Ukrainian Song Folklore in Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s Records: History of Publication, Analysis of Motifs and Plots

The subject of this study analysis concerns the history of publication of notes those Oleksandr Dovzhenko has recorded from his mother in December 1943 in Moscow. These are 32 song texts of Ukrainian folk Christmas carols, shchedrivky, spring rite carols and lyrical songs. The records are contained in a separate notebook, which has 30 sheets. The name of the collection is The Mother’s Songs. It is kept in the Russian State Archives of Literature and Art in Moscow (RSALA, fund 2081, inventory 1, unit of issue 330). The published work is aimed at the description of the editorial approaches to these song texts in various periods to these song texts, indicating the list of publications of each of them. Records of Christmas carols and shchedrivky from the collection of O. Dovzhenko contain motifs and plots typical for Volhynia, Podillia and Slobozhanshchyna. Most often, these are songs for the owners and their children, for a young man, a girl, less often these are the motifs with biblical characters, formed under the influence of folk tradition. Almost all ritual songs of the winter cycle have variants in Zorian Dolenha-Khodakovskyi’s collection of recordings [11]. The motifs of the lyrical songs from O. Dovzhenko’s recordings are typical for the song tradition of Podillia, Volhynia, the Over Dnipro Lands and Slobozhanshchyna. These are plots about watering horses near a well, embroidering a shirt for a Cossack, a widow and her unloved children for a potential husband, waking up / not waking up a Cossack, a request to a mother to show her daughter. They are circulated throughout Ukraine.