Aarne Thompson lost the system of elementary plots. Index of folk tale plots

Information prohibited for distribution among children includes information:

1) encouraging children to commit actions that pose a threat to their life and (or) health, including causing harm to their health, suicide;

2) capable of causing children to want to use narcotic drugs, psychotropic and (or) intoxicating substances, tobacco products, alcoholic and alcohol-containing products, beer and drinks made on its basis, take part in gambling, engage in prostitution, vagrancy or begging;

3) substantiating or justifying the admissibility of violence and (or) cruelty or encouraging violent actions towards people or animals, except for the cases provided for by this Federal Law;

4) denying family values ​​and creating disrespect for parents and (or) other family members;

5) justifying illegal behavior;

*- Note Phacochoerus "a Funtik:
« There's actually a lot more great stuff out there when it comes to age restrictions. Did you know, for example, that books for children under 12 years old cannot contain mention of serious illnesses? Because this is the only way to raise real Buddhas who know no evil. Exactly»

Can anyone name at least one good children's book that does not violate this law? All these Carlsons, Moomintrolls, David Copperfields, Harry Potters, Huckleberry Finns, Timurs, Uncle Fedora and Winnie the Pooh do nothing but maliciously trample all his points.

They run away from home, wander around, quarrel with their aunts and stepfathers, fight, fly on umbrellas, run on rooftops and generally endlessly commit actions that pose a threat to their lives. Children can only read scripts for Teletubbies, and the latter, if you think about it, sometimes lean too heavily on belly pancakes, clearly trying to harm their health through severe obesity.

In general, the monsters of consciousness surfaced to periscope depth.

(True, there is a loophole. New Bazhovs and Nosovs, of course, will not appear here as long as this law is in effect, but the old ones will still not be so driven off the shelves of children’s literature in stores and libraries. Because the law mentions in passing , that if a work has significant artistic and historical value, then so be it: smoke, drink and wander around the cemetery at night with a dead cat on a string.) And the funny thing is that, in general, society has no special objections to this wonderful law didn't call.

The criticism that was heard in places mainly boiled down to the fact that, under the influence of children, they would close down websites and terrorize concerts intended for adult audiences.

And the fact that children can and should be protected from all sorts of horrors - here everyone seems to have long ago reached a consensus. For some reason, today it is believed that children are such nervous and gentle creatures that at the sight of an ant that has broken its leg, they will faint with compassion and will never, ever think of taking a magnifying glass out of their pocket and performing some interesting manipulations with the arthropod... We somehow it’s more pleasant to think that children are remarkably clean and wonderful creatures who would have grown up to be unconditional angels if it weren’t for the evil and vicious people around us.

Alas, this wonderful view of the world has nothing to do with biological truths.

A child born into the world, although inclined towards altruism as a representative social type, but this tendency remains for the time being in a very passive state, because the first years of his life have completely different priorities on his agenda. Very, very far from the priorities of an elderly, complacent and well-mannered gentleman beginning of the XXI century.

The child knows nothing about humanism, selflessness and achievements social progress, but he understands well that the right thing to do is to hit the enemy who is interfering with you in the head with a stone, and then laugh joyfully, watching as his teeth flow away with red liquid.

With age, children, stuffed up to their ears with nannies' cooing about what is good and what is bad, become, of course, a little less natural. But for a very long time, most of them have such calm looks on the nature of violence, that modern inexperienced mothers now and then drink canisters of valerian, trying to understand why their beloved boys and girls do such things if no one taught them anything like that.

Children with their plastic psyche, which so easily forgets the bad, so flexibly adapts to the conditions of existence unbearable for an adult, can, of course, grow up on Teletubbies.

But this is not needed by children, but by their parents, who have now placed safety as an absolute priority over any other human needs.

We can guess what children really love by looking carefully at folk tales, which have also gone through their evolutionary path. Only those who actually liked the children managed to survive, asking with trembling voices to tell them again about evil witch eating little boys.

"But the majority folk tales so sweet, kind and innocent!” - you say.

Well, of course. After they were thoroughly washed and castrated by all sorts of brothers Grimm and Charlie Perrault during the Age of Enlightenment, after they were finally finished off by Walt Disney - yes, they are very cute.

The original, uncut versions of these beloved fairy tales most often look completely, completely different.

Do you want to know how? We hope you have your canister of valerian on hand.

In the original, Little Red Riding Hood did not wear a cap at all, but a chaperone - a cape with a hood. At Perrault's she walked around in the chaperone. But in the German version of the Brothers Grimm, the girl was wearing a hat, which has taken root with us. The first recording of this tale, made in Tyrol, dates back to the 14th century. It was widespread throughout Europe, and in the original it was told with the most curious details, which Perrault and the Grimms somehow forgot to mention.

