RUSSIAN TREASURED TALES
Collected by A.N. Afanasiev
"What a shame? It's shameful to steal, but nothing to say, everything is possible."
("Strange names").
A few words about this book
Preface by A.N. Afanasiev to the 2nd edition
Shy mistress Merchant's wife and clerk
Like a dog
Marriage fool
Sowing X…EB
wonderful pipe
Miraculous ointment
magic ring
The men and the master
good father
Bride without a head
fearful bride
Nikola Dunlyansky
husband on eggs
A man at a woman's work
family conversations
strange names
Soldier sieve
The soldier himself sleeps, and x ... d works
soldier and devil
runaway soldier
Soldier, man and woman
Soldier and Ukrainian
Soldier and crest
The man and the devil
soldier and pop
The hunter and the goblin
sly woman
betting
Bishop's response
Laughter and sorrow
Dobry pop
Pop neighs like a stallion
Priest's family and laborer
Pop and laborer
Pop, priest, priest and laborer
pop and man
Piglet
cow court
Male funeral
greedy pop
The tale of how the pop gave birth to a calf
Spiritual father
Pop and Gypsies
Drive the heat
The blind man's wife
Pop and trap
Senile verse
jokes
Bad - not bad
The first meeting of the groom with the bride
Two groom brothers
wise hostess
Woman's subterfuge
chatty wife
Mother-in-law and son-in-law
pike head
Man, bear, fox and horsefly
cat and fox
Fox and hare
louse and flea
Bear and woman
sparrow and mare
dog and woodpecker
hot gag
P ... and ass
Irritated lady
Notes
A FEW WORDS ABOUT THIS BOOK
"Russian cherished fairy tales" by A.N. Afanasyev were printed in Geneva more than a hundred years ago. They appeared without a publisher's name, sine anno. On the title page, under the title, it was only indicated: "Valaam. Tiparian art of the monastic brethren. Year of obscurantism." And on the countertitle there was a note: "Printed solely for archaeologists and bibliophiles in a small number of copies."
Exceptionally rare already in the last century, Afanasiev's book has now become almost a phantom. Judging by the works of Soviet folklorists, only two or three copies of the Treasured Tales have been preserved in the special departments of the largest libraries in Leningrad and Moscow. The manuscript of Afanasiev's book is in the Leningrad Institute of Russian Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR ("Russian Folk Tales not for printing, Archive, No. R-1, inventory 1, No. 112). The only copy of "Tales", which belonged to the Paris National Library, disappeared before the First World War war.The book is not listed in the catalogs of the library of the British Museum.
By republishing Afanasiev's "Cherished Tales", we hope to acquaint the Western and Russian reader with a little-known facet of the Russian imagination - "shameful", obscene tales, in which, according to the folklorist, "genuine folk speech beats with a living key, sparkling with all the brilliant and witty sides of the common man" .
Obscene? Afanasiev did not consider them to be such. "They simply cannot understand," he said, "that in these folk stories there is a million times more morality than in sermons full of school rhetoric."
"Russian cherished fairy tales" are organically connected with the collection of fairy tales by Afanasyev, which has become a classic. Fairy tales of immodest content, like the tales of a well-known collection, were delivered to Afanasyev by the same collectors-contributors: V.I. Dalem, P.I. Yakushkin, Voronezh local historian N.I. Vtorov. In both collections we find the same themes, motifs, plots, with the only difference that the satirical arrows of the "Treasured Tales" are more poisonous, and the language is rather rude in places. There is even a case when the first, quite "decent" half of the story is placed in the classic collection, while the other, less modest, is in "Cherished Tales". We are talking about the story "A man, a bear, a fox and a horsefly."
There is no need to dwell on why Afanasiev, when publishing "Russian Folk Tales" (issues 1-8, 1855-1863), was forced to refuse to include the part that would be published a decade later under the title "Russian Folk Tales Not for Print" (the epithet "cherished" appears only in the title of the second, last edition of "Fairy Tales"). The Soviet scientist V.P. Anikin explains this refusal in the following way: "It was impossible to print the anti-priest and anti-bar tales in Russia." And is it possible to publish - in an uncut and uncleaned form - "Cherished Tales" in the homeland of Afanasiev today? We do not find an answer to this from V.P. Anikin.
