Abstract
The chapter deals with a possibility, whether, to what extent and under which circumstances it is plausible to talk about a literature with an attribute adopted from comparative linguistics, i.e. whether it is meaningful to use the term Uralic literature. The possibility is demonstrated on a complex of texts from different Uralic provenance, belonging however to the same genre.
The genre itself, the national epics, has actually served in many cases for establishing a particular national literary tradition. The Uralic national epics, one way or the other, are closely related to one particular text, to Finnish Kalevala, and this relationship is definitely determined by an extrapolation of the concept of the linguistic kinship.