The girl in the red raincoat actually chatted with the wolf on the way to her grandmother. And when she came to the house, the cunning animal had already managed not only to kill the grandmother, but also to cook her. The wolf in the grandmother's cap and dress was cooking, the guest was invited to the table, and together they began to cheerfully eat the grandmother, who had delicious fatty meat. True, the grandmother’s cat tried to warn the girl about the undesirability of cannibalism. She spun around and sang a song:

The girl is chewing her grandmother
He gnaws his grandmother's bones.

But the wolf immediately kills the impudent cat with a well-aimed blow from a wooden shoe, to which Red Raincoat reacts very serenely. The girl strips naked, jumps into bed with her grandmother and begins to ask her difficult questions:

- Grandma, why do you have such broad shoulders?
- Grandma, why are you like that? long legs?
- Grandma, why is there so much fur on your chest?

The wolf honestly answers that this way it is more convenient for him to hug, catch up with, and warm his dear granddaughter. And when it comes to big teeth, the wolf can’t stand it and rips open his cute friend’s neck. Apparently, he didn’t have much fun with his grandmother at dinner.

And yes, it's over. No lumberjacks.

An ancient story about children lost in the forest has been found new life at the very beginning of the 14th century, during the Great Famine of 1315–1317. Three years of terrible harvests caused by prolonged frosts killed approximately 25 percent of the population of northern Europe. Cannibalism flourished in cities and villages. And it was here that Jeannot and Margot (or Hansel and Gretel in the German version) appeared.

There are many versions of the plot, but the most popular was that the father and mother, dying of hunger, decided to eat their children. The children, hearing their parents sharpening their knives, rushed into the forest to wait there until mom and dad died of hunger. On the way, the boy threw stones so as not to get lost. After sitting in the forest for some time, the children also began to languish from hunger and quietly crept back to the house. There they heard the conversation of their parents, who had obtained some bread somewhere and were now sad that there was bread for gravy, but the naughty meat dish had eluded them. The children stole a piece of bread and again went into the thicket. But now the boy marked the path with crumbs, which were immediately pecked by the birds, also mad with hunger. Having finished eating the bread, the children decided to die - and then they came to a house made of bread! And the windows were even lined with wheat cakes! Then everything goes along the track we are already familiar with. But in the end, the children happily return home, carrying with them not only bags fresh bread, but also a well-roasted witch. So now parents don't have to eat their children. Everyone is happy, everyone is hugging. Over time, the tale has changed. Hunger still remains as the main character, but parents now simply get rid of extra mouths to feed by taking their children to the forest. The house turns into a gingerbread house, because nowadays you can’t lure little listeners to the witch with bread, and the fried witch remains in the oven, never ending up on the family table.

In the Aarne-Thompson system of classification of fairy tales, Snow White is number 709. This is one of the famous stories of the folk storyteller Dorothea Wiemann, recorded by the Grimms and considerably softened by them, although the Grimm version will make Disney fans uncomfortable.

Well, first of all, Snow White, the queen’s stepdaughter, was also going to be eaten - how would they be without this in a fairy tale? The stepmother demanded that the servant, after strangling the annoying girl, bring her lungs and liver to the royal kitchen, which were served that same day at a cheerful dinner party in the castle (the offal turned out to be deer, because the girl bribed the servant with her beauty and youth). Snow White is captured by seven mountain spirits, who also like her beauty - so much that they decide to keep the girl with them. After Snow White's death from a poisoned apple, the coffin with her body is exhibited on the mountain, and there it is seen by the prince passing by.

Further, the Grimms write with some hesitation that the prince wanted to take the dead girl to him because she looked like she was alive and was very beautiful. Let's not think badly about the prince - maybe he, unlike Sleeping Beauty's lover (see below), was simply going to honestly and nobly expose her to local history museum. But while he is bargaining with the dwarves for the right to buy back the body, his servants drop the coffin, the dead girl falls, a piece of apple flies out of the girl’s mouth - and everyone is alive and happy. Well, except for the stepmother. Because they put red-hot iron shoes on the queen’s feet and forced her to dance on a burning brazier until she died.

Yeah. Of course, he kissed her... No, in the ancient versions of this super-popular plot, the first records of which date back to the 12th–13th centuries, everything happened differently. And half a century before Perrault, in the 30s of the 17th century, the plot was recorded in more detail by the Italian Count Giambattista Basile, another collector of folk tales.

