Folk Ballad: National Aspects of the Genre (Based on the Material of Russian Erzya, Moksha folklore)

Sharonova Elena Alexandrovna ORCID: 0000-0003-0221-4427 Doctor of Philology Professor, Department of Russian and Foreign Literature, National Research Mordovia State University 430034, Russia, Republic of Mordovia, Saransk, Bolshevistskaya str., 68, office 503 sharon.ov@mail.ru Other publications by this author

The ballad is a genre in which research interest does not weaken over time. Having clear formal and meaningful characteristics, the ballad forms its own unique and recognizable world. Having arisen in the folklore space, it was in demand by the author's literature, retaining its relevance. A lyric ballad is an epic genre that reproduces a person's private life in the context of his social existence, full of contradictions and conflicts with dramatic consequences. The promotion of private life into the focus of public attention is explained by the increased status of the human personality, overwhelmed by various kinds of passions, plunging him into a state of confrontation with the hostile world through his psychological or intellectual experience. The ballad focuses on the consciousness and soul of a person balancing between good and evil, opposing in it. The arena of violent clashes of feelings and passions is the family, the relationships in which form the social, moral, ideological, aesthetic, etc. foundations of life.

            The ballad has a moral character, because, portraying as the main actors the carriers of evil and their victims, it shows how evil triumphs in the fate of a person and suppresses him, through this causing sympathy for him, ennobling the souls of people, contributing to their understanding of their own actions and critical perception of information.

Like other folklore genres, the ballad has a unique form of consciousness, perceives the surrounding reality from an original angle, evaluates it with social, ethical, intellectual criteria inherent only to it. There are no random plots and characters in it, it obeys the established poetic system and tradition. Its plots, sometimes close to the fabulous and fantastic, reflect the real reality.

The events and characters in the folklore work are fictional, but there is an artistic truth in it that does not coincide with the truth of the real fact.  The advantage of artistic truth is to reveal the typical, general, natural. In the ballad, the artistic truth reflects the actual reality, full of grief and suffering, in the light of which a person accepts responsibility for villainous acts.

Due to the genre originality of the ballad, the reader's and research interest in it does not dry up over the years. The history of the formation of a block of works exploring the artistic nature of the ballad continues. Hegel in "Aesthetics" noted that the subject of the ballad is "stories and collisions, usually with a sad ending, in the tone of a terrible, soul-crushing, voice-intercepting mood" ^{[3, pp. 497-498]}. Following him, V. Y. Propp writes in the "Poetics of Folklore" that the sphere of folk ballads "was the world of human passions interpreted tragically" ^{[10, p. 63]}. B. N. Putilov in the "Slavic Historical Ballad" interprets the genre of ballads as narratives of dramatic "family collisions caused by social and everyday circumstances". which, arising "on the basis of political history", form a historical ballad ^{[11, p. 28]}. A.V. Kulagin in the study "Russian Folk Ballad" defines ballads as "epic songs with family and domestic conflicts" ^{[8, p. 6]}, in the center of the plot of which "the ontological conflict of the collision of man and fate", in the image of their heroes "the typical prevails over the individual", there is a mystical element ^{[8, p. 6]}. In the latest study of the literary ballad "Peculiarities of the development of the ballad genre in Russian poetry of the 1990s-2000s", the authors claim that "moral issues of the relationship between fathers and children, husband and wife, brother and sister" are central, despite the triumph of evil, the "theme of awakened conscience" is raised ^{[4, p. 25]}.

Despite the long history of studying the ballad genre, there are still urgent problems that need special understanding. Among them is the study of the national specifics of the existence of the genre. Ballads are formed in response to tragic collisions and incidents, everyday tragedies are presented in them in the focus of the requirements of folklore morality, aesthetics and humanism. Their genesis is due to objective and subjective reasons, changes that have occurred in the family and social life of people, in their social, moral and aesthetic consciousness. The objects of the image are the beautiful and the ugly, the sublime and the base, the relations of domination and subordination, wealth and poverty, permissible and unacceptable, given in the context of national life. A society with new criteria of good, evil and human dignity has given rise to ballad incidents ? artistic, ideal in their characteristics, but grown on the basis of real reality. Due to the fact that a person's intellectual and psychological life dominates the material, ballad stories took on the outlines of actual reality, playing no less a role and being no less valid than events and tragedies in practical life.

