13 june / 19:00
People love the scary: scaring each other as children before bedtime, recounting scary rumours and, eventually, watching horror films. Why does this happen?
The lecture is devoted to the concept of fear in traditional culture and traditional village scary stories. In folkloristics they are called "bylichki" and are connected both with mythological characters and with prohibitions on any actions at certain times. Where do the traditional images of domovoy, leshey, obderikha come from? Who are flying snakes, resurrected sorcerers, walking dead and what are the stories about them?
Lecturer: Nikita Petrov - Candidate of Philological Sciences, Head of the Laboratory of Theoretical Folklore Studies at the ION RANHIGS, Associate Professor at the Centre for Typology and Semiotics of Folklore, Russian State University of Humanities, Moscow, Russia.
The lecture is also available in online format.