Shapovalov (ethnographic group of Russians)

Shapovalov is an ethnographic group of Russians living in the southwest of the Bryansk and in the east of the Mogilev regions. Dribin , an urban-type settlement in the Mogilev region Novy Ropsk, is a village in the Bryansk region, considered to be one of the places of compact residence of the Shapoval.

The famous folklorist and ethnographer E.R. Romanov , who published a book about Shapulov in 1901, believes that Shapovalism arose in the Dribin region in the 18th century. They named Shapovalov from the word “hat”, although mostly craftsmen made felt boots and mittens from sheep’s wool ^[1] .

The craft was considered to be a litter: in mid-September, when bread was harvested from the fields, the slaughter went to towns and villages to earn money. We walked in two. Masters took simple tools, walked through the villages and felted felt boots on order. Where they stayed, they fed in that house and provided housing. If they were treated badly, they could take revenge, so the local population was afraid of them. Worked in Belarus, Ukraine and southern Russia. The life of a wandering artisan was full of dangers - robbers could take money, police could arrest, beat and rob no worse than robbers. Therefore, they united in artels with rather strict internal rules and a special dialect that was only clear to them.

Katrushnitsky plumeria

The Shapoval people came up with their own conditional language - “Katrushnitsa plaster” (Katruha - cap, lemezen - tongue), which includes 905 words with which they communicate. According to one version, Shapalovsky lemenen is the vocabulary of forest robbers. Researchers found its traces already in the 17th century (it was proved that the lemezen has Greek, Turkic and Finno-Ugric roots, includes Jewish and Gypsy words), and a hundred-odd years ago a small Shapoval-Russian was published in the magazine " Kievskaya Starina " dictionary. The creator of the manual, Fyodor Nikolaychik, noticed the similarity of the plaster with the language spoken by vagrant lyric singers, regulars in the markets. Half of its vocabulary is made up of nouns, another quarter - verbs. Adjectives, adverbs and pronouns are few, and official words are completely absent. The grammatical structure of Lemesen is Russian, and sentences are structured in a similar way. "Lemesen’s dictionary was divided into 13" subgroups. "For example, atmospheric and physical phenomena were indicated: rain - rot, snow - sivor, autumn - shusen, night - kimka, midnight — kimka’s flock, etc. Adjectives sounded interesting: young — florid, big — mongrel, thin — lazy, and so on. Romanov writes about Katrushnitsky lemezen — “They use their clay potter shapoval only outside the house, in working absenteeism, and never they don’t speak it at home. This is done, firstly, from the unwillingness to profane him (sic), and secondly, from the fear that local Jews who exploit, as elsewhere, the dark masses would not study it. to family members who are not involved in escapism ” In Soviet times, the Shapoval dialect did not degrade, but began to develop: words like“ collective farm ”,“ tractor ”,“ car ”,“ policeman ”, etc. appeared in the lemeza.