Russian Russian ballad originated on the basis of the medieval life of Russia and is an exclusively Russian artistic and aesthetic phenomenon. Erzya and Moksha ballads are also generated by the realities of medieval national life. The Tatar-Mongol invasion of the XIII?XVI centuries. it contributed to the emergence of historical ballads telling about the fate of Polonyan women, about the attacks of Tatars on Erzya, Russian, Moksha villages in order to capture people into slavery.

            During the late Middle Ages, ballads about a slandered wife appeared: the husband kills his young wife, believing the false words of his mother that during his long absence the house went into ruin because of the unreasonable behavior of the hostess, who allegedly sold horses from the stable, emptied wine cellars, released hunting falcons, "squandered" the gold treasury, "I wore out a colored dress" ^{[13, I, pp. 70-78]}. The husband, having committed a crime, learns the truth and bitterly regrets what happened. He is also a victim of his mother's slander.

Love-themed ballads have become widespread: the young man has fallen out of love with the girl and left her; the girl/girl threatens the young man with murder: "I will wash your hands, your feet, // I will make beer drunkenly from your blood, // I will drain the endow from your violent head, // I will pour tallow candles from your fat" ^{[5, p. 56]}. Similar motives for the bloody murder are heard in the Erzya historical songs about Pyotr Pavlovich: the mother expresses doubt to her son that he will be able to take the rank of his father and keep him ^{[12, L-45, l. 325]}.  Pavel Petrovich assures his mother that he will stay on the throne by bloody terror and the most severe oppression of the people, than his intention echoes the intention of the girl in the Russian ballad: "From human blood I will push rivers, / / From human meat I will dam ponds. // I'll make bridges out of human bones..." ^{[12, L 232, L 74]}.

 The ballads talk about a person's right to make his own choice in his personal life and about his vulnerability to the treachery of people he trusts. There is a situation of hopelessness in the microcosm within the macrocosm, which are opposed to each other. The big world remains outside the small family world, surpassing the big world in its plot role.

The ideological development of society, conditioned by its social development, forces the appearance of various plots as artistic and aesthetic concepts that model the actual ideas of time and constitute a way / program of their implementation into reality.  They arise in the depths of the collective consciousness at the level of intuitive understanding and overcoming socio-spiritual problems. In the process of their realization, works are formed, enclosed in a traditional poetic form, transformed to express a new content.

In Erzya folklore, ballads about a slandered wife are joined by ballads about a slandered sister, in which similar situations are resolved in different ways: the husband believes the slander of the mother against the wife and deals with her, and the brother does not believe the lying wife and forgives the sister. In the song "Kastusha", Kastusha has three brothers and three daughters-in-law. The brothers love their younger sister and every time they return from a business trip, they bring her expensive gifts. Wives don't like it, and they tell their husbands about it: for the first time  they kill the best horse and blame it on the Caste, but the brothers are not angry with their sister. For the second time, the wives kill the cow and blame the Caste. The older and middle brothers are not angry with their sister, and the younger one reproaches her for an imaginary crime: "Kastusha did not contradict him, // She did not say a word to him. // She bowed to three sides, // She went to the fourth side herself. // Then her brothers guessed, / / They returned the Castusha back. // In three corners of the yard // The brothers hanged their three wives" ^{[14, I, p. 124]}. The blood relationship connecting mother and son does not allow the son to doubt the truthfulness of the mother's words about the wife, on the other hand, does not allow the possibility to believe the slander of the wife against the sister (the sister receives forgiveness, and the evil one the wife is being punished).

