A City in the Epic Tale Picture of the World

The article analyses the city in the epic tale picture of the world. The emergence of Russian epic during the creation of statehood, which is inevitably marked by the development of cities, predetermined the urban flavour of the epic tale. Despite the variety of city names (astionyms), the epic tale presents a generalised idealised image of an epic tale city, whose architecture is distinguished by large dimensions and diverse rich decor. According to the rules of the epic tale world, the historico-ethnographic reality in the epic tale picture of the word is subjected to ‘re-coding’. The city in an epic tale is, first of all, a fortress behind whose walls one can find diplomatic, cultural-administrative and commercial life. The constituent parts of an epic tale city are a typified sequence of spatial objects, visited by the hero one by one: “the city wall”, “a wide (seven-verst) courtyard”, “holy churches, cathedrals”, residential buildings (“light reception halls”, “white stone chambers”, “golden-domed tower houses”), a room in them (“latticed entrance halls with jambs” etc.), a settlement (the commercial area in a city). Hyperbolic characteristics that perform the function of idealising the city in its description are not an exaggeration in the literal sense of the word, because they reflect the constant properties of the denotations of the epic (special, unreal) world. Folklore formulas with fixed epithets, which are the bearers and conduits of such traditional cultural meanings as the glorification and celebration of the beauty and grandeur of Russian cities embodying the Russian land, act as a specific language tool for representing the city in the epic tale picture of the world.