The question remains open how immodest fairy tales got abroad. Mark Azadovsky suggests that in the summer of 1860, during his trip to Western Europe, Afanasiev handed them over to Herzen or another emigrant. It is possible that the publisher of Kolokola contributed to the publication of Skazok. Subsequent searches, perhaps, will help to shed light on the history of the publication of "Russian cherished fairy tales" - a book that stumbled over the obstacles of not only tsarist, but also Soviet censorship.
FOREWORD A.N.AFANASIEV A TO THE 2nd EDITION
"Honny soit, qui mal y pense"
The publication of our cherished fairy tales ... is almost the only phenomenon of its kind. It may easily be that this is precisely why our publication will give rise to all sorts of complaints and exclamations, not only against the impudent publisher, but also against the people who created such fairy tales in which folk fantasy, in vivid pictures and not at all embarrassed by expressions, unfolded all the strength and all the wealth his humour. Leaving aside all possible reproaches against us, we must say that any exclamation against the people would be not only an injustice, but also an expression of complete ignorance, which, by the way, is for the most part one of the inalienable characteristics of a screaming pruderie. Our cherished tales are a unique phenomenon, as we said, especially because we do not know of any other edition in which genuine folk speech would beat in such a living key in a fabulous form, sparkling with all the brilliant and witty sides of a commoner.
The literatures of other peoples present many similar cherished stories, and have long been ahead of us in this respect as well. If not in the form of fairy tales, then in the form of songs, conversations, short stories, farces, sottises, moralites, dictons, etc., other peoples have a huge number of works in which the folk mind, just as little embarrassed by expressions and pictures, marked with humor, hooked with satire and sharply exposed to ridicule different aspects of life. Who doubts that the playful stories of Boccaccio are not drawn from the life of the people, that the countless French novels and faceties of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are not from the same source as the satirical works of the Spaniards, Spottliede and Schmahschriften of the Germans, this mass of libel flyers in all languages, which appeared about all kinds of events in private and public life - not folk works? In Russian literature, however, there is still a whole section of folk expressions that are not printed, not for printing. In the literatures of other peoples, such barriers to popular speech have not existed for a long time.
... So, the accusation of the Russian people of gross cynicism would be equal to the accusation of the same and all other peoples, in other words, it itself reduces to zero. The erotic content of the cherished Russian fairy tales, without saying anything for or against the morality of the Russian people, simply points only to that side of life that most of all gives revelry to humor, satire and irony. Our tales are transmitted in that artless form, as they came out of the mouths of the people and recorded from the words of the storytellers. This is what makes them special: nothing is touched in them, there are no embellishments or additions. We will not expand on the fact that in different stripes of wide Rus' the same tale is told differently. There are, of course, many such variants, and most of them, no doubt, pass from mouth to mouth without being either overheard or recorded by collectors. The options given by us are taken from among the most famous or the most characteristic for some reason.
RUSSIAN TREASURED TALES
Collected by A.N. Afanasiev
"What a shame? It's shameful to steal, but nothing to say, everything is possible."
("Strange names").
A few words about this book
Preface by A.N. Afanasiev to the 2nd edition
Shy mistress Merchant's wife and clerk
Like a dog
Marriage fool
Sowing X…EB
wonderful pipe
Miraculous ointment
magic ring
The men and the master
good father
Bride without a head
fearful bride
Nikola Dunlyansky
husband on eggs
A man at a woman's work
family conversations
strange names
Soldier sieve
The soldier himself sleeps, and x ... d works
soldier and devil
runaway soldier
Soldier, man and woman
Soldier and Ukrainian
Soldier and crest
The man and the devil
soldier and pop
The hunter and the goblin
sly woman
betting
Bishop's response
Laughter and sorrow
Dobry pop
Pop neighs like a stallion
Priest's family and laborer
Pop and laborer
Pop, priest, priest and laborer
pop and man
Piglet
cow court
Male funeral
greedy pop
The tale of how the pop gave birth to a calf
Spiritual father
Pop and Gypsies
Drive the heat
The blind man's wife
Pop and trap
Senile verse
jokes
Bad - not bad
The first meeting of the groom with the bride
Two groom brothers
wise hostess
Woman's subterfuge
chatty wife
Mother-in-law and son-in-law
pike head
Man, bear, fox and horsefly
cat and fox
Fox and hare
louse and flea
Bear and woman
sparrow and mare
dog and woodpecker
hot gag
P ... and ass
Irritated lady
Notes
A FEW WORDS ABOUT THIS BOOK
"Russian cherished fairy tales" by A.N. Afanasyev were printed in Geneva more than a hundred years ago. They appeared without a publisher's name, sine anno. On the title page, under the title, it was only indicated: "Valaam. Tiparian art of the monastic brethren. Year of obscurantism." And on the countertitle there was a note: "Printed solely for archaeologists and bibliophiles in a small number of copies."
