Neyilo I. The folk prose of Kupyanschina as told to Petro Ivanov: the plot, the theme, the character.

The Dissertation is devoted to the research of the scientific heritage of Petro Ivanov. The life and creative activities of the scholar are depicted on the bases of his published works, archives sources, epistolary. The author of the research ascertained the main principles of P.Ivanov as a folklorist. P.Ivanov discovered Kupyanschina as a specific territory of coexistence of various ethnic cultures and predominating of Ukrainian culture tradition in it. The scholar regards folklore as one of the most important components of the forming of national consciousness, and bound it with historical and cultural national development. He came to a conclusion that folklore prose is an inexhaustible source of the condition of the character of ethnic, its history, philosophy, and cultural level. He realized the necessity of grouping the folklore materials for the folklore studies. Having taken into the account the experience of his predecessors, the scholar had made attempts to systematize and classify the collected materials, grouped and published more than twenty folklore works. Ivanov's folklore heritage is represented by various genre collections. The folk tales, the legends, the omens etc were analyzed in the context of study of peculiarity of poetics system of the folklore prose. The collection of folk tales, to the author of the research's opinion, is of the greatest value among Ivanov's folklore works. This work demonstrates the original, authentic texts, which have no analogy in the published famous fairy-tale collections of ХІХ century. The materials of folklore prose, written by Ivanov, have some specific particulars in the system of plots, themes and characters. Consequently it is valuable for the folklorists for their integrated notion about collecting history of Ukrainian mythological epos. The multidimensional inheritance of Ivanov is an inalienable constituent of the Ukrainian folklore studies of the ХІХ - ХХ centuries. The Ivanov's collection of folklore prose is regarded as a momentous part of the Ukrainian and all-Slavic folklore studies.