“Hospital Memory. 1945”: a soldier’s songbook by Dmitry Makaruk

The article deals with the handwritten songbook of 1945 of the Soviet army soldier Dzmitry Makaruk, found by Belarusian folklorists in 1948 during an expedition to the Brest region. The article provides a textual profile of the document and analyzes it in the framework of the written folklore tradition of the Great Patriotic War. Created in the hospital, Makaruk’s songbook offers some insight into a distinctive genre-thematic group of songs common in the hospital subculture of Soviet soldiers.It is noted that one of the aesthetic dominants of the songbook under consideration is album poetry. Speaking about the nature of this phenomenon, the author provides information about the emergence, spread and evolution of the tradition of manuscript collections in the East Slavic region. The author also provides examples of wartime folklore’s assimilation of pre-revolutionary and Soviet cultural texts. The focus is mainly on examples of non-canonical wartime folklore, which are analyzed from a historical and anthropological perspective. The author concludes that soldier’s love lyric is influenced by the evolution of gender stereotypes and transformation of the traditional lifestyle in the public consciousness of the new time.