Russian Fairy Tales (Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library)

by Afanas'Ev, Aleksandr

  It is true that the hypothetically reconstructed archetype of a tale interested Afanas’ev perhaps more than its actual, individual variants, but he did not follow the fanatic principle that the eminent historian of literature, A. Pïpin, ascribed to him, namely, that everything expressing the arbitrary manner of the individual should be weeded out from the presentation of the tale as “twaddle that is only personal.” 5 However, in sundry cases, Afanas’ev artificially constructed a single text from several variants of a tale. Further, such an approach was naturally rejected, and as early as the sixties Khudyakov put forth the thesis that “the text of folk tales must stand inviolable.” At the same time P. Rïbnikov, who initiated the scientific recording of Russian epic folk songs (bïlinï), called for the study of “all that characterizes and exemplifies the narrator and stamps not only the folk but also the individual.” And even in the review of the first issues of Afanas’ev’s tales the leading critic, N. Dobrolyubov, charged the collectors of folk poetry in the future not to confine their task to a simple textual recording of a tale or song, but to render the full social and psychological circumstances in which the song or tale has been heard—above all to note the attitude of the teller to the tale and the reaction of the audience.6

  These principles found a still more consistent application in the works of Russian collectors and students on tales and bïlinï. The focusing of attention on tellers and listeners became the concern of Russian folklorists.7 From a mere laboratory preparation the recorded text tended to become a living organism. The present-day shorthand or tape recording of a folk tale with its detailed background data and with its careful biography of the teller, or the further stage, the reproduction by sound film—all these are clearly brilliant technical achievements in comparison with the texts of Afanas’ev. But perhaps the unsophisticated approach of the editor of Russian Folk Tales, who culled his bits from all quarters, in fact enabled him to accomplish the enormous and imperative task of exhibiting the repertory of Russian tales in all its manifold wealth.

  It is true that the further development of Russian research brought many essential correctives to the approach of Afanas’ev and was, in a certain way, an antithesis to this approach and to the romantic theories of language and lore that inspired him. But may one oppose this antithesis to the foregoing thesis, as if the former were a sober scientific conception and the latter, an antiquated fallacy? No, a creative synthesis of both is necessary.

  Afanas’ev and his teachers had overestimated the genetic originality of the folklore products, and they overlooked the constant interpenetrations of written and oral literature. But the later opponents of this romantic viewpoint, conversely, overestimated the significance of such genetic links and missed the functional differences between folklore and belles-lettres; they did not take into account the autonomous structure of both these domains. Absorbed by the problem of the individual features in the repertory of a storyteller, some outstanding Russian folklorists of the recent past (as for instance Boris and Yuriy Sokolov) have gone so far as to identify a tale variant with an individual literary work.8 Meanwhile, the birth and life of a folklore work follow quite different laws than the birth and life of a literary work.9

  A medieval author invents and writes down a tale: a literary work is born, without regard to how it will be received. Maybe it will be condemned by the community, and only generations or centuries later will descendants come across the manuscript, accept and imitate it. Or perhaps the community approves certain elements of the tale and rejects the rest. If the same author, however, invents a tale and begins to narrate it to the community, a work of oral poetry is conceived; but its entry into the folklore repertory depends entirely on whether or not the community accepts it. Only a work that gains the consensus of the collective body, and of this work only that part which the collective censorship passes, becomes an actual folklore entity. A writer may create in opposition to his milieu, but in folklore such an intention is inconceivable.

  If Afanas’ev adopted from the Romanticists the thesis that the folk tale is a product of collective creation, we must now, in spite of obdurate attacks against this “superstitious revival,” recognize that folklore as well as language really presupposes a collective creation, but this collective creation is not to be naively viewed as a kind of choral performance. Scientists of the Romantic school made a mistake, not in assuming that collective creation occurs, but in asserting that it gradually withers away and that the history of language and folklore is, therefore, a process of steady decadence and disintegration. In particular, the contemporary folk tale, no less than its antique archetype, represents a typically interpersonal social value.

  According to the experience of modern linguistics, language patterns exhibit a consistent regularity. The languages of the whole world manifest a paucity and relative simplicity of structural types; and at the base of all these types lie universal laws. This schematic and recurrent character of linguistic patterns finds its explanation first of all in the fact that language is a typical collective property. Similar phenomena of schematism and recurrence in the structure of folk tales throughout the world have long astonished and challenged investigators.

  In folklore as well as in language, only a part of the similarities can be explained on the basis of common patrimony or of diffusion (migratory plots). And, since the fortuity of the other coincidences is impossible, there arises imperatively the question of structural laws that will explain all these striking coincidences, in particular, the repetitive tale plots of independent origins.

  The remarkable studies of the Soviet folklorists V. Propp and A. Nikiforov on the morphology of the Russian folk tale have approached the solution.10 Both these scholars base their classification and analysis of the tale plots on the functions of the dramatis personae. Under the concept of function, they mean the deed defined from the viewpoint of its signification for the plot.

  The investigation of fairy tales through the Afanas’ev collection brought Propp to some suggestive conclusions. What are the constant and stable elements of the tale? The functions of the dramatis personae. By whom and how they are performed is irrelevant. These functions build the pivotal components of the tale. The number of functions occurring in fairy tales is very limited. The mutual connections and temporal sequence of these functions are regulated and restricted by certain laws. And, finally, there is his arresting conclusion: “All fairy tales are uniform in their structure.”

