This dissertation is devoted to studying of the Marusya Churai's songs and connection "the legend" about this personage to historical reality. This work traces research that his been done on the subject starting with the first written account of "the legend" to papers written within the 20th centurie. It has been discovered that P. Phylypovych first formulated a scientific hypothesis in the 1920's. Though G. Nudha tried in the middle of the 1960's to reconstruct Phylypovych's scientific work, he failed to reach his main goal, which was to prove to the Ukrainian literary community that Marusya Churai is a made-up person. Due to the active work of L. Kaufman, this was finally proved, although L. Kaufman popularized, unfortunately his own amplified version of "the legend" instead of bringing to light existing scien-tific research of the story. The work also formulates and proves a hypothesis concerning the "intelligentsia's" nature of "the legend" and dates it to the beginning of the 19th cen-tury. In thetradition of Marusya Churai we observe an uncharacteristic connection between folklore and literature. The hypothetical "legend" that originated among the Ukrainian intelligentsia became the basis for a historic novel by O. Shakhovskoy en-titled "Marusya, Ukrainian Sapho", written in 1839. This novel, in turn, became the basis of the tradition about Marusya Churai and related literary works of the 19th and 20th centuries. Shakhovskoy's novel's relation to Khmelnychyna story, which was popular in Russia during the first half of the 19th century; its use of Ukrainian ethno-graphic and folklore sources; and its following of the romantic tradition of W. Scott are all typical traits of romantic literature of that period. There are common traits between the traditions of the 17th century song writer, Marusya Churai, and the 17 th century Cossack historian and "secretary" of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Samijlo Zorka. Both of these traditions belong to the Kmelnychyna epoch and lack any documental evidence to confirm the existence of these people. The traditions of Marusya Churai and the 17th century Cossack song writer, Semen Klymovsky, developed similarly over the 19th century, until Klymovsky's work was found. Comparing these three traditions, we come to the conclusion that there is a "typological similarity" between them (V. Zhyhrmunskiy). By 17th century tradition, a woman was called by her father's name. Therefore, the Marusya in Shakhovskoy's novel should have been called "Churayivna". G. Kvitky-Osnovyanenko's works, a contemporary of Shakhovskoy, confirm the keeping of this tradition for unmarried women all the way up to the 19th century. In documents dating to the 16th and 17th centuries from Kyiv and Poltava and their sur-rounding regions, the name "Marya" can be found, whereas the name "Marusya" is used in folk songs and fictional works. One can find instances of the last name "Churai" in the works including "The Song of Churai" and "Zaporozhskaya Starina" by I. Sreznevskiy, which have their origin from "A History ofthe Ruses," which is the more historically reliable of the three. Certain observations concerning the texts of the songs attributed to Marusya Churai confirm G. Nudha's theory that О. Shakhovskoy took these songs from M. Maksimovych's collection of songs entitled "Ukrainian Songs" (1827). A study of the rhyme of the songs attributed to Marusya Churai reveal their folk style. Eight of the ten songs Shakhovskoy attributed to girl were written using kolomyika verse, which was widely used in folk lyrics only of 19th century. Traditional formulae (as defined by M. Perry and G. Maltzev) of folk lyrics of the 17th century and later - at the end of the 18th and the 19th centuries - can be found in songs, attributed to Marusya Churai. Formula and eidological analyses show that this songs were composed at the end of the 18th century and beginning of the 19th century, and not in the 17th century, as according to "the legend". The significant number of similarities between the songs attributed to Marusya Churai and songsre-corded in Western Ukraine in the 17th century (the manuscript collection of the Chartoryiski Museum) show that the former could not be composed in the 17th cen-tury by one person. It would have been impossible for the songs to have become so widespread that parts of them could be found in other songs already in the 17th cen-tury. The songs ascribed to Marusya Churai in Shakhovskoy's account can be called "the small encyclopedia" of the formula system and poetical language of Ukrainian lyrics.
