The collection includes epics and stories collected mainly in 1966-1980. on the territory of Transbaikalia and the Irkutsk region and stored in the archive of V.P. Zinoviev, who for many years purposefully and systematically studied these stories, which are "an interesting fact of poetic understanding of life." Mythological stories - epics, stories about brownies, watermen, mermaids, witches, sorcerers - have survived beliefs and continue to exist as a special, peculiar genre of folklore, which contains the richest moral, ethical, pedagogical and artistic experience of the people.