Udmurt state university

I.Main part
1. The concept of children's folklore
1.1. The history of the emergence of children's folklore
Folklore is thousands of years old, passed down from generation to generation in the form of songs or legends. Folklore is constantly in the process of development and evolution. It is constantly evolving and changing with people's lives. However, the study of folklore began only about 200 years ago. Folkloristics as a science began with the study of adult folklore. Children did not arouse any interest among researchers of "verbal creativity." The enthusiasts of the study were the educated nobles. In folklore and folk culture, they tried to consider the echoes of the great historical past. By "the people" the first folklorists understood the exclusively illiterate peasantry.
The discovery of children's folklore in Russia took place only in the second half of the 19th century. The researchers realized that the children are like those naive illiterate peasants. They also have their own mythology , they are also illiterate, that is, their culture is not written, but mostly oral. They have their own beliefs, their own folklore texts, which exist only in their environment and are of value only there. Children have their own ritual folklore: from calendar calls (“Rain, rain, stop”) to “ mirilok ” (“Peace, make peace, make peace and don't fight anymore”). Having discovered literally under their noses a huge “country of children”, folklore that can be studied, researchers enthusiastically began research in this area, achieving the most significant results in the 1920s. [4].
However, in the 1930s the study of children's folklore actually came to naught and did not develop for several decades. At that time, folklore was perceived as the "art of the word", oral creativity of the working masses, which has a high ideological and artistic value. Children's folklore - strange, wild, having a dubious aesthetic value, fell out of favor in Soviet times. Of course, highly artistic epics and lyrical songs were declared treasures of national culture, while teasers, rhymes, fables and other genres of children's folklore fell out of sight of domestic researchers for a long time. At that time, the term "children's folklore" itself was usually understood not as "folklore for children", but as "folklore for children" (lullabies, pestles , nursery rhymes , jokes).
The second wave of popularity of children's folklore came in the 1980s-1990s. Children's folklore turned out to be of interest not only to researchers, but also to ordinary readers: for example, the anthology "Russian School Folklore" [2] , published in a book series with the characteristic title "Russian Hidden Literature", became a humanitarian bestseller. The fundamental difference between studies of this time and works on children's folklore of the 1920s. is that now the main object of study has become the folklore of urban schoolchildren, and not peasant children. Particular attention was paid to the recording and study of fundamentally new genres of children's folklore, such as horror stories and sadistic rhymes.
The attractiveness of children's folklore, both for researchers and for the inhabitants, lies in its eternal relevance. If traditional peasant folklore was always perceived as dying out and disappearing, then such problems never arose with children's folklore. Obviously, as long as children exist in nature, as long as they have the opportunity to communicate closely with each other, children's folklore will live and develop rapidly in any environment: whether it will be outdoor games of village children in the fresh air or teasers used by city children at school or on the Internet while communicating in social networks.
Another reason for the popularity of children's folklore is that each of us in a certain period of life was its bearer.
Children's folklore, like a sponge, absorbs the texts of the mass culture of its time, and this influence is very important to take into account. In this regard, children's jokes and rhymes are very indicative, the heroes of which regularly become actual characters of pop culture. For example, in the early 2000s a variant of the well-known counting rhyme “The month came out of the fog ...”, where the rapper Decl became the main character (“ Decl came out of the fog, / He took out the pager from his pocket. / The pager squeaked, Decl died, / Because Decl is a goof”).
Parody is also typical for children's culture, when a popular work of culture becomes the object of "remaking". In the late Soviet years, songs from children's films and cartoons were extremely popular sources of "alterations" (for example, the song "From a smile will become brighter for everyone" was remade as "Behemoth burst from a smile"). At present, the same processes are taking place: the characters of popular children's cartoons and TV shows (from Pokemon to fairies from the Winx Club ) become the heroes of children's folklore. Parodying popular culture texts is a creative process, a living language game that should be encouraged, even if the level of parody seems low.
The difference between children's folklore is that it is developing very dynamically. The generation of children is changing, their repertoire is changing, children's folklore is undergoing noticeable changes in the process of growing up a child. There is often a situation when a children's cartoon comes out on the screen, and after a couple of weeks its characters are in demand in new folklore texts. Despite constant renewal and development, some plots and forms of children's folklore turn out to be unusually stable and are passed down from generation to generation. Thus, we can say that children's folklore is both "ancient" and "forever young".

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