WALKING DEAD IN THE LIFE OF EASTERN SLAVS: "MAGIA POSTHUMA" IN ANCIENT RUS AND VAMPIRISM IN PRE-REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA

From the period of Kievan Rus, there is earlier evidence of the belief in vampires than was found in the supposed homeland of vampires in southeastern Europe. The premise of this belief is the universal idea that after death, the soul is separated from the body. In the popular imagination, when the separation of the soul from the body of the deceased was not done peacefully or burial rites were not observed, making it possible to go to another world, this could lead to the return of the deceased, often in the form of a demonic entity. The old Russian word "upir" fell out of use in the Moscow state. However, it survived on the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Union and reappeared on the territory of modern Ukraine and Belarus as part of the Russian Empire. Therefore, the article discusses the question of how the belief in the walking dead was formed in Ancient Rus and in pre-revolutionary Russia. Initially, the harmful effects of these restless corpses were seen as the cause of epidemics such as plague and cholera, or droughts that led to hunger. Later, when it came to preserving traditional moral norms in gender relations, they resorted to the idea of devilish temptation. Nevertheless, from the point of view of Latin Europe, all forms of magic and superstition that contradicted the Enlightenment were considered barbaric and typical of the supposedly backward world of Slavs and Orthodoxy. The article develops the ideas formulated in the author’s book “History of the European myth of vampires”.