The two brothers came to a rich peasant’s house and asked to be allowed to spend the night. The peasant drank and made merry with the rich brother, but refused to invite the poor one to his table. The poor brother lay on the stove, looking at them; suddenly he fell from the stove and crushed to death a child lying in a cradle below. So the peasant also set out to see Shemiaka the judge, to lodge a complaint against the poor brother.
As they walked to the town (the rich brother, the peasant, and the poor brother, who walked behind them), they happened to cross a high bridge. The poor brother, thinking that he would not escape with his life from Shemiaka the judge, jumped from the bridge, hoping to kill himself. Under the bridge a man was carrying his sick father to the bathhouse; the poor brother fell onto the sledge and crushed the sick man to death. The son went to complain to Shemiaka the judge on the ground that the poor man had killed his father.
The rich brother came to Shemiaka the judge and lodged a complaint against the poor one for having torn off the tail of his horse. In the meantime the poor brother had picked up a stone and wrapped it in a kerchief. Standing behind his brother he thought: “If the judge judges against me I will kill him with this stone.” But the judge, thinking that the poor man had prepared a bribe of a hundred rubles, ordered the rich brother to give the horse to the poor one to keep until it grew another tail.
Then the rich peasant came before the judge and lodged his complaint about the death of his child. The poor man took out the same stone and showed it to the judge from where he stood behind the peasant. The judge, thinking that he was being offered another hundred rubles, for the second case, ordered the peasant to give his wife to the poor man to keep until she gave birth to another child, adding: “And then take back your wife and the child.”
The third plaintiff accused the poor man of having crushed his father to death. The poor man showed the same stone to the judge. The judge, thinking that he was being offered still another hundred rubles, ordered the dead man’s son to go to the bridge and said: “And you, poor man, stand under the bridge, and you, son, jump from the bridge and crush the poor man to death.”
Shemiaka the judge then sent a servant to the poor man to ask for three hundred rubles. The poor man showed his stone and said: “If the judge had judged against me, I would have killed him with this stone.” The servant came to the judge and said: “If you had judged against him, he would have killed you with a stone.” The judge crossed himself and said: “Thank God that I judged in his favor.”
The poor brother went to the rich brother to get the horse, in accordance with the verdict, until it should grow another tail. The rich brother did not want to give away his horse; instead, he gave the poor brother five hundred rubles, three measures of grain, and a milk goat, and made peace with him.
The poor man went to the peasant and, citing the verdict, asked for the peasant’s wife until she should give birth to a child. Instead, the peasant gave him five hundred rubles, a cow with her calf, a mare with her colt, and four measures of grain, and made peace with him.
The poor man went to the plaintiff whose father he had killed and told him that in accordance with the judge’s verdict he, the son, must stand on the bridge, and he himself, the poor man, under the bridge, and that the son must jump on him and crush him to death. The son thought: “If I jump from the bridge I shall not crush him but shall smash myself to death.” He gave the poor man two hundred rubles, a horse, and five measures of grain, and made peace with him.
COMMENTARY
ON RUSSIAN FAIRY TALES
1. THEIR LIFE—THEIR STUDY
“WHEN Juan went his progress, many of the Commons as well as Gentry presented him with fine Presents: A good honest Bask-shoemaker, who made shoes of Bask for a Copeak a pair, consults with his wife what to present his Majesty; says she, a pair of fine Lopkyes,1 or shoes of Bask; that is no rarity (quoth he); but we have an huge great Turnip in the Garden, we’ll give him that, and a pair of Lopkyes also. Thus they did; and the Emperor took the present so kindly, that he made all his Nobility buy Lopkyes of the fellow at five shillings a pair, and he wore one pair himself. This put the man in stock, whereby he began to drive a Trade, and in time grew so considerable, that he left a great estate behind him. His family are now Gentlemen, and call’d Lopotsky’s. There is a tree standing near his quondam house, upon which it is a custom to throw all their old Lopkyes as they pass by, in memory of this Gallant.
