A Love Story by a Distinguished Russian Old-Believer Storyteller from Latgalia

Abstract

The strong and vibrant Russian Old Believer community of Eastern Latvia (Latgalia district) produced many gifted artists, writers, poets and storytellers. Some of them went beyond the traditional topical limitations of Orthodox Christianity and wrote poetry and fiction on non-religious matters, such as love, family relations, history and the like. This research aims to bring to light one particular short story The Forced Love written by a self-madeauthor of Old Believer origin, Maria Pakhomovna Blokhina (1926-2010) to a broader readership. The story has been heavily influenced by Russian folk tales and contains valuable insights of the local ethnography and dialect. This study offers an examination of the story's origins, plot, characters and language and aims to demonstrate the literary and folk heritage of the story, to demonstrate the story’s ethnographic relevance of the period and to examine how the deliberate use of the local dialect by the author reveals her creativity in producing a text close to the style of a folk tale.