The Mythological Chronotype and Russian Epic Hero: the Philosophical and Cultural Analysis

Russian bylina (epic) is a unique piece of folk arts that lies at the juxtaposition with archaic myth, fairy-tale and story. Bylina is of special interest for philosophy, culture science, history, religion science, psychology and other liberal arts. Bylina is a unique type of ancient song-legend that narrates about the actual historic events, as well as mythological images and presentations. Chronotype (which provides a link between space and time coordinates) serves as a basic mythologeme of bylinas. The main character of bylina – Bogatyr – is a mythological image of a hero. Bogatyr’s age remains unchanged and conserved as that of other main mythological characters. Bylinas’ Bogatyrs are subject to nothing else but their own mythological course of time. Bogatyrs are similar to Ancient Greek and Scandinavian gods, whose
age is preserved permanently. The present study aims at determining the specific correlation between myth and bylina in the context of philosophical-culture science analysis, basing on archetypical approach by K. G. Jung. Structural and contextual peculiarities of bylinas indicate the presence of the mythological archetypes (universal inherent elements of the collective consciousness), symbols and mythologemes which enable understanding the content and importance of the
narration for archaic consciousness of ancient Slavs. Bylina is to some extent a transformed mythological material. The main characters of a classical Russian bylina are completely various images, each having its unique origin, native town,
possessing a set of properties, weak and strong traits. The main features of these characters are loyalty to motherland and people, unselfi shness, bravery, spiritual strength. Bogatyr exists as long as state and folk being remain actual.