Петр-полукорма, Афанасий-ломонос i inni. О przezwiskach świętych w folklorze rosyjskim
'PETR-POLUKORMA', 'AFANASII-LOMONOS' AND OTHERS. ON THE NICKNAMES OF SAINTS IN RUSSIAN FOLKLORE

Summary/Abstract: The article aims to reconstruct, on the basis of folk farmer's calendars (mesyatseslov), the linguistic worldview of saints in Russian folklore. The calendars of this type were compiled as a result of combining the Christian calendar with the farmer's calendar: the official names of saints were supplemented with emotional nicknames reflecting the record of the observations of nature connected with the day of a given saint, e.g. Aphanasii-lomonos 'one who breaks the nose' or Timofei-poluzimnik 'occurring in the middle of winter'. The formal grammatical analysis has only been applied to nicknames of the January saints. The identified derivatives were created from nouns, verbs and prepositional phrases, by means of suffixation (e.g. brusichnik 'one who collects berries', kuznets 'blacksmith') or by juxtaposition (np. Aleksei-prolei kubshin 'pour the jug', Eevdokiya-podmochi porog 'wet the doorstep'). The last category was to remind the country-dwellers of their duties. The article also deals with the semantic motivation of the nicknames: from the names of the seasons, through those of natural phenomena, chars and customs, to events from the saint's life. The authoress claims that the treatment of saints in texts of folklore is indicative of the desire to bring the sacred and the profane closer: on the one hand, the status of human work is elevated, as it acquires a deep dimension through association with the figures of saints (also nature undergoes sacralization); on the other hand, saints are conceptualized as farmers and so lose the halo of sanctity, their transcendent dimension being drastically reduced.

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