religions Article Christianity and Slavic Folk Culture: The Mechanisms of Their Interaction Svetlana M. Tolstaya The Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 119334 Moscow, Russia;
[email protected] Abstract: In Slavic folk culture, Christianity is a foreign, borrowed cultural model, while the oral tradition is native and familiar. The different areas of folk culture were influenced to varying degrees by the Christian tradition. The most dependent area of Slavic folk culture on Christianity was the calendar. In many cases, it only superficially accepted the Christian content of calendar elements and reinterpreted it in accordance with the traditional mythological notions. The same can be said about the folk cult of saints. The Christian saints replaced pagan gods and over time were included in the system of folk ideas, beliefs and rituals. The mechanism for regulating the balance between man and the world is a system of prohibitions, the violation of which is recognized as sin and is punished by natural disasters, death, disease and human misfortunes. The Slavic folk tradition adapted not only the individual elements, structures and semantic categories of Christianity, but also the whole texts, plots, motifs, and themes developed in various folklore genres. Therefore, the pre-Christian folk tradition of the Slavs was able to assimilate many Christian concepts, symbols, and texts, translate them into its own language and fill them with its own content. Keywords: Christianity; Slavic folk culture; mythology; beliefs; rites; folklore Citation: Tolstaya, Svetlana M. 2021. Christianity and the oral folk tradition represent two different cultural models that have Christianity and Slavic Folk Culture: coexisted in the same ethno-cultural space since the adoption of Christianity by the Slavs.