Article

Name: Folklore Version of the “Biblical” Story about Solomon in Hell and Her Russian Siberian Texts

Authors: Vera S. Kuznetsova

Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

In the section The Plot, Motive, Genre

Abstract:

The main theme of folk stories about the biblical King Solomon is his wisdom, which allows him to solve difficult problems and find a way out of difficult situations. Such stories include stories about Solomon in hell: left in hell during the descent of Christ into hell, for the liberation of the souls of the Old Testament righteous languishing there, Solomon, thanks to his wisdom, finds a way to get out of there – he threatens the devils to build a church, for which he is expelled from hell and so freed; they are the subject of consideration in the article. Neither the Holy Scriptures nor the apocryphal narratives known in ancient Russian literature about the descent of Christ into hell contain an episode about Solomon being left in hell, therefore they could not be the only source of folk legends. But similar stories are noted in the indexes of plots of folklore prose: AaТh 804В The Church in Hill; SUS 804В=AA 804* Solomon (soldier, blacksmith) in hell. For analysis, along with records of the European territory of historical Russia, Russian Siberian texts containing the indicated plot were involved in the work. The identified Siberian variants of the stories about Solomon in Hell expand our knowledge about the plot “repertoire” of Russian folklore prose in Siberia, and against the background of the fact that the Siberian fixations of this plot are not taken into account in the SUS, they clarify ideas about the geography of the existence of plot type 804B. Along with this, they replenish the general East Slavic fund of records of narrative folklore with new materials, which expands the source base for research. The results of the examination of folklore narratives about Solomon in hell, including their Siberian records, allow us to assert that not only the wisdom of King Solomon, but also the book motif of the biblical Solomon the temple builder, which was considered not represented in oral legend, was reflected in folk narratives based on folklore plot fund.

Keywords: Russian folklore, legends about Solomon in Hell, Siberian Russian texts

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