Exceptionally rare already in the last century, Afanasiev's book has now become almost a phantom. Judging by the works of Soviet folklorists, only two or three copies of the Treasured Tales have been preserved in the special departments of the largest libraries in Leningrad and Moscow. The manuscript of Afanasiev's book is in the Leningrad Institute of Russian Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR ("Russian Folk Tales not for printing, Archive, No. R-1, inventory 1, No. 112). The only copy of "Tales", which belonged to the Paris National Library, disappeared before the First World War war.The book is not listed in the catalogs of the library of the British Museum.
By republishing Afanasiev's "Cherished Tales", we hope to acquaint the Western and Russian reader with a little-known facet of the Russian imagination - "shameful", obscene tales, in which, according to the folklorist, "genuine folk speech beats with a living key, sparkling with all the brilliant and witty sides of the common man" .
Obscene? Afanasiev did not consider them to be such. "They simply cannot understand," he said, "that in these folk stories there is a million times more morality than in sermons full of school rhetoric."
"Russian cherished fairy tales" are organically connected with the collection of fairy tales by Afanasyev, which has become a classic. Fairy tales of immodest content, like the tales of a well-known collection, were delivered to Afanasyev by the same collectors-contributors: V.I. Dalem, P.I. Yakushkin, Voronezh local historian N.I. Vtorov. In both collections we find the same themes, motifs, plots, with the only difference that the satirical arrows of the "Treasured Tales" are more poisonous, and the language is rather rude in places. There is even a case when the first, quite "decent" half of the story is placed in the classic collection, while the other, less modest, is in "Cherished Tales". We are talking about the story "A man, a bear, a fox and a horsefly."
There is no need to dwell on why Afanasiev, when publishing "Russian Folk Tales" (issues 1-8, 1855-1863), was forced to refuse to include the part that would be published a decade later under the title "Russian Folk Tales Not for Print" (the epithet "cherished" appears only in the title of the second, last edition of "Fairy Tales"). The Soviet scientist V.P. Anikin explains this refusal in the following way: "It was impossible to print the anti-priest and anti-bar tales in Russia." And is it possible to publish - in an uncut and uncleaned form - "Cherished Tales" in the homeland of Afanasiev today? We do not find an answer to this from V.P. Anikin.
The question remains open how immodest fairy tales got abroad. Mark Azadovsky suggests that in the summer of 1860, during his trip to Western Europe, Afanasiev handed them over to Herzen or another emigrant. It is possible that the publisher of Kolokola contributed to the publication of Skazok. Subsequent searches, perhaps, will help to shed light on the history of the publication of "Russian cherished fairy tales" - a book that stumbled over the obstacles of not only tsarist, but also Soviet censorship.
FOREWORD A.N.AFANASIEV A TO THE 2nd EDITION
"Honny soit, qui mal y pense"
The publication of our cherished fairy tales ... is almost the only phenomenon of its kind. It may easily be that this is precisely why our publication will give rise to all sorts of complaints and exclamations, not only against the impudent publisher, but also against the people who created such fairy tales in which folk fantasy, in vivid pictures and not at all embarrassed by expressions, unfolded all the strength and all the wealth his humour. Leaving aside all possible reproaches against us, we must say that any exclamation against the people would be not only an injustice, but also an expression of complete ignorance, which, by the way, is for the most part one of the inalienable characteristics of a screaming pruderie. Our cherished tales are a unique phenomenon, as we said, especially because we do not know of any other edition in which genuine folk speech would beat in such a living key in a fabulous form, sparkling with all the brilliant and witty sides of a commoner.
The literatures of other peoples present many similar cherished stories, and have long been ahead of us in this respect as well. If not in the form of fairy tales, then in the form of songs, conversations, short stories, farces, sottises, moralites, dictons, etc., other peoples have a huge number of works in which the folk mind, just as little embarrassed by expressions and pictures, marked with humor, hooked with satire and sharply exposed to ridicule different aspects of life. Who doubts that the playful stories of Boccaccio are not drawn from the life of the people, that the countless French novels and faceties of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are not from the same source as the satirical works of the Spaniards, Spottliede and Schmahschriften of the Germans, this mass of libel flyers in all languages, which appeared about all kinds of events in private and public life - not folk works? In Russian literature, however, there is still a whole section of folk expressions that are not printed, not for printing. In the literatures of other peoples, such barriers to popular speech have not existed for a long time.