“A Gentleman seeing him so well paid for his Turnep, made account by the rule of proportion to get a greater Reward for a brave Horse; but the Emperour suspecting his design, gave him nothing but the great Turnep, for which he was both abash’d and laugh’d at.”
This story about Ivan the Terrible is among some ten Russian folk tales recorded by an Oxford doctor of medicine, Samuel Collins (1619-1670). In the sixties he lived in Moscow as physician to the Tsar Aleksey Mikhaylovich, father of Peter the Great, and, brought back to England a sable coat, presented to him by the Russian sovereign, and some curious data on the Muscovite empire. Shortly after Collins’s death his notes were published under the title The Present State of Russia (London, 1671). The tales mentioned above are entered in this booklet.
The classic collection of Russian folk tales was gathered by the outstanding ethnographer Afanas’ev, who first brought it out, in serial form, from 1855 to 1864. Almost two hundred years separate this edition from the modest debut of Samuel Collins. It is worthy of remembrance that Russian folk tales were first recorded and first published, not in their homeland and not in their mother tongue, but in England, in English translation. Similarly, Russian secular folk songs first were recorded under the initiative of an Oxford bachelor, Richard James, who had been in Moscow as chaplain to an English diplomatic mission and returned to Oxford in 1620 with these invaluable texts. Not in Russia, but in England, there appeared at the end of the same century a first and a brilliant attempt at a grammar of spoken Russian from the pen of H. W. Ludolf.
Such beginnings of an active attention to oral Russian speech and poetry are, of course, characteristic of the territorial and scientific breadth of British interests in the seventeenth century. On the other hand, there arises the not unimportant question why, in the land of its birth, the Russian spoken language and oral tradition, and in particular the Russian folk tale, remained so long unrecorded in writing. Here we are confronted with one of the most peculiar features of Russian cultural life, which sharply distinguishes it from that of the occidental world. For many centuries Russian written literature was almost entirely subordinated to the church: with all its wealth and high artistry, the Old Russian literary heritage is almost wholly concerned with the lives of saints and pious men, with devotional legends, prayers, sermons, ecclesiastical discourses, and chronicles in a monastic vein. The Old Russian laity, however, possessed a copious, original, manifold, and highly artistic fiction, but the only medium for its diffusion was oral transmission. The idea of using the written word for secular poetry was thoroughly alien to Russian tradition, and the expressive means of this poetry were inseparable from the oral execution and transmission.
Deviations from this dichotomous principle in the history of Old Russian literary art (ecclesiastical writings—secular oral poetry) are relatively rare. Thus, under the influence of hagiography and apocrypha, there slowly emerged new offshoots of folklore—oral legends and spiritual songs. On the other hand, in the oldest epoch of Russian history, before the Tatar invasion of the thirteenth century, secular elements had infiltrated from the oral tradition into the written literature, and some precious fragments of ancient written epos intimately linked with oral poetry fortunately survived in the Russian manuscript heritage. Later, echoes of this heroic epopee appeared in connection with the centuries-long struggle against the Tatar yoke. But on the whole the knights’ tales are drowned in the tens of thousands of old Russian religious texts, and even in the few exceptions the ecclesiastic mold obtrudes more and more.
In g
eneral, the laymen from the tsars’ court and from boyars down to the lowest ranks, continued to seek amusement and satisfaction for their esthetic cravings, above all, in the oral tradition and in oral creation. Therefore it would be erroneous to interpret this tradition and creativeness as a specific property of the lower classes. The oral literature of Russia, in the era before Peter, was at the service of all the levels of the social hierarchy, and this multiform, interclass, national character of Old Russian folklore left its indelible stamp. In the Old Russian milieu the difference between the written and the oral literature was a matter of function and not at all of social allocation.
The manifold functions of secular fiction were performed by folklore, and the language of these works was close to the usual colloquial Russian. The written literature was reserved for ecclesiastical tasks and used Church Slavonic, a somewhat renovated and Russified version of the language in which, at the dawn of Slavic Christianity, the church books were written in Great Moravia and Bulgaria.
