” might be humorous in a specific context or usage, but this does not mean that the proverb texts themselves are humorous. The paper discusses a famous Hungarian proverb collection, published by Z. Ujváry, in which a single peasant informant, in each case with his own classification, wrote down 1,143 proverbs and sayings. Only 38 items (i.e. 3.5%) were labelled by him as “joking, ironic, mocking, malicious”, etc. The analysis of the proverb texts shows that only very few proverb texts (less than 1%) have a sense of humour. The author has used a modern Hungarian proverb collection as test material, and is convinced about the assumption: only a very small percentage of the proverb texts are humorous in themselves.
The Lithuanian “baladeacutes” should be held to be narrative lyrics. Because of a strong lyrical trend in Lithuanian folk poetry, very often they seem to be cases between folksongs and folkballads. An attempt to explain the untragic nature of part of Lithuanian ballad-sujets is done in the article. The cause could be not only the lyrical mood of folk singers or the lack of epic as well as dramatic traditions in Lithuanian singing folklore, but on the great part the answer may be found in the medium those foreign sujets got in. In the oldest strata of Lithuanian ballads the role of mythology is of great importance, the archaic conception of death and love. It is the avoidance of rude cruelty in Lithuanian ballads that causes the absence of certain parts; the structure of sujet becomes obscure, and the inner logic of sujet is ruled out. Dramatical manner of performance is present only sometimes, but not always in Lithuanian ballads. The expression of the individual; traditional occasions to perform ballads; some poetical artificies of Lithuanian ballads; suppositional meaning of some ballads motifs; the classification of Lithuanian ballads as well as their origin is also reviewed shortly in the article.
Abstract
The article presents child-threatening mythical creatures, their expressions and functions in Lithuanian folklore. Threats of the mythical world can be divided into two groups: real and constructed threats. The ones of the first group, real threats, are perceived as threats to children by adults. Real threats arise from two types of representations of the mythical world: mythical creatures and mythologised persons. The second group, constructed threats, is the is the phenomenon in which adults use folklore narratives to evoke fear in children, but adults do not perceive those narratives as real threats. Three types of folklore genres were used to frighten children: fairy tales, folk legends, and short, frightening expressions. This article focuses on the latter. The research analyses Lithuanian customs, beliefs, and narratives from the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.
Summary Partant de la présupposition que la traduction constitue une des formes de la survie des œuvres littéraires et que l'exigence de la rétraduction des œuvres montre la possibilité de la réactualisation de ces œuvres, je vais examiner quelques aspects de l'influence réciproque entre la culture populaire roumaine et hongroise. Les sources textuelles de l'œuvre musicale Cantata profana de Béla Bartók sont des variantes roumaines des ballades populaires roumaines. Ces créations nommées « colindas » (chants de noël) ont survécues grâce à cette composition musicale. L'œuvre du compositeur hongrois a influencée aussi l'idéologie hongroise de la « source pure » : pour la désignation de la pratique qui fait appel et remonte à la culture populaire pour la réintégrer dans des œuvres nouvelles on emploie cette formule de nos jours aussi. On peut montrer qu'un autre ballade « par excellence roumaine », qui a donné la base d'une entière théorie de l'idéologie nationale roumaine et joue un rôle à peu près exclusive, même sacrale dans l'élaboration de l'identité nationale roumaine, la ballade Miorioa présente parenté avec les ballades néo-grécques des cleftis? Ne pourrait-on pas supposer qu'une œvre littéraire distincte de la mémoire collective roumaine provient d'un texte de langue néo-grecque ou bien ukraïnienne ? Ne pourrait-on pas dire que l'on possède une œuvre musicale qui pouvait devenir une des sources de la mémoire, de la connaissance et de l'identité collective hongroise et celle-là en même temps remonte à un texte de langue roumaine ? C'est à ces questions que ma communication cherche les réponses.
The interest in traditional popular culture appeared in the eighteenth century in Szeged and was maintained mainly by the scholarly teachers of the Piarist grammar school, and the Franciscan monks. Accordingly, most of the contributors were priests. The most important representatives of pre-ethnographic, pre-folkloristic interest are András Dugonics (1740-1818), Benedek Csaplár (1821-1906), Lajos Kálmány (1852-1919), the Bunevac Ivan Antunovich (1815-1888), Sándor Pintér (1841-1915), and the Jewish Immanuel Löw (1854-1944). They conducted research on the fields of dialectology, history, folk poetry and religiosity. They discovered and presented the traditional life of Szeged and its surroundings.
