Oskar Kolberg and his significance for the emergence of Lithuanian folkloristics

ENOskar Henryk Kolberg (1814-1890) is one of the most important Polish ethnographers and folklorists of the middle and the second half of the nineteenth century. While still in his twenties, during his first visits to Lithuania and Belarus, in 1836-1837, he first became acquainted with the local folk culture, became interested in it and began to write down the melodies of different folk songs. One of the numerous publications dedicated to the scholarly legacy of Oskar Kolberg, which came to light during the second half of the twentieth century, is the fifty-third complete volume of his works, entitled Litwa [Lithuania]. This volume contains texts and melodies of Lithuanian folk songs collected by Kolberg between 1846 and 1879. Oskar Kolberg is still insufficiently acknowledged as a figure important to the formation of Lithuanian folkloristics. Neither during the soviet period nor in independent Lithuania were his materials regarding Lithuanian folk songs, with their texts, melodies, accurate notes, topical comments and all the exhaustive descriptions about their existence, translated into Lithuanian and published in their complete version together with parallel Polish texts (in the original). This gap needs filling as soon as possible.