Eleazar Moiseevich Meletinskii (alsoMeletinsky orMeletinskij;Russian:Елеаза́р Моисе́евич Мелети́нский; 22 October 1918,Kharkiv – 17 December 2005,Moscow) was a Russian scholar famous for his seminal studies offolklore,literature,philology and thehistory andtheory of narrative; he was one of the major figures of Russian academia in those fields.[1]
He was Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities atRussian State University for the Humanities for several years until his death.[1]
The traditions of the mythological narration, dealt with the figures of the ancestors-heroes civilizers, and their comic-demoniac doublets.[2]Bakhtin summarized Meletinsky's analysis in his work on Rabelais:
This double aspect of the world and of human life [the existence of a second world and life outside officialdom] existed even at the earliest stages of cultural development, in thefolklore ofprimitive peoples. Coupled with thecults which were serious in tone and organization were other,comic cults whichlaughed andscoffed at the deity ("ritual laughter"); coupled with seriousmyths were comic and abusive ones; coupled with heroes were their parodies and doublets. These comic rituals and myths have attracted the attention of folklorists.
Meletinsky also citesFrejdenbergArchived 2007-09-27 at theWayback Machine's analysis of the comicalter egos of the heroes.[3]
In a class-based society,ritual laughter inpopular culture creates an anti-clerical world of feasts, playful parody, andcarnivals.[4]
Hermes is adeifiedtrickster, andUlysses, the main character of theOdyssey, has amatrilinear descent from Hermes.[5] In theLegendary Troy the mythological element also includes comic moments.[6]
In his 1963 work "Origins of Heroic Epic: early forms and archaic monuments", Meletinsky studied and compared elements of four ancient civilizations:Karelian-Finnish (pp. 95–155),Caucasian (156-246),Turkic-Mongolian (247-374) andSumerian-Akkadian (375-422).[7] Here the author examines very ancient myths and their role in the formation of the archaicepic.[8] Among the discussed ones is theAlpamysh, ancientTurkic epic.[9]
Meletinskii also makes an interesting analysis ofcomicdoublets (particularly in "Primary sources epic" pp. 55–58, bibliography included).[10]
The book also contains a bibliography (pp. 449–459), Primary sources epic (21-94).
