The Unity of Man and Nature in Mythological Worldviews: Analyzing Russian, Tuvan and Bashkir Folklore Texts

Introduction. The article examines origins of ethnic culture as a worldview system. It makes the first attempt to review pre-scientific (profane) knowledge and ideas of man about the world and existence, coexistence with natural forces, animals and plants, worships of personified spirits represented in folk art and lore. Goals. The work outlines a linguocultural interpretation of how pagan ideas about the world as a special linguocultural model would be verbalized (in particular, a thematic block of the ‘man-and-nature’ model), the latter be expressed in folk narratives, ethnic markers and paremias of the Russian, Tuvan and Bashkir languages. Materials and methods. The study focuses on Russian, Tuvan and Bashkir folktales, legends and proverbs that reflect anthropocentric perceptions of the surrounding reality. The linguoculturological method (or linguoculturological fields one of acc. to V.  Vorobiev) proves most instrumental in identifying certain cultural meanings and verbalized symbols of human understanding of the natural world determined by the system of ancient worldviews of Russian, Bashkir and Tuvan peoples — as manifested anthropological cultural codes in the analyzed texts, including paremias. The lexical-semantic and descriptive methods, those of comparative and diachronic analyses have been employed too. Results. Our linguocultural analysis reveals the paganism of Eastern Slavs as a set of mythological ideas from the pre-Christian era did find its reflections in the worldview of the Russian people: a naturalistic attitude towards nature entailed the endowment of objects of the material world with human traits. Traces of such understandings of the interaction between nature and man are still preserved in the everyday Russian linguistic picture of the world. In Bashkir mythology, animated descriptions of nature are traced in legends, rites, proverbs. Mythological ideas of Tuvans express the principle of unity between society and nature, while shamanism acts as a form of pagan beliefs proper. The paper resumes that elements of mythological worldviews related to archaic thinking at large and the whole lexical and paremiological corpora of the investigated languages still articulate archaic attitudes and cultural codes. The study describes a linguocultural mechanism of how mythological essentials are verbalized in Russian and Turkic (Bashkir, Tuvan) languages to reveal somewhat universal and ethnic features in worldviews of corresponding peoples.

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