... So, the accusation of the Russian people of gross cynicism would be equal to the accusation of the same and all other peoples, in other words, it itself reduces to zero. The erotic content of the cherished Russian fairy tales, without saying anything for or against the morality of the Russian people, simply points only to that side of life that most of all gives revelry to humor, satire and irony. Our tales are transmitted in that artless form, as they came out of the mouths of the people and recorded from the words of the storytellers. This is what makes them special: nothing is touched in them, there are no embellishments or additions. We will not expand on the fact that in different stripes of wide Rus' the same tale is told differently. There are, of course, many such variants, and most of them, no doubt, pass from mouth to mouth without being either overheard or recorded by collectors. The options given by us are taken from among the most famous or the most characteristic for some reason.
Note ... that the part of the tales, where the characters are animals, as well as possible draws all the sharpness and all the power of observation of our commoner. Far from the cities, working in the field, forest, on the river, everywhere he deeply understands the nature he loves, faithfully peeps and subtly studies the life around him. The vividly grasped sides of this mute, but eloquent for him life, are themselves transferred to his fellows - and the story full of life and light humor is ready. The department of fairy tales about the so-called "foal breed" by the people, of which we have so far given only a small part, clearly illuminates both the attitude of our peasant towards his spiritual shepherds, and their correct understanding.
"Cherished Tale" about a toothy bosom and a pike head
from Afanasiev's collection
Bibliothèque nationale de France
In the 1850s, folklore collector Alexander Afanasiev traveled around the Moscow and Voronezh provinces and recorded fairy tales, songs, proverbs and parables of local residents. However, he managed to publish little: like French fablios, German schwanks and Polish facets, Russian fairy tales contained erotic and anti-clerical plots, and therefore Afanasiev's collections were censored.
From the forbidden texts, Afanasiev compiled a collection called "Folk Russian Tales Not for Printing" and secretly smuggled it to Europe. In 1872, many of the texts included in it were published in Geneva, without the name of the compiler, under the title "Russian cherished tales." The word “cherished” means “reserved”, “secret”, “secret”, “holy kept”, and after the release of “Russian cherished proverbs and sayings”, collected by Vladimir Dal and Pyotr Efremov, and Afanasiev’s “Treasured Tales”, it began to be used in as a definition of a corpus of obscene, erotic folklore texts.
In Russia, Afanasiev's collection was published only in 1991. Arzamas publishes one of the texts included in it.
pike head
Once upon a time there was a man and a woman, and they had a daughter, a young girl. She went to harrow the garden; harrowed, harrowed, only they called her to eat pancakes in the hut. She went, and left the horse completely with the harrow in the garden:
- Let him stand while I toss and turn.
Only their neighbor had a son - a stupid guy. For a long time he wanted to hook this girl, but he couldn’t figure out how. He saw a horse with a harrow, climbed over the fence, unharnessed the horse and led him into his garden. Although he left the harrow
in the old place, but the shafts slipped through the fence to him and harnessed the horse again. The girl came and was amazed:
- What would it be - a harrow on one side of the fence, and a horse on the other?
And let's beat your nag with a whip and say:
- What the hell got you! She knew how to get in, know how to get out: well, well, take it out!
And the guy is standing, looking and laughing.
“If you want,” he says, “I’ll help, only you give me ...
The girl was a thief:
“Perhaps,” she says, and she had an old pike head in mind,
lying in the garden, with its mouth open. She lifted that head, put it in her sleeve
and says:
“I won’t get to you, and don’t climb here, so that no one sees, but let’s better through this poke.” Hurry up, stick the gag, and I'll instruct you.
The guy jerked off the gag and put it through the tyn, and the girl took the pike head, opened it and put it on the bald patch. He pulled like a jerk - and blew *** to the blood. He grabbed the gag with his hands and ran home, sat in a corner and kept quiet.
“Ah, her mother is so,” he thinks to himself, “but how painful it is for her ***** to bite! If only *** would heal, otherwise I will never ask any girl!
