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Abstract:

The article lists the surnames of the employees of the folklore department and the Esenin’s group who participated in the Great Patriotic War or whose childhood fell on 1941–1945. The facts of B.P. Kirdan’s biography related to the war are reported in more details. For the first time folklorists began collecting folklore of that military era in the first year of the war. Subsequently, folklorists continued to record folklore from frontline soldiers, blockade survivors, rear- line workers, and people deported to Germany. Based on the unique records (especially 2023 and 2025) of the author of the article, a classification of folklore genres is given, thematically related to military, blockade and rear events, which were shared by witnesses of the era and their children. The main classification unit of oral poetic genres at the present time is the memory texts (oral memoranda), and it often includes smaller genres: bylichki (a smoll tales about a pre-Christian belief), dreams, children’s games, ditties, teasers, proverbs and sayings. The Appendix represents for the first time the recordings of oral memory texts from 2023 and 2025, made by the author from a blockade survivor, a woman who had been under occupation, and from the children of frontline soldiers and their evacuated mothers. The Appendix also contains two so-called “self-recordings” of memories in folklore studies of women who were evacuated and whose childhood belongs to the Great Patriotic War. The geography of events is extremely broad and extends from Ukraine to Germany and Berlin, the Urals, covers Kursk, Voronezh, Ryazan, Yaroslavl, Vologda, Leningrad, Arkhangelsk, Sverdlovsk regions, the cities of Moscow and Leningrad, Yaroslavl and Pereslavl- Zalessky, Bilimbay and Anapa, Koenigsberg and Latvia.

Keywords: M.B. Bozhukova, P.I. Kazartseva, V.M. Kalantaevskaya, B.P. Kirdan, N.A. Romodina, P.A. Yukalo, folklore memory texts, folklore of the Great Patriotic War.