Folklore notes about Belarusian paradise and its Polish parallels

Abstract

The article discusses the Belarusian and Polish folk images of paradise, reflected in both „non-poetic” and „poetic” genres of folklore. It takes into account the fact that popular ideas of paradise can be mixed or co-exist with, or be contradictory to literary imagery. In both traditions, paradise in a sense forms a whole with its semantically (and often spatially) diametric opposite, the Hegelian „other”, i.e. hell. The complex, multivariate model of paradise as part of the world conveys information not only about its architecture, landscape and climatic features, „population”, an emotional sphere or „life style”, but also furnishes evidence for its existence.