Studies from the Polish-Ukrainian Folklore Borderland in the Scientific Work of Mykhailo Lesiv

The article is a review of the works of Ukrainian folklore published by the Polish scholar Mykhailo Lesiv (1928-2016), who is known primarily as a Slavic studier and dialectologist. He is the author of scientific works in the history and culture of language. Studies dedicated to folklore, inter-ethnic contacts, folklore aspects of linguistic interaction on the Polish–Ukrainian borderland occupy a significant place in his scientific heritage. He is also the author of studies presenting folklore materials from the Lublin region and Podlasie. In the 1950s, while collecting dialect material, Lesiv casually recorded oral literature from the inhabitants of the Podillian village of Stara Huta in Buszacki County. Those people had been relocated to the territory of the Western Voivodeships of Poland to the villages of the Szczecin Voivodeship (now it is the West Pomeranian Voivodeship) in the 1945–1946. The collected factual material was published in a number of the researcher’s studies. Cohabitation over the centuries influenced the folklore of both ethnoi. Ukrainian oral literature became an integral part of the spiritual culture of Poles, who incorporated a number of systemic features of the local dialects and Ukrainian folklore into their speech. Characterizing the situation of folklore usage on the Polish–Ukrainian borderland, the scholar concluded that the works of oral literature partially continue to function among the representatives with a conscious belonging to both Polish and Ukrainian people. These works can have Polish, Ukrainian and even mixed linguistic form. Regardless of the language in which folklore texts are performed, they have become a common property of the borderland cultural space. The existence of linguistically mixed folklore texts is one of the main external distinguishing features determining the specific identity of the culture of the Polish–Ukrainian borderland. Folklore bilingualism is a consequence of borrowing, as well as of the two-way translation of works, where certain sentences, phrases or separate words have been preserved in the original state.