Firstly, the king was married. Secondly, having discovered a girl sleeping in an abandoned castle in the forest, he did not limit himself to a kiss. After which the rapist hastily left, and the girl, without ever emerging from her coma, gave birth to twins in due time - a boy and a girl. The children crawled over their sleeping mother, sucked milk and somehow survived. And then the boy, who had lost his mother’s breast, began to suck his mother’s finger out of hunger and sucked out the damned splinter stuck there. The beauty woke up, found the children, reflected and prepared to starve to death in an empty castle. But the king passing by just remembered that last year he spent a very good time in these thickets, and decided to repeat the event. Having discovered the children, he behaved like decent person: began to visit and deliver food. But then his wife intervened. She slaughtered the children, fed their father their meat, and wanted to burn Sleeping Beauty at the stake. But then everything ended well. The queen became greedy and ordered the girl’s gold embroidered dress to be pulled off. The king, having admired the young naked beauty tied to a pole, decided that it would be more fun to send his old wife to the stake. And it turns out that the children were saved by the cook.

And here, in general, everything is extremely innocent. The only difference between the Disney plot and the original version recorded by the Grimms is that Rapunzel and the prince did not run away anywhere. Yes, he climbed into the tower along its spit, but not at all with the goal of getting married. And Rapunzel wasn’t eager to go to the pampas either. She quickly set out for freedom when the witch noticed that the beauty’s corset stopped meeting at the waist. (IN German villages, where many young ladies worked as maids in wealthy houses, this plot was not so fabulous.) The witch cut off Rapunzel, and the prince was left without eyes by the witch as punishment. But at the end of the fairy tale, everything grows back for them, when the prince, blindly wandering through the forest, came across his twin children, who were looking for food for the hungry and unhappy Rapunzel.

Charles Perrault worked especially diligently on the plot of the fairy tale “Cinderella,” carefully removing all the gloom and all the heavy mysticism from it. This is how fairies, princes of Mirliflora, crystal slippers, pumpkin carriages and other beauty appeared. But the Brothers Grimm recorded a version for folk storyteller Dorothea Wiemann that was much closer to the folk version of this tale.

In the folk version, Cinderella runs around asking for dresses for balls on the grave of her mother, who rises from the coffin to dress her daughter (the Grimms, after thinking about it, finally replaced the zombie mother with white bird, which flew up to the grave with bundles in her teeth). After the balls, the girl runs away from the prince, who wants not so much to get married as to immediately reproduce. The girl climbs first onto a pear tree, then onto a dovecote. The prince cuts down all these hills with an ax, but Cinderella somehow manages to hide. At the third ball, the prince simply glues the nimble beauty to the stairs, filling her with resin. But Cinderella jumps out of her golden slippers and, covered in tar, runs away again, saving her honor.

Here the prince, completely crazy with passion, decides to lure the young lady with the promise of marriage. While Cinderella is wondering whether his words can be trusted, even if they were announced to the entire kingdom, the prince begins to walk around with the shoes. The older sister cuts off her toes to fit into the shoes, but limps badly in them and loses them along the way. The younger sister cuts off her entire heel and walks quite smoothly, but the white doves reveal the deception to the prince and his retinue. While the sisters are bandaging the bloody stumps, Cinderella appears and, shaking the blood out of her shoes, puts them on.

Everyone is delighted, the prince and Cinderella are going to get married, and white doves peck out her sisters’ eyes because they forced Cinderella to clean the house and did not let her go to the ball. And now the sisters, blind and almost legless, crawl around the city and beg, thereby delighting the heart of Cinderella, who lives with a handsome prince in a cozy palace.

The most popular character in Slavic fairy tales, whose name means Baba-Yazva, has an extremely dark origin, and the description of her charming home was a sure way to scare the little Polyans, Drevlyans and other Krivichi to the point of hiccups. For even the youngest inhabitants of the Slavic lands, alas, knew well what a hut on chicken legs was. Until the 13th–14th centuries, and in some places even longer, right up to the 19th century, in our forest areas the dead were buried in domovinas - “death huts”. It was great way burial grounds for the wood-rich northern lands with their perpetually frozen ground. Several nearby trees were selected, they were cut down at a height of one and a half to two meters, the roots were cut and partially pulled out to protect the trunks from rot, and a small hut was erected at the top, where the corpse was placed along with the food it was due and some belongings. It was almost impossible for predators to get into such a hut, and they could stand for decades and centuries. Grandmother Ulcer, Old Woman Pestilence, and namely Death itself, of course, considered these houses as their rightful home. Her bone leg, which belonged to world of the dead, knocked menacingly on those who dared to poke closer to this guarded burial place. And all the Ivan Tsarevichs who came to visit her went through the rituals that were due to the dead: they were washed, ridding them of the “human spirit”, they were given food for the long journey and they were put to bed - for a long time.

