Eleazar Moiseevich Meletinskii (also MeletinskyorMeletinskij; Russian: Елеаза́р Моисе́евич Мелети́нский; 22 October 1918, Kharkiv – 17 December 2005, Moscow) was a Russian scholar famous for his seminal studies of folklore, literature, philology and the history and theory of narrative; he was one of the major figures of Russian academia in those fields.[1]
The traditions of the mythological narration, dealt with the figures of the ancestors-heroes civilizers, and their comic-demoniac doublets.[2]Bakhtin summarized Meletinsky's analysis in his work on Rabelais:
This double aspect of the world and of human life [the existence of a second world and life outside officialdom] existed even at the earliest stages of cultural development, in the folkloreofprimitive peoples. Coupled with the cults which were serious in tone and organization were other, comic cults which laughed and scoffed at the deity ("ritual laughter"); coupled with serious myths were comic and abusive ones; coupled with heroes were their parodies and doublets. These comic rituals and myths have attracted the attention of folklorists.
In his 1963 work "Origins of Heroic Epic: early forms and archaic monuments", Meletinsky studied and compared elements of four ancient civilizations: Karelian-Finnish (pp. 95–155), Caucasian (156-246), Turkic-Mongolian (247-374) and Sumerian-Akkadian (375-422).[7] Here the author examines very ancient myths and their role in the formation of the archaic epic.[8] Among the discussed ones is the Alpamysh, ancient Turkic epic.[9]
Meletinskii also makes an interesting analysis of comicdoublets (particularly in "Primary sources epic" pp. 55–58, bibliography included).[10]
The book also contains a bibliography (pp. 449–459), Primary sources epic (21-94).
1963, Proiskhozhdenie geroicheskogo éposa. Rannie formy i arkhaicheskie pamiatniki (meaning "The origins of the heroic epic: early forms and archaic monuments"). Moscow. (462 pages) ISBN5-02-018476-4[2][3][4](in Russian)
1964 Primitive heritage in archaic epics, Reports of the International Congress of anthropological and ethnological sciences, Moscou : Nauka.
1976, Poetika Mifa
1977 Mif i istoricheskaia poetika folklora (Mythe et la poétique historique du folklore), Moscou : Nauka.
1986, Vvedenie v istoričeskuû poétiku éposa i romana. Moscow, Nauka.(in Russian)
Introduzione alla poetica storica dell'epos e del romanzo (1993) (in Italian)
Dostoevskii v Svete Istoricheskoi Poetiki;
1996, MELETINSKY E. M. (1) ; BELMONT N. La poétique historique du folklore narratif (The historic poetry of folklore narratives); journal: Ethnologie française ISSN0046-2616; 1996, vol. 26, no 4, pp. 573–747 (dissem.), pp. 611–618 (in French)
