“I know all the terrible truth only”: urban legends about industrial objects, catacombs and protracted constructions in Perm

Abstract

The article presents full-text records of contemporary urban legends collected in 2018 during the authors’ fieldwork in Perm. These narratives reflect typical urban plots and stereotypes. Their sources are not local oral tradition alone, but also fiction and popular non-fiction literature, mass-media, special websites and Internet message boards. Part of these folk texts are stories with a stable plot, but most of these narratives are poorly structured and function as rumors and gossips. The data is divided into three thematic groups: stories about catacombs under the city (mines and underground passages), typically concerning a variety of objects - from medieval strongholds, such as kremlins, to small village churches; tales about inhabited houses and objects of infrastructure (an especially remarkable set of those revolves around the so called Death Tower - the building of the regional police office - considered a smaller copy of the main MSU building, originally intended for a local university campus); narratives about factories, “secret” industrial incidents and possible technogenic disasters. On the one hand, modern urban legends form and express a “sense of place” (in other words, local identity); on the other hand, they explicate typical industrial city anxieties.