On the Funeral Rituals of Pagan Slavs’ is the Master thesis by Slavist, ethnorapher, and archeologist Aleksander Aleksandrovich Kotlyarevsky (1837-1881); it was defended in 1868, and the same year it was published. The work reflected the author’s interest to archeology.
Instead an introduction, the author started the book with a message to Count A. S. Uvarov, where he formulated his task: to combine the single facts of the old funeral rites and customs of Slavs, to analyze them, and to build in a systematic way. The author took a historical point of view, trying to escape any a priori ideas. The work contains two main parts: the first one gives a critical analysis of sources; the second one – a review of conception of Pagan Slavs about the afterlife and a description of their funeral rituals. In the part ‘Slavic Paganism and customs’ the author noted that changes of Slavic customs testified occasional mechanical difficulties, damage or loss of old traditions. Thus, he rejected the genetic and historical methods, giving preference to the systematic approach and trying to achieve the deepest initial levels of their sense. His systematic method was founded on the critic of sources, which were divided into four groups: language, common life, written materials (almost a half of the work), and burials. Speaking about language, the author stressed the importance of the initial meanings of the words, and ethnographical distribution of concepts. At that, he warned researchers against superfluous generalizations. He used mythical conceptions and common-day phenomena as his sources. In the chapter about the written materials he analyzes a few Arabic testimonies, quite precious (they are given in the supplement). The second part of the book is a review of Slavic beliefs in the afterlife, soul, and death; there are small chapters about pre-Slavic time and Slavic customs inside it.
That book attracted much attention and became a significant step in the history of religious studies in Russia, as a sample of critical and systematic approach.