Research of the Lands along Viliya and Berezina in the Books of the Counts Tyshkevich: The Formation of Regional Cultures of the Empire

Abstract

The article discusses the results of expeditions to study the Belarusian lands along the Viliya and Berezina rivers, conducted in the 1850s by Counts Konstantin and Eustachy Tyshkevich. The details of the historical epic of 1812 were stored in the memory of the inhabitants of the coastal lands, oral history conveyed the details of the death of Napoleon’s army on the Berezina River near the village of Studenka. In addition, there were a large number of burial mounds in these territories, and the aforementioned historians assumed that they would fi nd evidence of the connections of these lands with ancient European civilization during excavations. However, the expeditions discovered a large amount of fundamentally different material, which radically changed the results of the Tyshkeviches’ research work. A deep layer of folk culture and oral history was discovered, in which the events of past wars and other events of centuries ago “lived”. This led to a change in the status and place of folklore, ethnographic culture of Belarus, and most importantly, raised questions about the role and place of this part of the Russian Empire in the historical concepts of European and Russian development. An appeal to the folklore tradition in its song and ritual variants showed researchers the existence of a special folk culture, different from neighboring cultures. A comparative study (comparison with neighboring Eastern and Western European cultures) of national heroes and shrines, consideration of folk culture allowedus to raise the question of the existence and need to study regional culture.