Romanova O. Transformation of ideas about Forest Demonology in Ukrainian Traditional Beliefs of the ХІХ – ХХ century.

The dissertation is devoted to the study of forest folk demonology. The key base is considered, the state of development of the problem is determined. The synthetical overall study of traditional Ukrainian beliefs and their customs related to the characters of the forest demonology was conducted for the first time. This research was made the systematic finding and comparison of semantic fields of male, female and children’s characters. The extensive use of resources in ethnology, linguistics and history of culture gave the author the opportunity to discover the character and the level of people’s perception and learning of the forest as their environment, to reconstruct the mechanisms and processes of its spiritualization, sacralization of natural components, and the interaction between them in traditional culture. The appearance of such characters as kikimora and lykhomanka, odmin and cursed children was reasoned. The marginal type of forest demonology characters was highlighted and their role in the paradigm of mythological perception of bearers of traditional culture was discovered. In the result of the investigation of male forest demonological characters, there was conducted the comparative analysis of their two basic groups in the connection to their relation to the locus of forest: 1) constant and ancient – Lisovyk, Chugaister, Vodyanyi; 2) marginal which become the part of the forest world only for the time of their transformation (werewolves). The special attention was paid to ancient characters’ deep zoomorphism including Lisovyk, Chugaister, Vodyanyi which can point to their archaic origin and reveals their night origin.