srivonei
Nice to finally see someone else with an interest in slavic neopaganism. My mother is Czech, and even though I lost my fluency when I started to go to school in America, I still remember a lot of Czech (for example, I could understand the title of this thread without translation),
Jej! I'm not what you'd call fluent, but I'm getting there. My family's primary language is English now, but it's peppered with Slovak phrases, sometimes in translation - it's one of those things that you don't really realize is important to you until it's gone (or almost gone), you know?
I'm glad to see you are interested in Slavic paganism
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and there are a lot of things I read about Slavic neopaganism that I remember from children's fairy tales that she told me. You're right though, there is a mass of fakelore out there, didn't some Russian guys a hundred years ago forge a book claiming to be a historical account of Slavic paganism, or something like that?
Tea's right - you're thinking of the Book of Veles/Velesova Kniha. It's more a mythical account of the birth of the Russian people - and it isn't historical per sé, but it's still relevant to many Slavic pagans, especially those in the East. My focus is on West-Slavic traditions, so it's not as spiritually relevant to me as it would be to a Russian.
Bit ethnocentric, eh?
Anyhow, I used to be pretty dismayed by fakelore. But since then I've kind of learned to recognize that we're a living people, with living traditions and living Gods. We may have forgotten things that were sacred to us in the past, but we live in the present, and the Gods are still here - new stories about them shouldn't be a dirty thing, we just need to recognize that these tales are new.