Unprecedented social upheavals, with shifts and revaluations of traditional values—such are the characteristic marks of the seventeenth century in Russia. The boundaries between the ecclesiastical and the secular, between letters and folklore, between the written and the spoken language, begin to be effaced. The traditional disunion is replaced by a fertile interpenetration. A laicization of the written literature begins; for the first time in the history of Muscovy written attempts at secular fiction are made. And as the only native tradition upon which these attempts could lean was the oral one, there appears in Russian literature of the seventeenth century a vigorous influence of folklore. In its turn, the book—especially the translated book—had a much stronger effect than before on oral poetry. When Russian literature ceased to segregate itself from secular elements, translations of foreign fiction naturally became frequent. Then, in line with old habits, the oral tale, susceptible to profane elements, easily took this new material to its own. Russian literature of the seventeenth century is particularly rich in works that lie on the borderline between written and oral tradition. The capricious fusion of both these elements created such peculiar, inimitable masterpieces as, for instance, the tales of Woe-Misfortune (Gore-Zlochastie), of Savva Grudcïn, of a Lad and Lass. But precisely such hybrid formations show with particular clarity how tenacious in the Russian consciousness was the distinction of two heterogeneous realms of literature, the written and the oral. Folklore, when committed to paper, was radically transformed; therefore genuine Russian folk tales and songs of the seventeenth century could not reach us except through the whim of foreign travelers such as Collins and James.
From the seventeenth century on, both the development of the Russian secular book and the influence of folklore forms on written literature have continued. But the Russian eighteenth century brought forth new currents: it tended to create an aristocratic literature and to isolate and canonize the language of the elect. However, the narrowing of the social base of oral production, and the gradual change of the folklore from a property of the whole people to that of the common folk, was not effected at once. Over a long period, folklore did not vanish from the household of the gentlefolk but continued to fill its nook there, while lofty poetry on the classic model held forth in the drawing room. Even so, one of the most prominent among the initiators of the new literature, Vasiliy Trediakovskiy, more than once acknowledged that under the occidental, aristocratic make-up many native folklore traits were concealed.
As early as the twelfth century one may read in Russian sources that a rich man, suffering from sleeplessness, ordered his attendants to tickle the soles of his feet, to strum on the gusli, and to tell him fairy tales. Ivan the Terrible, who became one of the popular heroes of the Russian folk tale, was its most avid fancier, and three old blind men followed each other at his bedside, relating fairy tales before he slumbered. Skillful tellers of tales continued to enliven the leisure of tsar and tsarina, of princes and gentry, as late as the eighteenth century. Even at the close of that century we find in Russian newspapers advertisements of blind men applying for work in the homes of the gentry as tellers of tales. Lev Tolstoy, as a child, fell asleep to the tales of an old man who had once been bought by the count’s grandfather because of his knowledge and masterly rendition of fairy tales.
Cheap colored prints, intended for the common people, at times introduced the texts of folk tales. But in publications of a higher level the folk tale, for a long time, was inadmissible; and when, toward the end of the eighteenth century, an amateur of folklore, Chulkov, tried to regale his readers with three genuine folk tales, the critics protested “because the simplest peasant could, without any trouble, invent some ten such tales and were they all put into print, it would be a waste of paper, quills, ink, printers’ type, not to mention the labor of the gentleman of letters.”
Later, in the same vein, contemporary critics reacted to Pushkin’s attempts at imitating the folk tale and resented the illicit intrusion of the muzhik into the society of nobles. If an imitation was to be sanctioned, all bluntness and vulgarity offensive to refined habits and tastes had to be erased. When the author, stylizing a folk tale, was ready and able to prettify and drain it of local color the critics declared with satisfaction: “Obvious it is that this tale comes not from the muzhik’s hut but from the castle.” (Pletnev, discussing the tale of Ivan-Tsarevich adapted by Zhukovskiy.)