Now we perceive the story about Mashenka, who visited three bears to try out their beds and bowls, as something originally ours. And here we are fundamentally wrong. It is “The Three Bears” that is not even an international wandering story - it is purely Scottish fairy tale, which has also entered English folklore.

Leo Tolstoy made it Russian. He translated this tale after reading it as performed by Robert Southey (Soutey's tale was published in 1837). In the original folklore version, their eternal enemy, the fox, came to the bears, and he was either forced to run away from the bears as fast as he could, or they still managed to skin him, on which the smallest bear then loved to warm his paws, sitting in front of the fireplace. Robert Southey turned the main character into a little old woman. The old woman's fate remained unclear. This is how the ending of Southie's tale sounds:

“The old lady jumped from the window, and whether she broke her neck in the fall, or ran into the forest and got lost there, or got out of the forest safely, but was captured by a constable and sent to the house of correction as a tramp, I cannot say. But the three bears never saw her again.”

But our Lev Nikolayevich did not want to know any old women and made the heroine a little girl who successfully escaped from the horrors of the bear forest.

>T.A. Kitanina

Indicators of plots and motifs

This review does not claim to be a complete account of all existing indexes of plots and motifs. Similar signs exist today huge amount, in addition to individual editions, many indexes are attached to the publication of texts - and in this case, finding them is not always easy. The review is accompanied by a list of indexes and materials for them, based on the bibliography published in the “Comparative Index of Plots” of East Slavic fairy tales (pp. 411-415) and slightly expanded. All references to indexes are given according to this list in the text of the review.

Despite large number indexes and the variety of material they describe, most of them are built according to a very limited set of standard schemes, more or less ordered and developed. It is these schemes that will be discussed in the review. Our task is not to characterize each index, but to consider, if possible, what methods exist for describing and classifying plots and motifs, what material they are applicable to, and what questions they can answer. Such a formulation of the question inevitably leads to the fact that the most famous works will often be selected from the entire mass of material - simply because other, less well-known works are built on their model and there is no point in describing them separately. However, the question of applicability various classifications for material other than that for which they were created, perhaps somewhat justifies returning to the discussion broadly famous works. And since special system descriptions and systematization literary plots has not yet been developed, with the characteristics of each of existing systems the possibility of applying it to literature will be specifically discussed.

When compiling indexes of folklore subjects, the Aarne system is still most often used (42). The main advantage of this system today is its prevalence. Since many folklore indexes have already been compiled according to the Aarne system different nations, it turns out to be the most convenient for introducing new material into scientific use, allowing it to be included in a fairly broad context. This is a system for classifying complete plots - which makes it convenient for working with more or less homogeneous material. However, even here certain difficulties arise - for example, when searching for plots associated in different traditions with different characters. Thus, the fairy tale “Dividing the Harvest” (“For me the tops, for you the roots”), “canonized” in Russia as the tale of a peasant and a bear, is found in the indexes built according to the Aarne system, in the section “Tales of the Fooled Devil.” There are quite a lot of such examples. Of course, such difficulties can be eliminated using a reference system, but this is a separate task and has not yet been solved. The difficulty of applying this system to non-European folklore has been repeatedly noted (see 149 p.3; 148, preface). To solve this problem, Thompson (149) made significant changes to the plot description system proposed by Aarne. Thompson's rather complex plots are decomposed into several elements that make up the structure of the plot, numbered in Roman numerals, and for each element there are options for its implementation, indicated by letter indices, for example:

I. Competition. (a) The princess will go to the one who lies so much that she says: “It’s a lie.”

II. Lie. The young man tells tales (a) about a huge bull; (b) about a tree that grew to heaven overnight, about its ascent to heaven and descent from there on a rope; or (c) about a man cutting off his head and putting it back, and the like.

III. Victory. The princess (king) is forced to say the required words when the hero tells a disgraceful lie about herself.

Thus, a version of the plot can be presented schematically: etc. This addition to the Aarne system provides a significant advantage when compiling new indexes, since it allows more accurately finding correspondence to existing subjects in other traditions. Often quite complex plots are repeated in the folklore of different peoples, not entirely and not in all versions. Thus, in the index of fairy tales of the peoples of India, Pakistan and Ceylon (148), the above plot looks like this:

852 The hero makes the princess say "It's a lie"

I (a), III (the hero tells the story of the theft and says that the thief is the father of the princess).

