Nikolaï Marr et le folklore

Nikolai Marr’s activity coincided with a period during which folk studies were thriving in Europe and Russia; to study this theme in Marr’s works, one must start by retracing its European and Russian background in the 19^th century, taking into account all its different currents and schools. It is well known that Marr spent his childhood in his native Georgia where popular creation was still quite present and took on a nationalist tinge. Later, as a student and then as a professor at Saint Petersburg University, he kept a keen interest in folklore, composing a series of erudite studies about Caucasian folkloric monuments, taking advantage of his knowledge of Georgian and Armenian and following the philological Russian tradition.
A radical change occurred in 1892 when Marr undertook his archeological excavations in the ancient Armenian site of Ani. He became familar with the Armenian language spoken by the people and various other dialects, and became acquainted with the daily life, world vision and folklore of the local population. Nevertheless, for him, folklore was no more than simply an element of popular culture next to material civilization; this corresponds with the universal vision of Marr’s New Theory of language which he developed from the early 1920s. In the same way, he insisted on the necessary hybridisation of folklore productions, that also occurs in the linguistic field. Marr produced very few works on folklore in this last period, as if he preferred to devote himself above all to general linguistics. As a later development of his vision of folklore, we can however look at the works of his former students and followers, such as Yossip Orbeli, Vladimir Propp, Olga Freidenberg and Viktor Zhirmunsky—perhaps Marr’s folkloric legacy could be even more significant than the one he left in the field of linguistics.