The motif of the importance of blood relationship over other forms of family relations is also heard in Russian ballads on the robber theme ("Robber's wife", "Robber Brothers and sister", etc.), which appeared in the XVII century.:  the daughter was married off to a robber; the husband returned from fishing one day, shouting: "Get fire quickly, // Flood the stove coolly, // You're already warming the key water, // You're my bloody dress, // Bloody dress, robber" ^{[2, pp.128-129]}; the wife began to wash the dress and shirt and realized that they belonged to her brother. An even more terrible tragedy is mentioned in another version of the ballad: the widow's sons went on robbery to the "Verezhsky" (Varangian, Baltic) sea and, unknowingly, killed their brother-in-law, a sailor, dishonored their sister ^{[2, pp. 124-127]}.

In the Russian song, the robber brothers rob a rich woman, dishonor her, throw her sailor husband and first-born child into the river; then they recognize her as their own sister; struck by their own villainy, the brothers commit suicide. In a Moksha song, a mother leading a debauched lifestyle orders her sons to kill anyone they meet and bring their belongings home. The brothers come across a sister who has been married to another village and is going to visit her mother, do not recognize her, kill her, take her things and bring them to her mother. With singing and dancing, she meets her sons, accepts the loot from them, but when she recognizes her daughter in the murdered one, she either loses her mind or begins to wail bitterly ^{[20, IV, pp. 260-262]}. It reflects the echoes of the avunculate – the tradition of a close relationship between maternal uncle and nephews, which develops at the moment of transition from matriarchy to patriarchy and preserves the closeness of a person to his mother's family. Encroachment on a sister and her children means a crime against the family, the value of which is unconditional and cannot be forgiven, which leads involuntary criminals to suicide as a form of self-punishment.

The similarity of Erzya and Moksha ballads with Russian could be due to common moral norms and social conditions of life, Russification of large arrays of Erzya and Moksha populations in the central regions of Russia (Penza, Tambov, Ryazan, Vladimir, Nizhny Novgorod, Kostroma, Simbirsk, Samara, etc. provinces), borrowing, the influence of the plot on the plot, artistic and aesthetic principles of displaying reality in the conditions of interstitial and co-existence,

The Erzya and Mokshans have been fighting numerous robbers for a long time, the territory of the Mokshans' residence was called the "robber's land", where runaway people, "fugitives" gathered, united in large gangs and lived in earthen towns-caves built specifically for a long stay. There were especially many of them near Morsha, Pichaev, Kadom and in the Shatsky Zalessky camp, from where they sometimes left for mining on 70 carts ^{[6, I, p. 15]}. A vivid illustration of what has been said is the Erzya song "Moksho" about a robber and a mokshanin, in which robbers ride around on carts.

Russian Russians in the VIII?XIX centuries were in the sphere of the existence of the Russian world, were an integral part of it, their artistic creativity had the same patterns as the Russian, coincided with it thematically and ideologically, according to genre composition. The peculiarities of the Erzya ballads include the depiction of human relationships with the world of birds and animals. In the song "Asho utkin" (White Duck)  the hunter kills the duck sitting in the nest, despite her pleas for mercy, because soon the chicks should hatch from the eggs. The song concludes that it is impossible to kill beautiful ducks in the spring of the forest ^{[18, p. 143]}.  In a number of songs, the bird warns the hunter that death will overtake his family along with it. The hunter, returning home, does not find his wife or children alive, and realizes the gravity of his crime ^{[19, I, pp. 345-348]}. Sometimes a hunter is met at the gate by his wife crying and reports that their only son died suddenly. Sometimes his mother, wife and children die. In the song "Yaksyarga" ("Duck"), the duck that the hunter wants to shoot says that she is not a bird at all, but the king's eldest daughter cursed by her stepmother ^{[14, I, p. 159]}. The duck warns the hunter: if he kills her, his mother, wife, and children will die. The hunter does not believe the duck, kills it. He returns home and sees that the bird's prediction has come true.   

In the image of a duck, mythological motifs associated with its peacemaking function sound. According to one version of the creation myth, the world is created from her egg, she is a sacred bird, retribution follows for encroachment on her. Sometimes the duck calls itself the bird of the god Verepaz ^{[17, p. 187]}.