Now the time has come: they decided to marry this guy, they betrothed him to a neighbor's girl and married him. They live a day, and another, and a third, they live a week, another
and third. The guy is afraid to touch his wife. Here we must go to the mother-in-law, let's go. Dear young woman, she says to her husband:
“Listen, dear Danilushka! Why did you get married, and what's the matter with me
don't you have? If you can’t, what was someone else’s age to seize for nothing?
And Danilo to her:
No, you won't fool me now! You have ***** bites. My gag has been hurting for a long time since then, it has barely healed.
“You’re lying,” she says, “it was I who was joking with you at that time, but now
don't be afraid. Come on, try hosha on the road, you will fall in love with it yourself.
Then the hunt took him, turned up her hem and said:
“Wait, Varyukha, let me tie your legs, if it bites, then I can jump out and leave.”
He untied the reins and twisted her bare thighs. He had a decent tool, how he pressed Varyukha-ta, how she screamed with a good obscenity,
and the horse was young, got frightened and began to bellow (the sleigh here and there), threw out the guy, and Varyukha, with bare thighs, rushed to the mother-in-law's yard. The mother-in-law looks out the window, sees: the horse is a son-in-law, and she thought, it’s true, he brought beef for the holiday; went to meet, and then her daughter.
“Ah, mother,” she shouts, “untie it as soon as possible, no one has seen Pokedov.
The old woman untied it, asked what and how.
- And where is the husband?
- Yes, his horse threw out!
Here they entered the hut, looked out the window - Danilka was coming, went up to the boys that were playing grandmother, stopped and looked. The mother-in-law sent her eldest daughter after him.
She comes:
— Hello, Danila Ivanovich!
- Great.
- Go to the hut, only you are missing!
- Do you have Barbara?
- We have.
“Did she stop bleeding?”
She spat and left him. The mother-in-law sent a daughter-in-law for him, this one pleased him.
"Come on, let's go, Danilushka, the blood has long since subsided."
She brought him to the hut, and the mother-in-law meets and says:
"Welcome, dear son-in-law!"
- Do you have Barbara?
- We have.
“Did she stop bleeding?”
- I've been gone for a long time.
So he pulled out his gag, showed his mother-in-law and said:
“Here, mother, it was all in her!”
- Well, well, sit down, it's time for dinner.
They sat down and began to drink and eat. How they served scrambled eggs, the fool wanted the whole
eat her alone, so he came up with, and deftly pulled out the gag, hit
bald with a spoon and said:
- That was everything in Varyukha! - Yes, and began to stir the scrambled eggs with his spoon.
There is nothing to do here, everyone climbed out from behind the table, and he ate the scrambled eggs alone
and began to thank his mother-in-law for bread and salt.
"Russian cherished tales" by A.N. Afanasyev were printed in Geneva more than a hundred years ago. They appeared without a publisher's name, sine anno. On the title page, under the title, it was only indicated: “Valaam. Typarian art of the monastic brethren. Year of darkness. And on the countertitle there was a note: "Printed solely for archaeologists and bibliophiles in a small number of copies."
Exceptionally rare already in the last century, Afanasiev's book has now become almost a phantom. Judging by the works of Soviet folklorists, only two or three copies of the Treasured Tales have been preserved in the special departments of the largest libraries in Leningrad and Moscow. The manuscript of Afanasiev's book is in the Leningrad Institute of Russian Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR ("Folk Russian Tales Not for Printing", Archive, No. P-1, inventory 1, No. 112). The only copy of the Tales, which belonged to the National Library of Paris, disappeared before the First World War. The book is not listed in the catalogs of the British Museum Library.
By republishing Afanasiev’s “Treasured Tales”, we hope to acquaint the Western and Russian reader with a little-known facet of the Russian imagination - “shameful”, obscene tales, in which, according to the folklorist, “genuine folk speech beats with a living key, sparkling with all the brilliant and witty sides of the common man” .
Obscene? Afanasiev did not consider them to be such. “They can’t understand,” he said, “that in these folk stories there is a million times more morality than in sermons full of school rhetoric.”