But it was Pushkin who perceived to the full the artistic value of the folk tale. “How fascinating are these stories!” he said. “Each one is a poem.” Moreover, the poet, who felt more acutely than his contemporaries the needs and aspirations of native literature, understood that the modern Russian novel was only in bud and that the oral tradition still remained for the Russian prose writer an instructive and unequaled model. “Nowhere as in the folk tale has it been possible to endow our language with such Russian breadth. But one must learn to speak Russian also outside the tale!”
Pushkin could not confine himself to the remarkable achievements with which he crowned the century-old triumphal way of Russian poetry, and during the last period of his brief life span (1799-1837) he tried to enrich modern Russian fiction by laying a foundation of native prose. From this quest emerges his interest in folk tales. He knew the folk tales thoroughly and recorded them, but, strange as it may seem, his own imitations of fairy tales are based, for the most part, on French translations of the Arabian Nights, the brothers Grimm, or Washington Irving rather than on Russian folklore. Likewise, it is curious that none of Pushkin’s fairy tales are composed in prose and that most of them are in a meter foreign to the Russian tale. Most surprising of all, he nonetheless succeeded in mastering the spirit and tone of the Russian folk tale. For instance, in his famous Tale of the Golden Cockerel Pushkin simply retells Irving’s Legend of the Arabian Astrologer, and he does it in trochaic tetrameters, alien to Russian folk tales; yet both Russian and American readers, willy-nilly, associate this pastiche with Russian folklore.
In the structure of folk tales Pushkin sought the answer to the question that tormented him: What is the essence of Russian prose? Thus arose his attempts to set genuine Russian folk-tale motifs in free spoken verse—that which is used by skillful jesters and which lies on the border between prose and poetry proper.
Pushkin’s experiments with Russian folk tales, and Gogol’s with the Ukrainian, exemplify the formative period of modern Russian prose. Likewise, it is not by chance that the later intensive recording and impassioned study of the true folk tales, and the appearance of such vast and magnificent collections as the books of Afanas’ev (1855-1864),2 Khudyakov, and others,3 coincide with the flowering of Russian literary prose. The Russian folk tale played a great role in the creative development of the classic masters of Russian prose—Tolstoy, Dostoevskiy, Leskov, Ostrovskiy. And the oral style, which is a constant and typical feature of Russian literature, finds its fountainhead in the folklore tradition.
Rarely are workers in the field of ethnography
called upon to play such a many-sided role in the history of a national culture as was Aleksandr Nikolaevich Afanas’ev (1826-1871). Without his tales a Russian child’s bookshelf is incomplete. Generations of authors have drawn and still draw upon Afanas’ev’s stock. Without it and without his three-volume work on the symbolism of the fairy tales and folk mythology,4 the “Snow Maiden” of Ostrovskiy and Rimskiy Korsakov would never have been created; there would have been less richness of protean imagery in the poetry of Esenin, who, after long searching in the hungry years of the civil war, procured a copy of Afanas’ev’s study at the price of more than three bushels of wheat—and was jubilant over his luck.
In the quantity and diversity of its material, Afanas’ev’s store of fairy tales remains unparalleled in Russian folkloristic study. Collectors and investigators of folk poetry and customs have learned and still learn from it. Around this collection there began heated and fertile discussions about the methods of recording, study and classification of popular narratives.
It is characteristic that Afanas’ev came to folklore as an outsider: by education he was a lawyer. Among the more than six hundred tales that he published, only some ten were recorded by him. For his publication he used mostly the rich stock of Vladimir Dahl, the famous collector of lexical and folkoristic materials, and the remarkable collection of folk tales assembled by the Russian Geographical Society. Unfortunately, in only two-thirds of the tales of Afanas’ev is the place of the recording noted. He paid scant attention to questions of where and from whom this or that tale was heard. Here and there the editor did not refrain from some stylistic retouching of the texts, but in this respect he did not go so far as his principal model, the brothers Grimm.
Russian Fairy Tales (Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library) Page 61