A sore point in the study of anomalous phenomena is the so-called trust problem. How reliable are the modern stories of people who claim that they have been in contact with aliens, gnomes, elves, or with evil spirits?
If we study folklore, then we can learn about many similar stories in past centuries. And when people talked about it, they swore that everything was true. At the same time, each narrator knew and indicated when, where and with whom this event happened. And very often this happened to the narrator's neighbors, his relatives or himself, and thus the stories had a lot of detailed details.
Folklorist V. Zinoviev from Irkutsk, compiler of the collection "Mythological stories of the Russian population of Eastern Siberia" has collected many such stories. Here he is talking with a peasant. The first thing that he tells him:
- I am an unbeliever, but here you have to believe.
And then he expounds a terrible mystical incident, which his fellow countrymen witnessed with him. Specific names are given. Thus, the credibility of the message can be verified by cross-examining witnesses. Which Zinoviev does right there. And he is convinced that the testimonies of the witnesses coincide in details. That is, these people are telling the truth.
Retelling dozens of stories about encounters with evil spirits, Zinoviev comments on one of them as follows: the narrator sketched a plan of the area on paper, “here he clarified how it was, who was coming from where and where the meeting took place. All this gave the story an indisputable authenticity, really fascinated”. The folklorist throws up his hands in bewilderment: "How to combine the undoubted atheism of the narrator with the content and manner of the story?"
In Turgenev's story "Bezhin Meadow", peasant boys tell each other stories they have heard from adults about mermaids, brownies and other evil spirits.
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Another well-known collector of folklore, P. Bazhov, in his essay "Near the Old Mine", tells about a conversation with an elderly Ural citizen Vasily Khmelinin. The conversation took place on the porch of a guardhouse near the mine's wood storage.
Having heard from Khmelinin several stories about the tricks of evil spirits in the vicinity of the mine, Bazhov asks him a question: they say, are not all this empty fairy tales? No, the old man replies, “not fairy tales, but tales and visits are called. Otherwise, hey, and not everyone can speak, with caution it is necessary."
Bazhov immediately remarks: “The old man, apparently, wanted to consider everything as the truth himself. He spoke as if he had really seen and heard everything himself. When the places visible from the guardhouse were mentioned, Khmelinin showed with his hand: "Over there he fell down …" Khmelinin, - emphasizes Bazhov, - knew the life of the mine in every detail."
Folklorist P. Rybnikov describes the following scene on the banks of the Onega River: “Do people often fall into the hands of evil spirits here?” - I asked on Shui-navoloka. In response to my question, residents of the region gave me dozens of examples both from the past and from recent days, they told me cases that they had heard or had seen themselves."
Folklorist S. Maksimov in his book "Unclean, Unknown and Cross Force" highlights the most important feature of Russian reports of contacts with strange creatures. He writes: "Stories of this kind are extremely common, and the surprising monotony of the particulars of this phenomenon is striking."
V. Propp fixes his attention on the same in "The Historical Roots of a Fairy Tale": "The similarity is much wider and deeper than it seems to the naked eye."
Folklorist N. Onchukov recorded at the beginning of the 20th century a lot of "contact subjects", often similar even in the smallest details. Drawing a line under them, he writes: “As can be seen from the above stories, there is nothing special, extraordinary in these incidents, and all incidents and encounters with goblin, devils, watermen, dead people happened either with the storytellers themselves, or with well-known or very close them people."
E. Pomerantseva from Moscow University, the head of many modern folklore expeditions, also claims that any message about contact with evil spirits “always has the character of a witness testimony: the narrator either reports his own experience, or refers to the authority of the person from whom he I heard about this case. " Pomerantseva insists: each such story "is an ingenuous testimony."
She cites, for example, such a testimony of a peasant woman about her meeting with evil spirits: “I saw myself, such a tremendous, immense one. His hat is so big, wide."
And also such a testimony: a person who told about how he saw the devil at the age of ten claims: "By God, there was such a case!"
Again, we read in Zinoviev: "I did not believe anything, but here I heard a voice, I saw it myself." The participant of the event does not doubt the reliability of the incident.
Stories of this kind have long been nicknamed by the Russian people bylichkas, former allys, and visits.
Folklorists B. and Yu. Sokolov wrote at the beginning of the 20th century: with legends of this type “a certain share of faith in the reality of the incident is combined. It is not for nothing that they are sometimes called "bylichki"."
Pomerantseva points out: “The word“bylichka”was overheard by the brothers B. and Yu. Sokolov among the Belozersk peasants, used and commented on in a well-known collection and, with their light hand, entered the practice of Russian folklorists. The "witness" is a peculiar "lyrical hero" of the story. His shock at meeting the creatures of the other world is always present in her."
"The peasant Kuzmin told me and swore", - the folklorist P. Efimenko noticed the fervent god of the peasant (they say, all this is true!) In the book "Demonology of the inhabitants of the Arkhangelsk province", published in 1884.
"The information about bylichki that have come down to us from the first half of the 19th century," Zinoviev reported, "also has the character of stating the people's idea of the goblin."
N. Onchukov, like the Sokolov brothers, noted that stories about evil spirits, in contrast to fantastic fairy tales, are in the nature of information about real incidents and are called by the locals "past".
I. Karnaukhova, who collected and published in 1934 "Tales and Legends of the Northern Territory", also insists on the non-fiction of reports of meetings with unknown creatures. "The very term 'existential'," she notes, "suggests that the narrator considers the event he is narrating to be a reality."
The same conclusion is made by another famous collector of folklore D. Balashov, who published "Tales of the Tersk Coast of the White Sea" in 1970: "Every story … always begins with a kind of" real "beginning: who, where, when, with whom happened, who told me."
From the book by A. Priima "At the Crossroads of Two Worlds"
