The Riddle Of The Riddle: A Study of the Folk Riddle's Figurative Nature

The true folk riddle from oral traditions that are now rapidly disappearing from the face of the earth is one of the most ancient threads of culture. Truly old specimens of it are succinct, eccentric, poetic, and highly intense. Have you ever tried to guess a folk riddle? If you have, you couldn't fail to notice that the task is impossible. Contrary to common-sense expectations, a true folk riddle cannot be answered. Why so? Because it wasn't meant for individual wit. It was a collective property as concerns both the description and the answer.

The present study delves into the folk riddle from oral traditions by rereading works from the history of riddle study and reconsidering the problems they faced and solutions they found. It unfolds a chain of twenty-six functional and structural conditions that describe how the folk riddle is articulated as utterance. It offers a new and quite unexpected view of the subject. Among other things, the study argues that the true ancient folk riddle is a figure of concealment that has two targets: besides the recorded, explicit answer, it harbors another one, unpronounced and esoteric. The folk riddle, in this light, turns out to be much more hilarious than common wisdom would have it.

Savely Senderovich, born in 1935 in Odessa, USSR (modern-day Ukraine); studied Russian philology at Odessa University, German philosophy at Leningrad University; in 1974 emigrated to the USA; in 1977 earned a Ph.D. in Russian literature at New York University; since 1977 Professor of Russian Literature & Medieval Studies at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; author of studies in German philosophy, Russian letters from the eleventh through the twentieth centuries (including books on Pushkin and Chekhov), Russian cultural history (including a book on St. Gorge in Russian culture and essays on the origin of Russian historiography), folklore, and literary theory. In recent years he has written over 30 papers on Vladimir Nabokov, both Russian and English, in collaboration with Yelena Shvarts.