That is, in the Indian version there is no second part of the plot, dedicated to telling fables, and the third is implemented in only one way - the story of theft. Indexes compiled according to the Aarne-Thompson system more clearly demonstrate such cases of coincidence and divergence of different traditions. Another important addition made by Thompson is the addition to each plot of a list of motifs included in it, indexed according to Thompson's index of motifs. Thus, the index of plots builds syntagmatic connections of motives, the paradigms of which are given in the index of motives.

Unfortunately, the compilers of the most representative Russian index of plots (Barag L.G., Berezovsky I.P., Kabashnikov K.P., Novikov N.V. Comparative index of plots: East Slavic fairy tale. - L., 1979) used the Aarne system without Thompson's additions. But in this edition for the first time a very significant appendix appears: a list of the most common plot contaminations.

So, later additions to Aarne’s system make it possible, on the one hand, to correlate the plot with smaller narrative units as elements of its structure, and on the other hand, by tracing the tendencies of contamination of plots, to inscribe the plot into structures of a higher order.

However, with all these additions, Aarne's system only works for describing fairy-tale material. It turns out to be of little use for describing other types of texts. As for literary plots that are constructed according to completely different laws, there is simply no place for them here.

After the release of the Aarne index of fairy tales, he also compiled an index of legends (1912 - an index of Finnish etiological legends (44) and an index of folklore explanations of voices and sounds of nature (45). Subsequent Aarne indexes (46, 47) already included fairy tale plots , and the plots of the legends. The legends are divided here into three sections: non-etiological legends ("Sagen", mythological stories) and two sections of etiological legends, corresponding to the two indexes of 1912. Detailed review These works, as well as subsequent ones, compiled on the same principle, see the article by S.N. Azbelev “Problems of international systematization of traditions and legends” (//Specificity of folklore genres: Russian folklore. - M., Leningrad, 1966. Issue X. P. 176-195). However, the plot of non-fairy tale prose is even more difficult to formalize and classify; it is even more connected with the peculiarities of local traditions, therefore subsequent indexes of legends and mythological stories (for example, the works of Sininge (140), Christiansen (69)) followed the path of clarifying details, complicating the rubrication - and were essentially reduced to categories based on characters. Simonsuuri, in the preface to his index (139, 30), directly states the principle of classification by characters as the basis of his system: “The leading principle of my system is the division of all this material into 15 large main groups, and the main units of division were the supernatural creatures and forces found in them , as well as persons with supernatural powers, then supernatural phenomena and incidents" (30, p. 37).

This classification turned out to be convenient when describing texts containing supernatural phenomena. However, even within the framework of the chosen material, the author was faced with the fact that a character can act in someone else’s function - so the devil can individual texts play the role of a dead person, spirit, etc. In this case, the author proposes to determine its place by function - thereby showing the insufficiency of defining a motive through a character. In many cases, Simonsuuri was able to cope with this complexity with the help of a system of references, but sometimes the vagueness of the principles for identifying a motive leads to the fact that similar motives end up without references in different groups. So in the group “Innocently Executed” we find the motive: “In some place blood appears - an innocent person is executed at this place” (C811), and in the group “Place of murder, execution, burial” - the motive: “At the place of execution one can hear and you see something eerie, inexplicable - the place evokes horror" (C631). And these are the difficulties that the author encountered when describing only folklore texts containing an element of the supernatural. It is clear that an attempt to apply a similar system to other types of texts, even if very similar plots are found among them, is doomed to failure. For example, for literary texts where the given motifs are widespread, plots in which:

a) an innocent person is executed or saved at the last minute;

b) the truth is revealed thanks to miraculous phenomenon or its imitation (before or after execution);

c) execution or hard labor of an innocent person can be semantically equivalent.

Nevertheless, for mythological stories it is important to create a catalog of characters with a description of their functions. This problem is solved by the index compiled by S. Ayvazyan and O. Yakimova, attached to the book by E.V. Pomerantseva "Mythological characters in Russian folklore" (Moscow, 1975). This index is structured strictly as a description of mythological characters, divided into three groups: nature spirits, house spirits, and a group that includes stories about the devil, the serpent, and the damned. Within each group there are sections relating to one character (goblin, merman, brownie, etc.). The index shows in what images a given creature appears, where it lives, on whom it affects, in what way, how one can protect oneself from it, etc. In this situation, the compiler should not be concerned with the question that different characters may have the same characteristics same functions, since the character’s characteristics consist of the entire totality of his manifestations. Some inconvenience in using the index is due to the fact that it is not structured enough. It would be advisable to identify groups of similar characteristics and unify the numbering of plots for all characters, so that for the goblin the plot “the goblin gets a man” is number 5, for the mermaid (“the mermaid gets a man”) is number 10, and for the devil (“the devil is driving”) - under number 3. If such a unification were made (for example, for any character under number 1 (a, b, c, etc.) there would be stories about what images he appears in, under number 2 - where he lives, 3 - who he influences (with whom he comes into contact), 4 - what he is afraid of, etc.) it would be much easier to compare the functions of various mythological creatures and then new groups of characters could be entered into this system, found in other types of texts (such as, for example, children's horror stories, stories about “aliens” and, possibly, literary texts with fantastic content). But even in its current form, the system proposed in Pomerantseva’s book is widely used by scientists. Using the same system, with a number of clarifications, an index of plots of Siberian tales and byvalschinas by V.P. was compiled. Zinoviev (16, 17).