"Russian cherished fairy tales" are organically connected with the collection of fairy tales by Afanasiev, which has become a classic. Fairy tales of immodest content, like the tales of a well-known collection, were delivered to Afanasyev by the same collectors-contributors: V.I. Dalem, P.I. Yakushkin, Voronezh local historian N.I. Vtorov. In both collections we find the same themes, motifs, plots, with the only difference that the satirical arrows of the Treasured Tales are more poisonous, and the language is rather rude in places. There is even a case when the first, quite “decent” half of the story is placed in the classic collection, while the other, less modest, is in “Cherished Tales”. We are talking about the story "A man, a bear, a fox and a horsefly."
There is no need to dwell on why Afanasiev, when publishing Folk Russian Tales (issues 1–8, 1855–1863), was forced to refuse to include the part that would be published a decade later under the title Russian Folk Tales Not for Print. (the epithet "cherished" appears only in the title of the second, last edition of "Fairy Tales"). The Soviet scientist V.P. Anikin explains this refusal in this way: “It was impossible to print the anti-pope and anti-bar tales in Russia.” Is it possible to publish - in an uncut and uncleaned form - "Cherished Tales" in the homeland of Afanasiev today? We do not find an answer to this from V.P. Anikin.
The question remains open how immodest fairy tales got abroad. Mark Azadovsky suggests that in the summer of 1860, during his trip to Western Europe, Afanasiev handed them over to Herzen or another emigrant. It is possible that the publisher of Kolokola contributed to the publication of Skazok. Subsequent searches, perhaps, will help to shed light on the history of the publication of "Russian cherished fairy tales" - a book that stumbled over the obstacles of not only tsarist, but also Soviet censorship.
FOREWORD A.N.AFANASIEV A TO THE 2nd EDITION
The publication of our cherished fairy tales ... is almost the only phenomenon of its kind. It may easily be that this is precisely why our publication will give rise to all sorts of complaints and exclamations, not only against the impudent publisher, but also against the people who created such fairy tales in which folk fantasy, in vivid pictures and not at all embarrassed by expressions, unfolded all the strength and all the wealth his humour. Leaving aside all possible reproaches against us, we must say that any exclamation against the people would be not only an injustice, but also an expression of utter ignorance, which, by the way, is for the most part one of the essential characteristics of a flashy pruderie. Our cherished tales are a unique phenomenon, as we said, especially because we do not know of any other edition in which genuine folk speech would beat in such a living key in a fabulous form, sparkling with all the brilliant and witty sides of a commoner.
The literatures of other peoples present many similar cherished stories, and have long been ahead of us in this respect as well. If not in the form of fairy tales, then in the form of songs, conversations, short stories, farces, sottises, moralites, dictons, etc., other peoples have a huge number of works in which the folk mind, just as little embarrassed by expressions and pictures, marked with humor, hooked with satire and sharply exposed to ridicule different aspects of life. Who doubts that the playful stories of Boccaccio are not drawn from the life of the people, that the countless French novels and faceties of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are not from the same source as the satirical works of the Spaniards, Spottliede and Schmahschriften of the Germans, this mass of libel flyers in all languages, which appeared about all kinds of events in private and public life - not folk works? In Russian literature, however, there is still a whole section of folk expressions that are not printed, not for printing. In the literatures of other peoples, such barriers to popular speech have not existed for a long time.
... So, the accusation of the Russian people of gross cynicism would be equal to the accusation of the same and all other peoples, in other words, it itself reduces to zero. The erotic content of the cherished Russian fairy tales, without saying anything for or against the morality of the Russian people, simply points only to that side of life that most of all gives revelry to humor, satire and irony. Our tales are transmitted in that artless form, as they came out of the mouths of the people and recorded from the words of the storytellers. This is what makes them special: nothing is touched in them, there are no embellishments or additions. We will not expand on the fact that in different stripes of wide Rus' the same tale is told differently. There are, of course, many such variants, and most of them, no doubt, pass from mouth to mouth without being either overheard or recorded by collectors. The options given by us are taken from among the most famous or the most characteristic for some reason.
Note ... that the part of the tales, where the characters are animals, as well as possible draws all the sharpness and all the power of observation of our commoner. Far from the cities, working in the field, forest, on the river, everywhere he deeply understands the nature he loves, faithfully peeps and subtly studies the life around him. The vividly grasped sides of this mute, but eloquent for him life, are themselves transferred to his fellows - and the story full of life and light humor is ready. The section of fairy tales about the so-called “foal breed” by the people, of which we have so far given only a small part, brightly illuminates both the attitude of our peasant towards his spiritual shepherds, and their correct understanding.
