Воскрешение Перуна. К реконструкции восточнославянского язычества

The first concept was worked out by the official leaders of Soviet science, such as B. D. Grekov and B. A. Rybakov, Members of the Academy of Sciences. According to their concept, the Eastern Slavs (living from the time immemorial on the same territories as at the present) had discovered — some thousands years В. C. — the plough agriculture, created the state, and developed a pagan religion that came very close to Christianity.

The second concept was presented by the officially disgraced scholar, Professor Vladimir Propp, one of the founders of Soviet semiotics (he was one of the leaders of world structuralism as well). Propp has observed that Russian agricultural festivals, which are highly seasonal, demonstrate a stable set of common features (due, he said, mainly to the similarity of peasant working conditions). Since these festivals totally lack any developed gods, the inference was that the underlying Russian paganism was totally devoid of them, being of an especially archaic nature (like in the views of Anichkov, Niederle and Veselovsky). Such figures as Kupalo, Yarilo and the like, were «underdeveloped deities».

V. Propp's opinions added an additional impulse to the legacy of the work done by the Russian ethnographer of the older generation, Dmitriy Zelenin, who had studied Slavic demonology with the retrospective method. His follower was Nikita I. Tolstoy, the grand-grandson of Leo Tolstoy. Member of the Academy of Sciences, he had built an influential school of ethnographers and ethnolinguists. So, the third major concept of Slavic Paganism emerged, aimed at reconstructing the old pagan religion using the exclusively ethnographic material. Naturally it could throw to the past only what remained kept in the living culture, i. e. no major gods. Thus the most prominent professional ethnographers, ethnolinguists, and folklorists have accepted the idea of the ancient Slavs having only lower mythology (demonology).

The fourth concept was offered by Vyacheslav Ivanov and Valdimir Toporov, also structuralists and (if for no other reason than this) considered by the regime as frondeurs. They used the names of Slavic gods as their main source and compared them with other Indo-European names, social terms, and myths. On this basis they began reconstructing a developed mythology derived from the common Indo-European substrate (the «Basic Myth», the initial struggle of Perun against Volos -Veles, etc.). Their methodology was to a great extent borrowed from Levy-Strauss. It allowed them to reach such freedom of making connections that the results of their reconstructions became very rich, but, alas, lost the reliability. There is no direct proof of the struggle of Perun against Volos (and Volos, as distinct from Veles, probably is at all a new god, most likely having emerged as a transformation of the Christian Saint Vlasius/ Blasius, Bulgarian Vlas).

As far as Boris Rybakov's theory is concerned, it is analysed and criticized at great length in this work since it turned out to be the most influential, and until now remains such, particularly outside the confines of the scholarly world. Rybakov's use of material (the entire categories of which he simply lacked the professional qualifications to process) was already outdated at his time and often embarrassingly crude. The conclusions at which he arrived were not just unsound but often simply comical. In spite of all this, however, one must give him his due for his his considerable imagination and enthusiasm for his subject matter.

From the modern perspective, it is worth noticing that his works became the basis for modern neo-pagans, more and more noticeable since the 70s among the new religious movements. Produced by nationalism, in the conditions of the general political and ideological decline of the Soviet regime, as well as the crisis of the Russian Orthodoxy, this movement has ignored virtually all real data on ancient pagan cults and rituals and began to create new cults and rituals, formally combining the elements borrowed from the Indian and Germanic practices and aimed at the propaganda of such primordial cruelties as hatred of the aliens, militancy, isolationism and xenophobic nationalist solidarity. Ecological concerns of the present time (respect for nature) are being hijacked by the new pagans and recruited into their complete disavowal of the principles and norms of civilization.

Therefore, the proper analysis of genuine East Slavic cults and mythology appears important also in the context of clear seeing the alleged basement of the growing neo-pagan movements.