An attempt to create an index of plots based on the cluster principle was made by Yu.I. Smirnov (“East Slavic ballads and similar forms”, M., 1988). The author has set himself the task of moving away from the “static” nature of the Aarne-Thompson system and tracing the variability of texts and the sequence of these changes. For a more complete account of the transformations of ballad plots, the author also involved others lyrical forms(up to ritual lyrics), into which, in his opinion, a ballad can turn. The index is divided into three big topics(I. Mother and son (daughter); II. Mythical creature(ethnic enemy, foreigner) needs a girl; III. The ethnic hero gets the girl). Inside each chapter there are plots divided into versions (evolutionary chains demonstrating changes in part of the plot in the presence of some unchanged element). The plots included in the index represent holistic, unstructured annotations, so it is not always clear on what basis a particular unit is presented as a separate plot or as a version. Eg.

Scene 32. The mother sent her son (daughter) on a ship.

Vers. 32.1. The mother did not want to get rid of her son. The father buys a ship on which his son is sent from home. The mother changes her mind and calls her son home. But the son answers: the ship does not sail against the water, the sail does not stand against the wind.

Vers. 32.2. The daughter is disgusted with her mother. The mother takes her daughter to the river, puts her in the shavings, sends her off, and only after that wants to say goodbye to her. But the daughter can no longer say goodbye: the shavings float like a falcon flies; The rowers row as if flapping a wing. The daughter promises to fly home like a cuckoo in a few years.

Vers. 32.4. The mother sends her son to become a soldier very early. He promises to send her a letter only in the ninth year of service, and to come for leave in the tenth year.

Scene 33. Mother abandoned her daughter.

Vers. 33.2. The mother did not want to sell her daughter. Father arrived in one hour. He bought a boat and sent his daughter out on the blue sea for a walk. When the father wished for his daughter to come to visit, it turned out that she could not come: her boat began to sink.

That is, very close annotations (32.1 and 33.2) turn out to be versions of different plots, while variants 32.2 and 32.4 that are far from each other are assigned to the same plot. The cluster system, which is not distinguished either structurally or graphically, is difficult to perceive; its logic is not always clear, which the compiler himself is aware of: “For greater clarity, each of the evolutionary sequences of similar versions and plots would probably need to be accompanied by a corresponding graphic image ( diagram, drawing). Unfortunately, we do not know any other way to show the evolutionary sequence more clearly" (36, p. 11).

All systems considered so far are indicators of holistic plots. However, there are groups of folklore texts, due to the differences in the cultures that gave rise to them or simply genres, that do not have overlapping plots. Nevertheless, these completely different plots are often built from similar elements. When moving from the level of plots to the level of their constituent motives, the possibility and meaning of combining folklore material that is heterogeneous both geographically and in genre appears within the framework of one index. Thompson's motive index solves this problem. Thompson’s principles for identifying a motive are quite vague - his task did not include a strict theoretical definition this unit. Another thing was important - to bring together all the recurring plot elements of folklore that could attract the attention of a researcher. Thompson's system made it possible to describe a huge number of new texts that cannot be described according to Aarne and other classifications of plots. Motif indexes have continued to be published successfully for over 50 years (see, for example, Kirtley B.-F. A Motif-Index of Traditional Polynesian narratives. - Honolulu, 1971; Neuman 0. Motif-index to the talmudic-midrashic literature. - Michi-gan , 1954; Ikeda H. A type and motif-index of Japanese folk-literature (FFC 209, 1971 and many others).

More flexible than all previous ones, and therefore more universal system They tried to use Thompson in the description of literary texts - an index of motives for the Italian short story D.P. Rotunda (136) was built on it. But in this case, the rubric adopted by Thompson, adapted for folklore, turned out to be less suitable for literary material. Thus, the separation of the chapters “Sex” and “Society” led to a distortion of the plots, which are built precisely on the collision of love and public relations. For example, in stories about an abandoned lover, the plot-forming element is often social inequality lovers, while in the index such a plot is interpreted simply as betrayal, breakup, etc. And stories about deceived husbands, without any motivation, are distributed between the headings “deception” and “ family life"In addition, the vagueness of the concept of literary motive when trying to adapt Thompson's system for literature would lead to the swelling of Thompson's already six-volume index to infinite proportions.