Our cherished tales are curious in addition to many aspects in the following respect. For an important scholar, a thoughtful researcher of the Russian nationality, they provide an extensive field for comparing the content of some of them with stories of almost the same content by foreign writers, with the works of other peoples. How did the stories of Boccaccio (see, for example, the fairy tale "The Merchant's Wife and the Clerk"), the satires and farces of the French of the 16th century, penetrated into the Russian backwoods, how did the Western short story degenerate into a Russian fairy tale, what is their social side, where and, perhaps, even from whose side there are traces of influence, what kind of doubts and conclusions from the evidence of such an identity, etc., etc.
FOLK RUSSIAN TALES BY A. N. AFANASIEV - a fundamental publication, the first in Russian. science set of Russian. fairy tales (including also Ukrainian and Belarusian fairy tales). First edition in 8th issue. in 1855-63, the last time scientific. ed. 1984-85 (ser. "Literary monuments"). Contains approx. 580 texts dec. genre types east.-glory. fairy tales recorded in more than 30 lips. The basis of the Sat. compiled notes by Afanasyev himself, local amateur collectors, texts from the Rus. geogr. about-va (more than a third), the former printed editions, as well as the collection of V. Dahl - approx. 200 texts. Proposed by Afanasiev in the second ed. (1873) classification (fairy tales about animals, fairy tales, novelistic, satirical, anecdotes) retained the practical. value to this day. The question of the degree and nature of the work of Afanasiev-ed. above the texts remains open (for sure, we can talk about editing the language and style of fairy tales). Sat. caused a great response in the scientific. environment, in lit. criticism. Simultaneously he became for a long time (and to a certain extent remains at the present time) main. a source for acquaintance of the general reading public in Russia and abroad with Russian. classical nar. fairy tale. In 1870, Afanasiev published Russian Children's Tales, Vol. was recognized by the censorship committee as harmful, but it took pride of place in the circle of children's reading, withstanding more than 25 editions. This Sat. served as material for artists: it was illustrated by I. Bilibin, G. Narbut, Yu. Vasnetsov, T. Mavrina, and others. on many European languages.
A. N. Afanasiev in 1855-1863 The collection "Folk Russian Tales" is published in eight issues. In the first edition, there was no distribution of fairy tales by thematic sections.
The second edition of the collection of fairy tales (posthumous) in four books (volumes) was prepared by Afanasiev himself. Fairy tales are divided into thematic sections (tales about animals, fairy tales, short stories, everyday satirical tales, anecdotes), notes made up the fourth volume, which also included popular tales.
Shortly after the first edition of Russian Folk Tales, Afanasiev was going to print a lightened illustrated collection of Russian Children's Tales for family reading. It included 61 fairy tales: 29 animal tales, 16 fairy tales and 16 household tales from the main collection. However, censorship put all sorts of obstacles to this undertaking, and the collection was published only in 1870. The head of the censorship committee and a member of the council of the Ministry of the Interior, P.A. Vakar, in his submission to the press department, pointed out that all departments that have educational institutions should be notified that the content of 24 fairy tales in the children's collection is unacceptable and harmful: "What only it is not depicted in them, not to mention the main main idea of almost all these fairy tales, that is, the triumph of cunning aimed at achieving some selfish goal, in some outrageous ideas are personified, as, for example, in the fairy tale "Truth and Falsehood" , in which it is proved that "it is wise to live with the truth in the world, what truth is today! You will be sent to Siberia for the truth ..."
The negative response of censorship led to the fact that the next, second, edition of Russian Children's Tales was published only in 1886. In total, this book has gone through more than twenty-five editions.
The meaning of the book[edit | edit source]
About the educational value of the collected folk tales (even the main collection), he wrote to Afanasiev in 1856-1858. N. A. Elagin (brother of P. V. Kireevsky): “children listen to them more willingly than all moral stories and stories.”
Illustrations from editions of the book "Russian Children's Tales" were included in the golden fund of Russian painting: the collection was illustrated by I. Ya. Bilibin, Yu. A. Vasnetsov, N. N. Karazin, K. Kuznetsov, A. Kurkin, E. E. Lissner, T. A. Mavrina, R. Narbut, E. D. Polenova, E. Rachev and others.
In his collection, Afanasiev systematized the voluminous material of Russian fairy tales of the first half of the 19th century, providing them with extensive scientific commentary. The system adopted by Afanasiev is the first attempt to classify fairy tales in general.
