Folklore plays an enormous role in the formation not only of a sense of national identity, but of personal identity too – as children, many of us grow up listening to folktales involving talking animals, wicked witches, supernatural beings and magical powers, and these tales tend significantly influence our development. They can be moralizing or purely aesthetic: regardless, folktales capture the imagination and instil a sense of wonder in the listener, continuing an ancient oral tradition that links us to our ancestors. Many of the elements of folklore and the folktale are shared between cultures – the supernatural, for example, or the enduring figure of the evil, ugly old witch – but Russia enjoys a particularly rich and vibrant body of work deriving from these influences. Although interest in the folktale (skazka, in Russian) and in folkloric influences only became truly prominent in the 19th century onwards, it has had an enormous impact upon the nation’s culture, particularly in the arts. Countless writers have produced both prose and verse that is permeated with folk influences, including Lermontov, Gogol’, Pushkin and Blok. The legacy of folklore is no less prominent in the musical world of the mid-nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries: operas and orchestral works composed by the likes of Mussorgsky, Stravinsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Liadov draw upon many aspects of folk music and archetypal characters from the skazka. This essay will examine the interaction and interdependence of these art forms, their shared roots in Slavic mythology, and the scale of the impact of these influences on modern Russian culture, with particular regard to music.

The mythological roots of Russian folklore

Many of the elements of Russian folklore can be traced back to their roots in the ritualistic pagan beliefs of the ancient Slavs; across Russia, what is now modern-day Ukraine, and other Slavic nations. Unlike the Greeks, Romans, and other peoples, not much is known about the beliefs or mythology of the prehistoric Slavs, and concrete evidence of this was only discovered in the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D. However, the sheer vastness of Russia and the surrounding areas, and the diversity of the people who inhabited them, means that these tribes were home to a real wealth of religious customs and beliefs. Invasion and occupation by groups such as the Scythian, Sarmatian, and Germanic peoples, as well as contact with the nomadic Iranian Scyths and Celtic tribes, had a significant linguistic, religious and mythological impact upon the Slavonic peoples. Despite this huge diversity, Slavic tribes shared many common beliefs and rituals. Given that these peoples were surrounded by and subject to the forces of nature, an unrivalled power that they could not yet understand, it seems inevitable that they would revere and worship it. This worshipping of nature in all its forms