Of the relatively recent works, noteworthy is the method developed by B. Kerbelite ( Historical development structures and semantics of fairy tales (based on Lithuanian fairy tales). Vilnius, 1991). The researcher abandons the practice of highlighting motifs in the text, since such an unsteady and difficult-to-define unit is difficult to formalize. Instead, she proposes structuring the text using elementary plots (EP), which she defines as a sequence of actions and situations related to the hero’s achievement of one goal. The goal is usually clarified by achieved result- change in the state of the participants in the collision. When identifying elementary plots, the location in the text of their constituent actions is not taken into account - that is, the possibility of different relative positions of elementary plots is taken into account (for example, framing one ES by another). B. Kerbelite offers different levels of description of the plot - from more concrete to more abstract - demonstrating the technique of transition from one to another, which allows us to establish the deep similarity of externally different ES and highlight their types and versions. In the Kerbelite classification, the description of ES is given at more abstract language than in indexes compiled according to the Aarne-Thomson system. It's hard to tell the plot from this description. real fairy tale, so using its pointer is quite difficult. But all the types identified by the researcher are correlated with the types according to AT, and the subjects identified in AT, in turn, are described according to the Kerbelite method. Under this condition, the Kerbelite index turns out to be a valuable addition to the existing international system classification of plots, since it reveals structural similarities of plots that are not correlated in the Aarne-Thompson thematic classification.

Of course, this technique is not directly transferable to literary material- here we will encounter completely different signs of determining the state of the hero, that is, determining the initial situation, result and goal. But the very principle of identifying elementary plots, the method of describing them and the scheme of their interaction in the organization of the text - all this can be very useful to the compiler of an index of literary plots.

Materials for the index of literary subjects were proposed by Yu.V. Shatin in the article “Husband, wife and lover: the semantic tree of the plot” (// Plot and motive in the context of tradition: Materials for the dictionary of plots and motives of Russian literature. Issue 2. - Novosibirsk, 1998, pp. 56-63) using an example one group of plots united by a common initial situation: the absence of a husband, the appearance of a lover, an attempt at seduction (successful or unsuccessful). The plots are arranged in accordance with the logical possibilities for the development of the initial situation, depending on the choices that each of the characters makes. This method of organizing the index seems to be productive specifically for literary subjects, since it allows us to take into account the literary context of the works, the role of which is very important in literature. The greatest difficulty in this work is the selection of the material to be described. The fact is that Shatin’s article appeared as part of a large project to create an index of plots in Russian literature, work on which has been underway for several years at the Novosibirsk Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The colossal scope of this work, which has already yielded good scientific results (see, for example, the collections: Materials for the Dictionary of Plots and Motives of Russian Literature. Issues 1-3. - Novosibirsk, 1996-1999) forces scientists to strictly limit themselves to the material, without taking into account how translated literature, as well as “second-tier” literature, mass, entertaining, epigonic. However, the allocation plot schemes exclusively from highly artistic works - a very difficult task, since “high” literature gravitates precisely towards non-standard turns, breaking stereotypes, including plot ones. Perhaps this is the time fundamental work has not yet arrived, and before it becomes feasible, several smaller indexes must appear, reflecting the literature of a certain era and genre, but taking into account, if possible, all texts within the selected framework.

An example of such a local index (and extremely local) is the consolidated typology of plots and themes of notes in the collections of Pu Songlin, Ji Yun and Yuan Mei (// Fishman O. L. Three Chinese short story writers of the 17th-18th centuries - M., 1980. P. . 387-421). This is very complex system, which simultaneously includes many parameters - from genre (stories, notes; didactic content, non-didactic content, works in which the plot is discussed) and themes (about the supernatural, about the natural), to the characteristics of the character (chaste, libertine, genuine scientist, charlatan, poor person, etc.), the forces he faces, and the ways he interacts with these forces. All these parameters are encoded with letters and digital codes, which, when read with the help of the enclosed key, give practically full information about each type of text. By bringing together the indexes compiled in this way for each of the short story writers (38, 39), it becomes possible to meaningfully compare their genre, thematic and plot repertoire. This system is subordinated to the main goal of the entire monograph - a comparison of three collections of biji (a type of Chinese prose of small forms) and the identification of both the common features that are dictated by the very nature of biji and the specific features inherent in each author. Nevertheless, the author does not exclude that, compiled to solve one specific task, this system may be suitable for describing collections of short narrative texts other authors.

