Folk Stories About Covid-19 as a Phenomenon of Modern Urban Folklore

The article analyzes folk stories about COVID-19 recorded in the urban environment during March–December 2020. The authors identify different varieties of “COVID” prose (the cases from medical practice, “confessions” of the people on the way to recovery, “hypotheses” of the virus’s origin, gossips about the planned chipping, traditional recipes for “the Chinese infection”, etc.), determine their subject matter (the origin of the virus, the duration of the pandemic, methods of COVID treatment, the vaccine’s effectiveness, means of transmission, etc.); distinctive features of oral stories are also given: the content’s relevance, the responsiveness to new hypotheses and versions of the virus’s origin and treatment, the mobility of genre’s boundaries. The tales of medical workers, telling about extraordinary incidents in medical practice, combine the tragic and the comic features. Their characters are doctors, showing miracles of endurance and selflessness, and “sufferers” — patients who are worthy of respect and sympathy. Narratives existing in a vast sociocultural space are based both on personal experience and on information obtained from “official sources” (mass media, Internet, medical workers). The emergence and active development of “COVID” folklore is an indication of folklore’s dominant features to respond vividly to changes in human life and society and acts as a clear demonstration of the sustainable development of folk traditions at the present stage

Aesthetics · Art · Folklore · Literature · Narrative · Pandemic · Political science · Sociocultural evolution · Sociology · Sympathy · Anthropology · Discourse Analysis and Cultural Communication · History · Language, Communication, and Linguistic Studies · Medicine · Psychology · Social Psychology · Sociopolitical Dynamics in Russia