Bloggers Karamazov has posted an interview about what sounds like a very interesting book:

Today Robin Feuer Miller sat down with Barbara Henry to discuss her book, Tales from the Netherworld: The Katabasis in Russian Literature, which came out with Northern Illinois University Press this month.
[…]

RFM: I have to confess! I needed to look up the word “katabasis.” Possibly others might too, so could you give a quick, handy definition of it before we go further in our conversation?

BH: Strictly speaking, a katabasis is a descent, understood in the literary sense as a descent to the underworld, a key stop on the heroic journey. But almost as soon as you define it, questions arise. Is Odysseus’s visiting Hades a katabasis if he actually sails over Ocean and makes blood offerings at Hades’ entrance? Isn’t that a nekyia, a summoning of ghosts? Is Gilgamesh’s journey really a katabasis if he doesn’t make a descent, and there don’t seem to be any, well, dead people, in the place he visits? There’s no normative model of a katabasis, even in the literary works that supposedly codified it. I define it as a journey in which the protagonist meets death in its own kingdom. Which might be underground, or in the forest, or even in your own head. Or mine. Definitely mine.

RFM: I already alluded to the unusually wide-ranging aspect of your book, whether through time, genre, or space. At the same time, you had to make difficult choices, for example, in the first two chapters on the magic tale and the memorate, how did you choose one version of a tale or memorate over another? What was something you had to leave out that you wished you could include?

BH: The chapters on folktales were a challenge, and not only because folklore and folk literature are disciplines in their own right, and have methodologies quite distinct from the study of modern literature. Folktales themselves straddle ancient and modern worlds and literatures, and because of this longevity, I was interested in the kind of transformations that they exhibit, not just in terms of their plots, where transformations are part and parcel of magic tales in particular, but in their forms. I believe that katabatic narratives not only mark historical changes in the world without, but generate formal change in the literary works that they inhabit. I focused on the best-known versions of a particular tale, not only because they’d likely be known to a reader, but because the most widely-reprinted versions of a tale are that way because they themselves are poised between tradition and the innovation that the katabasis generates. This was easier to do with a magic tale like “The Magic Swan-Geese” (“Gusi-lebedi,” 113), which conflates characters in a way that is entirely unlike other tales of its type. Those differences in a given story to our idea of what a magic tale should look like are the very things that suggest a katabatic influence.

It is also challenging to work with the memorate, best known now as the “urban legend.” The overlap and interchange between the worlds of the living and the dead are rendered in the memorate as a textual exchange. I looked at memorates that exhibited a particularly marked porosity in their use of literary intertexts, “dead” stories that were dead because they were printed and unchanging, versus the memorate, which weaves in a bit of Gogol’s “The Nose” or Zhukovsky’s “Lyudmila” for its own purposes, animating them in unexpected and ghoulish ways. The memorate is such an interesting form that I wish I could have looked at how they’re operating today online, especially on social media, but this period and mode of circulation was beyond my purview.

RFM: In Chapter 2, “A Local Call: The Memorate,” I was fascinated by your discussion of how Russian peasant cultures distinguished between the benevolent and the malevolent dead, and how there was a belief that the earth would reject the bodies of the “unclean,” so they were often dumped in ravines or exposed in wasteland swamps. It is such a chilling insight, especially as you move forward in your analysis to the Soviet period. But I wondered, too, about the building of St. Petersburg on a swamp? You write compellingly about St. Petersburg as a kind of underworld in several of your chapters, but I was wondering in particular if those engaged in constructing the city experienced something of the uncanny and if it was reflected in either magic tales or memorates of that period.)

BH: I first encountered this idea of the earth as a moral force that rejects evildoers in the film Repentance (Pokayanie, 1984), which I saw in a sweltering Leningrad cinema in the summer of 1988. I’m not aware, though, of memorates on the subject of St. Petersburg’s dead, mostly because a lot of the legends collected by folklorists focus on rural areas, especially on remote regions of the Russian north. I could be mistaken about Petersburg memorates, particularly if they’re circulating today in electronic form. It would be interesting to see if they borrow from Pushkin’s, Gogol’s, and Dostoevsky’s uncanny Petersburg. Maybe the “Petersburg Myth” is itself a memorate, for its collective construction and indelible impress on how we see the living city of St. Petersburg through the eyes of the dead.

They go on to discuss Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island, Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Dead House, and many other things. I was, of course, familiar with katabasis (we discussed it in this thread and probably elsewhere), but I don’t think I’d run into memorate, which the OED (entry from 2001) defines as “= memorat n.” even though it is attested earlier (1948: “Memorates are narratives of personal happenings which may pass into the tradition as memorial sagns” [sic!] vs. 1965: “Whether to include memorats in classificatory schemes is vexing, for these special stories..do not qualify as a possession of the folk at large”); memorat is defined as “Cultural Anthropology. In folklore studies: a narrative relating personal experience,” and the etymology is:

< German Memorat (C. W. von Sydow in Volkskundliche Gaben, John Meier zum Siebzigsten Geburtstage Dargebracht (1934) 261) < classical Latin memorātus, past participle of memorāre (see memorate v.). Compare earlier memorate n.

I googled that 1948 citation to make sure it wasn’t a typo and discovered that a fuller version of the sentence is “Memorates are narratives of personal happenings which may pass into the tradition as memorial sagns [Erinnerungssagen]”; I can’t imagine who thought it was a good idea to render sagen as “sagns,” but such is life in academia. The chapter title “A Local Call” refers to a joke, relayed at the start of the interview, about a call to Moscow from Hell being local. And I really have to watch Repentance (მონანიება) again; it’s been several decades since my first and only viewing.