The hero of the ballad loses knowledge of the duck's being chosen, perceives it as an ordinary forest prey, to which he has the right. But the ballad, having a genetic genre memory, remembers the sacredness of the duck and punishes the hunter: by killing the creator of the world, he simultaneously destroys his world – his family, which for him is no less than the "big" world.

The ballad asserts the value of the duck as a part of the natural world, which must be protected and preserved because of its fragile beauty, humanitarian motives for condemning the predatory and unreasonable behavior of the hunter-killer appear, testifying to the high aesthetic perception of the world by the authors of the ballad. The song says that life is a sacred gift for both man and animal. And to kill a bird hatching chicks, a mother bird, is a genuine crime. The ballad develops the idea of the equivalence of human and animal life, for both are given by God.

The song artistically comprehends the inhuman psychology of a hunter-killer who does not heed the warnings of his victim. The tragedy lies in the consciousness of a person perverted by the nature of his craft.  In the song "Chineme" ("Marten"), a marten grieves because of the destruction of her nest by a hunter, the killing of her cubs, which condemns her to live out her life without offspring like a childless old man ^{[18, p. 147]}.   Expressing a careful attitude to nature, the ballads also touch on environmental themes, talk about the need for a humane attitude to the surrounding world.

Ballads on the plot of "The Wonderful Pipe" were common, telling about the murder of a younger sister by older sisters out of envy for her. The mother has three daughters thinking about marriage. To solve the issue that concerns them, she sends them for berries, promising to marry the first one who fills the vessel before the others. At the same time, wanting to marry the eldest daughter first, he gives her a small jug, the middle one – a bigger one, and the youngest one ? the largest jug. The younger sister picks berries tirelessly and quickly fills her jug. The older sisters are walking on the hills at this time, and when they see a full jug of the younger sister, they kill her. A beautiful tree grows above it.  A guy walking through the forest or the brother of a murdered sister cuts down a tree (birch) and makes a pipe or violin out of it.  When he starts playing, the violin tells the story of the murder of a girl ^{[17, p. 121]} to her parents, murderous sisters and other people. The sisters throw the violin into the burning furnace, a coal pops out of the furnace, a murdered girl rises from the ember. In the ballad "Syatkin" from a burnt violin, a coal hits the forehead of the killer sister and she falls dead, and the coal, touching the floor, turns into a Syatkin ^{[15, pp. 140-147]}.

In the Russian ballad, as a result of the curse of the mother-in-law, the daughter-in-law turns into a rowan tree. The mother-in-law tells her son to cut her down, and she begins to say: "You're not flogging a rowan tree, / / You're flogging your young wife! //And as for the twigs, they are our children" ^{[13, I, p. 130]}.

In a number of ballads, a lazy childless wife stops working in the house. When asked by her husband why she behaves like this, she answers that her mother-in-law does not tolerate the dust from yarn or textiles, or declares that while his mother lives with them, she will not love him and will not work ^{[17, pp. 535-539]}. Weak-willed son Tyugai persuades his mother to go with him to the forest to collect nuts and leaves her there. However, realizing that his wife will not love him anyway, he brings his mother back ^{[18, pp. 33-35]}. In the song "Mitruzh", the son asks his wife Matryona to steam the old mother in the bath and dress her in a clean dress. Then he takes her to a steep ravine in a distant field and pushes her to the bottom. The horse cannot stand the terrible act of the owner and, speaking in a human way, warns that he will go to a village meeting and tell about his atrocity. Mitruzh persuades the horse not to do this, promising that when he dies, he will not forget his kindness: he will bury him in the middle of the yard, put the best yoke on him and decorate the harness.  Two weeks later, the horse pretends to be dead. Mitruzh puts on him a washcloth, a thin yoke, drags him behind the vegetable gardens and throws him without burying him.  The horse rushes to the village meeting and tells about the murder of Mitruzh mother.  The old men tie Mitruzh to the horse's tail and drag him through seven fields ^{[14, I, pp.198-199]}. The motivation of Mitruzh's action is not given. However, the moral is obvious: evil is necessarily punished.

