The paper presents the results of our study of the place and role of the Russian folk calendar in P.I. MelnikovPechersky's novel «On the Hills». It is shown how the choice of beliefs is determined by literary and compositional goals of the writer. We distinguish three types of the author's use of the folk calendar and the ways of their presentation. It was found that the literary source for most of the cited beliefs is the «Menology» section of V.I. Dal's book «Proverbs of the Russian people». However, the literary source of four sayings is not clear. In this paper we present our arguments in favor of the theory that these four were made up by Melnikov-Pechersky on the basis of the proverbs published by V.I. Dal, and their expression was enhanced. Then from Melnikov-Pechersky's novel they were adopted to various collections of proverbs as folklore.
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