Cand. Sc. (Philology), leading research fellow, Department of History of Foreign Literatures, Philological Faculty, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia, Moscow, ognelen@hotmail.com
This article examines the artistic features of the novelette Dancing bones (1871) by B. Guimarães. A broad historical and literary contextual analysis has made it possible to identify its central motif — the ‘vengeance of restless souls’ — as a fusion of traditions from Ibero-Roman legends and the mythological and cultural ‘demonic’ substrate of Brazilian Indigenous heritage. The study proposes that Guimarães ‘rewrote’ an episode from the Portuguese legend A Dama Pé-de-Cabra (The Lady with a Cloven Hoof) by A. Herculano, adapting it to a Brazilian literary framework. A detailed examination of the novelette’s composition, narrative perspectives, and intertextual elements reveals Guimarães’s poetic stylization as a unique symbiosis of European heritage and Brazilian Indigenous myths, preserved in both cultural folk memory and the oral tradition of mestizo-Caboclo communities.
Latin American literature; Brazilian romanticism; Bernardo Guimarães; Ibero-Roman legends; Brazilian myths.
Download textFor citing: Ogneva E.V. (2025) Portuguese legends and Brazilian beliefs in Bernardo Guimarães’s Dancing Bones. Human being: Image and essence. Humanitarian aspects. Moscow. INION RAN. Vol. 3 (63). pp. 96-108. DOI: 10.31249/chel/2025.03.05