The murder of elderly parents is a very ancient motive and is known to many peoples of the world ^{[9, p. 73]}.

The motive for the punishment of evil is also given in the ballad "Balalai", but with a pronounced argumentation.  A married Balalai falls in love with a young Lubushka, who pretended to agree to marry him if he kills his wife and children. Balalai fulfills her demand and offers to become his wife. Lyubushka says: "You're a fool, Balalai man! // You're crazy, Balalai! // Your wife was better than me… // And then you killed her, // And then you ruined her. // You had three babies, // And you didn't spare those, // And you didn't spare those. // And you'll kill me all the more. // Oh, I won't marry you" ^{[14, I, pp. 209-211]}. And Balalai realized that he was a fool and crazy.In the pre-Christian period, Erzya men could have several wives, while there was a custom of marrying young boys to adult girls.

As a result, family tragedies arose due to marital inequality, the wife's dissatisfaction with her husband-child, and the husband - wife when he became an adult. Now he was trying to marry a woman of the same age, which was permissible before the adoption of Christianity, but with its adoption it became impossible. Therefore, he sought to get rid of his wife in any way.  Sometimes a husband ruined his wife, and when he saw the suffering of young children, he understood the unreasonableness of his act and regretted what he had done ^{[17, pp. 668-670]}.

The conflict between the grown-up husband and the aged wife is given in the ballad "The wife of the Erzya guy failed" ^{[14, I, pp. 241-242]}. The wife makes a hard bed for her husband, puts a small pillow, bakes unleavened bread. The husband turns to God with a request that He deliver him from his unloved wife. The wife says that he will never find a wife better than her, and when she dies, the unhappy husband is overcome with sadness.  He goes to a village meeting to get hired as a herdsman. In three days he steals horses for seven fields. There he plays the pipes and cries. The red-faced horse asks him about the reason for his sadness and offers to deliver him to his homeland, where he asks to lock him in a glass stable and serve fresh clover.  Once at home, the guy forgets about the horse for three days. When he comes to the stable, the horse slaughters him with his front legs ^{[14, I, pp. 241-242]}. The motive of forgetting a promise is found in fairy tales.  Forgetting is understood as the loss of memory when leaving the realm of the dead to the realm of the living and vice versa. In the ballad, the fairy-tale motif is compounded by a tragic ending. The hero's departure from the familiar world after the death of his first wife, returning back with the help of a wonderful talking horse and dying under his hooves causes a parallel journey from the real world to the beyond and back in order to prepare for a new marriage. However, this turns out to be impossible due to the curse of the old wife, and the hero's story ends with his death in accordance with the poetics of the ballad genre.

In the ballad, the realistic conflict between husband and wife is complicated by the magical conflict between a man and a horse. Both conflicts end tragically, the husband is condemned for his ungrateful attitude towards his wife and horse.   The Erzya ballad is edifying, in it evil is doomed to retribution.

The emphasis on unequal marriage is dictated by the beginning of the decomposition of patriarchal foundations.

With the development of capitalist relations, money and wealth interfere in the conflict between the old and new generations, old and new views, they begin to deform related family relations. A number of songs condemn a rich man who is proud not of humanitarian virtues, virtue, but of wealth ^{[19, I, pp. 130-131]}. In the song "Od tsera" ("Well done"), a young man curses that, having become rich, he neglects the people, the family, the fatherland. He explains the acquisition of wealth only by his abilities. Despising the people, the house, the country, he defiantly turns away from them and goes to another land to surprise the world there ^{[18, p.67]}. On a foreign land, happiness leaves him: a new wife will not give birth to children, cattle do not breed, bread does not grow ? no one needs him there, his abilities and beauty are not in demand. Death follows on his heels. In an effort to avoid the inevitable, he resorts to fortune-telling, turns to the dark forces for help, to Baba Yaga, but all in vain ^{[18, pp. 67-69]}.   The young man asks Yaga to help him, but death strangles him. Yaga on a black horse takes  his body is on the mountainside, and the birds are pulling his beautiful hair into nests. The cuckoo informs his wife, left at home, about his death.  This ballad is reminiscent of the Russian ballad about Anika the warrior. Anika boasts of strength, leads an obscene life, ruins auctions and bazaars, "nailed merchants and boyars and all sorts of people." Having lived in this way for a long time, he imagines himself immortal, capable of crushing any opponent with one finger, but turns out to be powerless against death, which overtakes him in the field ^{[1, pp. 288-290]}.

