Spiritual verses in handwritten memorial notebooks (tradition of the Russian-Komi-Permyak borderland)

Folk religious poetry is quite often included in the sphere of funeral and memorial rites. Singers of spiritual verses often write them down in special “memorial” notebooks, which they use during performances. There is a controversial issue that has not yet been resolved. Do written collections existing in different territories display such a noticeable originality that would allow us to assert the presence of special local or regional manuscript traditions? In this article, the author characterizes memorial notebooks that arose in the Middle Urals, in the zone of active Russian-KomiPermyak contacts, where Russian-Yurlinians and Kochev KomiPermyaks live. A collection of 29 manuscripts serves as our material, of which 5 are analyzed in detail. The specificity of memorial notebooks is manifested in a typical set of spiritual poems, accompanying genres, choice of titles, acceptable forms of writing (with or without division into poetic lines), etc. Most of these handwritten notebooks include not only spiritual verses, but also prayers, essentially becoming “vernacular prayer books”. Typical poem titles include a mention of genre; indicate a place in the ritual; name the main characters; repeat the first line or its keyword. In Komi-Permyak notebooks, more often than in Russian ones, the traditional set of poems is expanded by including new verses. The “horizontal” organization of the text here becomes one of two conventional ways of writing spiritual verses. Elements of the written form acquire additional content, they become conventional and are reproduced within the community.

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