The mountains and the city in contemporary legends of Miass

Abstract

The paper reviews contemporary city legends collected in the Southern Ural in Miass and its vicinities, as recalled by informants of various social background (men and women, teenagers, adults and elderly people, of various education). Online persistence of such narratives - on message boards, thematic websites, social networks etc. - is as widespread as oral transmission is. These texts consider local geographical and sociocultural features of the area - mountains, lakes, defense industry sites. The most popular are the stories of “creepy places”, e.g. the legend of the “howling house”. City “creepy places” legends demonstrate that local tradition relies significantly upon the binary opposition of city center vs outskirts, in contrast to the “ups and downs” opposition of older cities (where the supernatural mostly resides in towers and cellars). Such legends are often telling of a local lake, pond or mountain. A distinct group of legends are those concerning the Ural mountain range; they emerged under significant influence of a defense enterprise, the Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau. The pragmatics of city legends is to make feel fear, to warn about danger or “to tame” certain space. As the result the analysis the following patterns are highlighted: local city legends are based on general folklore motives, the texts exist in the city environment without being associated with any specific social group, memorates have almost given way to fabulates, the texts are distributed both orally and on the Internet.