Folk songs and small genres of folklore in A.S. Pushkin’s tragedy «Boris Godunov»

The article considers folk songs, proverbs and sayings, motifs and images of the Russian folklore, which are creatively used in A.S. Pushkin’s tragedy “Boris Godunov”: to characterize the situation, to recreate historical colouring, folk customs, to reveal the personality and psychology of a character, the features of his / her speech. The purpose of the study is to establish the role of folklore genres in the structure of “Boris Godunov”, their artistic functions in Pushkin’s tragedy, their connection with the characters and the plot situations of the play. The article uses modern principles and methods of studying the problem of “literature and folklore”, formulated in numerous studies of domestic literary scholars and folklorists, including the works of the author of this article. The article concludes that such qualities of Pushkin’s style as accuracy, clarity and expressiveness come in many respects from the Russian folk poetry. Pushkin’s mastery of the poetics and stylistics of folklore contributed to the development of remarkable simplicity and at the same time of the aphoristic nature of the writing, which characterize the whole tragedy “Boris Godunov”.