             The Erzya ballads also talk about a person's dependence on God and death and that he must take care of his soul. And in them providentialism defines everything, as it happens in mythological, ritual and epic poetry, where God is the essence and phenomenon, content and form, necessity and reality, reason and law, beauty and harmony, the trinity of the present, past and future.  When a duck tells a hunter about the inevitable punishment for his crime, she means God's punishment.

The punishment of death is mentioned in the Erzya ballad "Dark-haired guy". Everyone succeeded the only son of his parents: like a straight tree, he is as tall and tall as the flowers of an apple tree, his eyebrows are like silk, his hair is like rings, curls. Girls really like him. In the upper end of the street will go to play ? the girls of the lower end are offended, in the lower end of the street will go to play ? the girls of the upper end of the street are offended, in the middle part of the street will come to play ? the girls of both ends of the street are offended.  The girls came to the guy's mother and asked him to play the same way with everyone. The mother cursed her son for a terrible illness. For three years he lay on the bed. After three years, his mother promised him a black death.  Death began to follow him on his heels. The guy asked her to forget about him for a while so that he would take a wife. Death left him for three years and came for him again. The guy asked to be given the opportunity to raise children. She left him for another three years, and then took him away  ? widowed wife, orphaned children ^{[14, I, pp. 214-215]}.  At first glance, a paradoxical ballad: a mother condemns an innocent son to death, who is punished only because he was born and grew up beautiful.  It is obvious that in the ballad there is a mythological motif of dying and resurrection, through which a person must pass in order to take place in a new capacity and gain a new social status. The guy goes through the trials provoked by his mother, and gets the right to start a family. The image of the mother appears here as an echo of the matriarchy, which asserted the will of a blood relative as a priority.   Of course, the indicated motive could not literally be repeated in the ballad genre, which preserved only the memory of him thanks to the poetic tradition.

In a completely different way, the theme of man and death is developed in the Moksha ballad "Kafta panttne" ("Two Mountains"). Parents forcibly marry their son. The son tells them that if he gets married, he will die on the wedding day. His mother, sister and father persuade him not to be afraid, and if death comes for him, they will give their souls for him.  On the wedding night, death comes for his soul. Mother, sister and father refuse to fulfill their promises, saying that there is no escape from death. Then the young wife intercedes for him, offering to take her soul instead of her husband's soul, and death retreats, leaves the guy for three years. Three years later, he asks for more time to raise children – and death recedes again. Three years later, the guy asks to be allowed to experience life in a gray old age – and death retreats forever, saying: "You love life too much, man! // You have too many desires!" ^{[14, I, pp. 218-220]}. The myth poetizes and aestheticizes not only love, but also the social activity of the guy, the desire to experience the joys of life at all its stages, which even death is surprised at, and leaves him. Life is also of great value to her if it belongs to a strong-willed person, the creator of his destiny. This ballad has a detailed plot and a clear ideological orientation, on the one hand, it poetizes a young wife, her willingness to sacrifice herself for the sake of saving her husband, on the other hand, sings of the guy's love of life, his high humanitarian virtues. The domestic conflict – the forced marriage of a guy and the rejection of the promise of his parents and sister – is of a secondary nature, the ballad does not focus on their behavior, it glorifies the act of a young wife and the guy's confrontation with death.  Before us are two young beings with outstanding human qualities.