Over the past twenty years, as far as I know, only two indexes of literary motifs have been published. Eliza Malek's book "Russian Narrative Literature of the 17th-18th Centuries: Experience in Indexing Plots" is a selection from a computer database collected by the author and numbering about 1,500 plots. The purpose of the index is to introduce into scientific use and systematize information about plots and plot-forming motifs common in Russian literature of this period. IN dictionary entry includes:

1. name of the plot or plot-forming motif;

2. summary plot;

3. a list of handwritten implementations;

4. list printed publications texts that implement this plot (motive);

6. text illustration of the plot.

The index includes only a description of the simplest narrative forms: anecdotes, facets, zhartes, apothegms, which somewhat simplifies annotation. Annotations from E. Malek are given good show about the plot and its variations. Moreover, the author introduces an unusual point for indexes - “text illustration of the plot” - where he cites one of the texts that implements the plot in its entirety. This, of course, is also possible only due to the brevity of the topics under consideration. literary forms, but it is in this case that it is especially valuable, since Malek uses many hard-to-access sources (manuscript collections, rare old printed books), which cannot always be accessed by a reader who is not specifically engaged in this particular plot or period. A researcher who needs a simple reference gets very detailed information about the plot from the index, while a specialist in the field gets more or less full picture its spread and development over almost two centuries. It is, of course, difficult to judge how complete this picture is from a small sample from a huge database, but it is already clear here that E. Malek brings up many handwritten sources. Collections of the 18th century are apparently also well taken into account, but from the material presented it is not clear whether journals from this time are taken into account. Some texts are being introduced into scientific use for the first time. The index deliberately does not separate translated and original texts(which is stated by the author in the preface), since the researcher is interested in all the plots that existed in Russian literature and became a fact of Russian culture of the period under review. As a result, the book contains material about the interaction of Russian literature with other literary traditions, about ways of Russian culture mastering foreign experience. From the point of view of the actual methodology for compiling the index, the choice of material by E. Malek put her in an advantageous position over researchers of other literary forms, since the genres she considered are closest to folklore, both in the repertoire of plots and in the methods of their implementation, which gives the author the opportunity to widely use experience accumulated in this area by folklorists. How close was the connection between this literature and oral folk art, says a large number of references to the indexes of Aarne-Thompson, J. Krzyzhanovsky, a comparative index of plots of East Slavic fairy tales and to other works of folklorists. The new expanded edition of the index (26) contains a table of coincidence of subjects with the indexes of Aarne-Thompson, J. Krzyzhanovsky, Tubach, Rotunda, SUS, Thompson (Motif-Index). However, Malek, in my opinion, did not fully exploit her advantage. Of course, the classification of literary plots is a task that has not yet been solved, but it is precisely plots of this type that have been classified in folklore, and, starting from this experience (precisely starting from, and not following it), it seems that the author could try to systematize his material more successfully than V alphabetical order titles. In the absence of any categories and the frequent discrepancies between the names of the plots and the existing indexes, searching in E. Malek’s book is very difficult. This is most noticeable in cases where the title does not reflect the essence of the plot, especially if the first word in the title is the name of the character, which in other versions may not appear at all. For example, plot 137 “Scipio Africanus and the poet Ennius” in the text cited by E. Malek herself is not about Scipio, but about a Roman nobleman, and plot 2 “August Caesar and the dignitary dissatisfied with him” is about Sigismund the Emperor. Placing them in a cluster of related subjects under a general heading would simplify the search, which now requires a preliminary reading of the index in its entirety. In addition to inconvenience in work, the alphabetical systematization of the material leads to the fact that similar plots are widely spaced, which destroys the picture of the development and interaction of plot schemes. This loss may not be so significant when publishing 161 dictionary entry out of one and a half thousand, but when publishing the entire database it would be a great shame not to trace these processes. In addition, the work does not specify in any way what is meant by the terms plot and motive, which leads to the lumping together of clearly unequal material.

The book by Ann B. Tracy “The Gothic Novel 1790-1830” (153) also collects characteristic elements of the Gothic novel, different in nature and function, and annotations of entire texts without attempting to combine them into any system.

The third work - the already classic work of A. Hansen-Leve "Russian Symbolism" - contains a description poetic motives. According to the author himself, the methodology he proposed is not applicable even to the analysis of the prose of the Symbolists, not to mention the prose of other literary eras.

Thus, with an abundance of description systems folklore motifs and plots, similar work in the field of literature has only just begun, but the need for it is very noticeable. Let's wait for new signs to appear...