FOR RUSSIANS, it is impossible to imagine life without the countless characters from our fairy tales. We first encounter them in childhood. Even before we can read, we are given picture books by doting relatives showing sly Kolobok, who “got away from his Grandpa, got away from his Grandma,” but could not get away from Fox. By now, many generations have been well acquainted with Kurochka Ryaba (the Little Speckled Hen), who “laid a little egg, no ordinary egg, a golden egg.” And nobody, of course, could break that egg. Little fingers are guided from picture to picture by solicitous grandmothers and mothers repeating the words, “Grandpa hit it, hit it, but did not break it… Grandma hit it, hit it, but did not break it… The Little Mouse ran by and flicked its tail and broke it.” And then there is the Turnip that nobody could pull out of the ground. They tried pulling with “Grandpa holding the Turnip, Grandma holding Grandpa…” and when a long chain formed with the Little Mouse at the end, they finally managed to pull out the Turnip.
Then children grow up a bit and the books become more sophisticated. The Sly Fox, the Clumsy Bear, the little girl Masha (who wanders into the house of the Three Bears), and the fish who grants all of Yemelya’s wishes “by the will of the Pike,” come onto the scene, followed by Vasilisa the Beautiful, Prince Ivan, Finist the Bright Falcon, and many, many others.
The years pass and children move on to other sorts of books, but all the characters that inhabited their childhood stay with them. They become the protagonists of countless cartoons; they turn up in jokes. Like the one based on the fact that the verbs “to plant” and to “put in prison” are both variations of the verb “to sit” — “Grandpa sat [planted/put in prison] Turnip, and Turnip did his time, got out, and cut up Grandpa.” Or the one where Kolobok jeers at Connor MacLeod, “By the end of the day, only one of us will have a head” (MacLeod, immortal character from the Highlander series, can only be killed by decapitation, and Kolobok of course has no neck to chop).
Did these characters inhabit the world of our forefathers who lived two hundred years ago? After all, these are Russian folktales. Yet, as we know today, they reflect ancient folkloric beliefs, worldviews passed down through the depths of time.
There is no doubt that these tales were once told in villages, otherwise they would not have reached us. But their place in the city was another matter. Until the nineteenth century, folktales were considered a “plebeian” amusement. Peasants spent long winter evenings telling them. And the urban poor read lubok, the old Russian take on comic books, featuring the likes of Bova Korolevich, an oversized hero of traditional Russian tall tales.
But the educated classes looked down their noses at such foolishness. Pushkin, who adored his Nyanya (Arina Rodionovna, the peasant woman who cared for him in childhood and beyond) and spent long hours listening to her tales in childhood, did not find room in any of his writing for Sly Fox or Prince Ivan. Maybe Arina Rodionovna told him these stories, but it would appear that they did not make much of an impression on the future poet. Pushkin’s folktale-inspired writing was primarily based on plots from foreign sources. Today these tales are invariably illustrated with their protagonists dressed in traditional Russian garb, but The Golden Cockerel came from Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra; “The Tale of the Dead Princess and Seven Knights” bears a striking resemblance to plots found in the Brothers Grimm; and the “Tale of the Golden Fish” is obviously inspired by One Thousand and One Nights. It is as if, for Pushkin and his peers, Vasilisa the Wise, the Frog Princess, and the prophetic mare Sivka Burka did not exist.
And they would not exist for us today had it not been for Alexander Nikolayevich Afanasyev. Afanasyev was a lawyer who worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs archives. But what interested him more than anything else in the world was Russian folklore. This led him to take up a rather odd and, at the time, not very well understood project — collecting Russian folktales. He wrote them down, studied them, analyzed them, tried to explain them, and penned articles and scholarly treatises interpreting them. Today, his works seem terribly dated and his interpretations naïve, but his contribution to Russian culture was enormous. Not long before his death, Afanasyev published two volumes of Russian folktales. He then sent abroad a volume of “Intimate Tales” — the erotic Заветные сказки, also translated as Forbidden Tales.
For obvious reasons, the Intimate Tales were not read by everyone, but the two volume compendium of folktales became one of the most read books in Russia. Well, actually, the meticulously compiled two-volume set was for the most part read only by scholars of folklore, but the retellings of folktales that by now are too numerous to count all relied on Afanasyev. His publication was the source of Kolobok and the Little Speckled Hen, and the countless Hares, Foxes, and Bears that make appearances in books, cartoons, and at New Year’s parties. It was within these tomes that Prince Ivan first came galloping up on the Gray Wolf, that the Frog Princess first caught the arrow shot by the Prince, not to mention many other personages who now hold such a cherished place in our imaginations.
Afanasyev’s publication of Russian Fairy Tales in 1870 came at a time when philosophers, historians, and literary critics were endlessly pondering Russia’s fate, when the narod (“folk, people”) were being transformed into something akin to an object of worship, and folktales were suddenly in demand. With the advent of modernity, art in all countries began turning to folklore, and suddenly fairy tale heroes were elevated to a higher level of culture.
It was around this time that Victor Vasnetsov painted Sister Alyonushka grieving for her Brother Ivanushka, who has been transformed into a little goat, and Prince Ivan riding the Gray Wolf with the princess. Somewhat later, Ivan Bilibin created a whole new style of children’s book with his illustrations of Russian folktales, and soon adaptations of Afanasyev started to be widely available. To the surprise of some, these homegrown stories were no less entertaining than the creations of Charles Perrault or the Brothers Grimm.
The early twentieth century saw outstanding philologists devote themselves to fairy tales. The Finn Antti Aarne devised an entire system for classifying the plots of folktales, and the Russian philologist Nikolai Andreyev created a similar system for Russian folktales. Finally, the internationally renowned scholar Vladimir Propp undertook the task of analyzing magical or “wonder” tales from throughout the world, with particular attention to Russia tales, and found in them vestiges of ancient initiation rites.
It turns out that all those stepdaughters cast out of their homes by their stepmothers, to say nothing of all the Prince Ivans who stumbled upon a little hut on chicken legs at the edge of a dense forest, were enduring the difficult ancient trials that were rites of passage into adulthood. What happens to every boy or girl at the end of the tale? Yes! They find their better half and it all ends with a wedding and a feast for the entire world. The standard fairytale ending, in rhyme, goes: “и я там был, мед-пиво пил, по усам текло, а в рот не попало” (“I was there, drank mead and beer, it flowed down my moustache, but missed my mouth”). But to get there, they had to undergo torturous, grueling initiation rites, after which our ancient ancestors, now considered adults, were allowed to marry. Propp’s theory seems quite distant from Afanasyev’s, in which the heroes of all folktales represented the reflections of celestial bodies. But if it had not been for Afanasyev’s collection of folktales, our childhoods would have been deprived of this rich world. Bilibin, Propp, and millions of readers would not have had access to them and their illustrations and philological research would never have existed.
How much drabber our world would have been had we not encountered Kolobok and the Little Speckled Hen in our very first steps through life!
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