This book by the renowned Russian linguist and semiotician Nikolai Mikhailov Николай Александрович Михайлов (1967–2010) is now published posthumously, more than ten years after his death. Presented ...is analytic overview of numerous past studies on Slavic and Balto-Slavic mythology. Included are works written by scholars of Slavic mythology based on written sources as well as on findings from folklore, linguistics, and archaeology. The first analysed is the work of the Lusatian-Serbian author Michael Frenzl on Slavic idols, which was written as early as 1691 but not published until 1719. It is followed by treatises and monographs that span across three centuries. The so-called original sources (reports of chroniclers, archaeological sources) may be incomplete and obscure, yet they are in this book again critically analysed. The author reconstructed the mythology of various Slavic nations partly also through the remnants of paganism that have survived to this day in various and often highly modified forms.
The cultural genome.Space and its ideograms of the mythical storyAs a biological genome determines our biological appearance, so too the cultural genome determines our cultural expression. This is a ...set of findings about the functioning of the universe and rules derived from them. When people verbalize these findings in a narrative, a mythical story occurs. A mythical landscape is a form of the cultural landscape that people created in accordance with their mythical conceptions that they could master the forces of nature with its help. From individual structures of the text fragments of Slavic folk traditions, a composite story in many versions is made, which explains the mechanism of renewal and describes the cyclical changes of the nature. People were using this mythical story as a mental model, which was materialized in specific spaces as spatial ideograms, which are discussed in the next part of the book (‘The cultural genome. Space and its ideograms of the mythical story’).
The book 'In the moonlight glow. Outlines of mythic characters in the villages of Lokev and Prelože in the context of Slavic mythology' is a rarity on the European scale in the field of pre-Christian ...beliefs. What makes it so valuable is that it is a first-hand record of these beliefs, as they were told to the author by people close to him, grandmothers, grandfathers and villagers, who preserved their old-faith beliefs and rituals until the last century. The book is therefore an inexhaustible source of old- faith practices, beliefs, sacred places and other folklore traditions in the villages Lokev, Prelože and their immediate neighborhood. As such, it is one of the main sources of study in Slavic mythology, as well as in general and monument to the integration of karst-nature and its people.
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