 In the plot of "Kafta Panttne" mythological and epic ideologies collide. Parents forcibly marry their son. "Providence does not like this, and it warns the groom that he will die on the wedding day. Death is sent because the mythological principle of the sacredness of marriage and its voluntary nature is violated" ^{[16, p. 96]}. The ballad celebrates the great power of love and the idea of invincibility of life if a person strives to realize God-given abilities in work, in the family, in the public field.

In Erzya folklore, ballads about the search for a new free land, located no one knows where, were popular. This land is either nobody's or robber's ^{[19, I, p. 170]}, is located in an unknown direction, where dangerous roads lead through impassable swamps and forests, where animals growl, ditches are dug along the roads, there are stakes with the skulls of dead people impaled on them. A young Erzyanin goes in search of this land and dies. His wife finds out about his death  from flying crows who saw his body by the roadside and drank his blood. In a number of songs, the wife sends her husband in search of a new land. The song sees the reason for his death in the fact that he is carrying out an assignment from his wife, not his mother ^{[19, I, p. 262]}. So does the guy Andyamo, who goes to occupy the Kudadeyskoye field. The horse also warns him about the danger. He does not obey and dies ^{[14, I, pp. 154-155]}. In this ballad, the cause of the tragedy is not so much external circumstances, as the guy's indispensable desire to realize his intended goal despite all the obstacles that threaten death. This psychological motive is also present in the Russian ballad "Dmitry and Domna", in which Domna goes to Dmitry's house despite her mother's warnings. 

In the epic "Mastorava", the motive of the search for the promised land is developed in the legend "Tekshon". Tekshon is the grandson of the Erzya patriarch Kudadei, who founded a numerous family of 77 seven villages. After the death of Kudadei, his lands are occupied by the many-headed serpent Minyasha and has owned them for several human generations. The descendants of Kudadei go to unknown lands, where they live in the most difficult conditions surrounded by three mountains, beyond which it is impossible to go. Kudadei predicted that sooner or later his grandson would be born with his heroic strength and bright mind, and he would free his blessed land from the dominion of snakes.  Tekshon, after the blessing of the council of elders, rides a wise horse to fight with Minyasha, defeats him, but on the way back, together with the horse, falls down the mountain and receives severe wounds. Mazai's wife goes in search of him. The leader of the flock of ravens points out to her the location of her husband and tells her how he can be saved. Mazai washes Tekshon's wounds with water from a wonderful lake, heals him and the horse, and they return home. Tekshon gathers a council of elders, which decides to return to the ancient homeland. In "Mastorava" the ballad motif is mastered in the context of heroic themes. The main character Tekshon in his actions and deeds does not contradict existing social and moral prohibitions, on the contrary, brings great benefit to the people ^{[15, pp. 140-147]}. Therefore, it comes out victorious in a difficult battle.

Erzya, Moksha and Russian ballads are the product of national mentality, artistic and aesthetic, social, moral views. In them, the life of the people is concretized by the destinies of individuals, the emphasis is on spiritual life, on ethical, social, moral ideas – both traditional and those that have arisen at a new stage of historical development. Their attention is drawn to the tragic aspects of human existence caused by his negative reaction to the world.   

In the ballads there is a memory of the myth. Of course, the content of the myth in the ballad is transformed, it does not explain the myth and cannot do this, because it has lost its understanding. But she operates with the data of the myth, continues to preserve the attributes of the myth in her poetics, which allows her to have a complex genre constitution that leads away from a simplified understanding of her plots and images of actors.The ballads expose the cruelty of the hunter and condemn his occupation, which harms nature;   the unreasonableness of a mother who condemns her son to an incurable illness and death; the stupidity of a guy who kills his wife and children to marry a young girl; the cunning of a mother who sends her sons to robberies, etc.; the love and devotion of a young wife who sacrifices her life to save her husband, and a guy who forced death to retreat before his irrepressible desire to live are sung a full-fledged active life, etc.

            Erzya, Moksha and Russian ballads are united in genre with their thematic diversity. Their characters and events represent different aspects of life, illustrate various aesthetic and moral codes, obeying a common poetic system.