Margarita Moisejeva

Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore

Personal Audio Recordings of Everyday Life in the Cassettes of Lithuanian Old Believers Collector Ivan Maloglazov from 1998 to 2009

In the Folklore Archive of the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, in addition to Lithuanian folklore material, religious records of the Lithuanian Old Believers community are stored, the largest part of which is the collection of Lithuanian Old Believers collector Ivan Maloglazov, an Old Believer himself. The collection material started to be digitized and archived only a few years ago. It is interesting that the traditional and religious recordings of Lithuanian Old Believers together make up only 39 percent of the entire collection. Most of the tapes – 61 percent of the entire collection – are Ivan Maloglazov’s personal household recordings: daily conversations with family members, friends and other people, birthdays, trips, community meetings, fragments of radio and television programmes. Household recordings reveal various socio-cultural realities of the life of the Lithuanian Old Believers community at the turn of the millennium and almost a decade after. This community, due to historical religious and political circumstances, was forced to live a tight-knit lifestyle for a long time, which makes such detailed records unique from an ethnological point of view.