  The explanation that we have tried to develop in relation to corresponding linguistic phenomena suggests itself similarly for the tale patterns. The folk tale is a typically collective ownership. The socialized sections of the mental culture, as for instance language or folk tale, are subject to much stricter and more uniform laws than fields in which individual creation prevails.

  Of course, in the composition of the folk tale there are, besides constants, also variables that the teller is free to alter; but these variations must not be overestimated. Afanas’ev avoided the danger of missing the tale itself behind its variants. “The reflection of the personality of the teller in his tales” is indisputably an interesting problem, but, because in the folklore hierarchy the tale comes before the teller, it is necessary here to be doubly cautious.

  Naturally, the profession, personal interests, and inclinations of a narrator find expression in the distribution of points of emphasis, in the choice of nomenclature and attributes of the dramatis personae—when, for instance, a narrator who is a postman by trade expertly creates a twelve-headed dragon to send the king a threatening letter, first by mail and then by wire. But attempts at biographical interpretation, when applied to the poetics of the tales, are unconvincing. It happens that a sensitive man likes to relate a sentimental tale; but the reverse is also possible, namely, a striking anti-biographism. In the district of Vereya, in the Moscow region, I met a storyteller renowned throughout the countryside, by profession a scavenger and by nature a gutter-mouthed ruffian: his tales were by contra
st always full of virginal sentimentality and high-flown expressions.

  The brothers Sokolov note that among the storytellers there are dreamy fantasts obsessed by fairy tales, humorists addicted to tales of anecdotal tinge, and several other psychological types; and the mentality of a given teller manifests itself both in the selection of his repertory and in his manner of telling. Meanwhile, the question must be inverted. In the tale tradition there are different clear-cut genres—fairy tales, anecdotes, etc.—and a favorite manner of execution traditionally corresponds to each of these types. From this inventory the narrator obviously selects those parts which most nearly correspond to his individual likes or professional interests. But we may not put aside the fact that he takes upon himself one of the roles that pre-exist in the folklore stock of conventional masks, whereas in written literature a creative personality can shape a completely new role.

  For Afanas’ev the teller did not screen the tale, and this is quite natural: the basic problem had to be and was posed before the accessory problems. The same order of tasks confronts the reader who aims to acquaint himself with the world of Russian tales. Through Afanas’ev’s collection he will meet the Russian tale in its most varied and striking examples. It is from his collection that the Russian tales translated for the present anthology are derived.11

  2. THEIR CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES

  ORAL poetry, we repeat, was for centuries the only verbal art that fulfilled the secular demands in Old Russia. During this period it had time to root itself deeply in Russian life. Is not this the main secret of the notable vitality of the Russian folklore and particularly of the folk tale?

  Among the folklorists there reigned for a long time a romantic belief that the oral poetic tradition is richest in the remotest depths of the Russian land. These far-off areas drew the attention of the searchers, so that the Archangel taiga was better known to the ethnographer than the lore at hand in the villages close to Moscow. On the eve of the revolution, such villages were explored by a group of young field workers, and it became evident that one or two hours by rail from the city, in the immediate neighborhood of factories and mills, there was an abundance of folklore, especially tales.

  Up to the time of the revolution the tale continued to live a robust life among the peasants, rich and poor, cowherds, hunters, fishermen, workers and artisans, soldiers and coachmen, peddlers, innkeepers, vagabonds, beggars, and thieves, the haulers on the Volga, the old men, women, and children.12 Intensive collecting in Soviet Russia indicates that the harvest among the Russian folk is not dwindling.13 From a single person, the aged, illiterate, but rarely gifted peasant woman Kupriyanikha, in the Voronesh region, more than one hundred and twenty tales were recently recorded.14 Neither in the kolkhozes, nor in the workers’ settlements, nor in the Red Army, do the tales die out.

  An outstanding expert, Yuriy Sokolov, presents a balance sheet in his textbook Russian Folklore (1938): “In the principal printed collections of Russian tales there are more than three thousand items; there are just as many tales scattered about in various secondary publications. Almost as many, if not more, are still in unpublished manuscripts.” Recordings of Ukrainian and Byelorussian tales in books and manuscripts hardly yield place to the Russian.

  Not only the quantity but also the quality of the tales was heightened by the exclusive, privileged place that, through many centuries, oral poetry occupied in all strata of Russian society. Students have noted striking traces of professionalism in the formal refinement of Russian tales.15 The art of the tale was cultivated and handed down from generation to generation by Russian minstrels (skomorokhi). Masters of storytelling continue to be highly appreciated in the villages. For instance, in the Siberian associations (artel’s) of lumberers, fishermen, and hunters there are skillful tellers especially hired to beguile the hours of work and leisure.

  “The song is beautiful through its harmony, and the tale through its narrative composition,” a popular Russian proverb says.16 And how beloved is this mastery, another byword testifies: “The narrative composition is better than the song.”17

  The best connoisseur of the tales of all the Slavic peoples and their neighbors, the famous Czech investigator J. Polívka, in his synthetic study on the Eastern Slavic folk tales, comes to the conclusion that, in the peculiarity of its ritualized form and in its richness of narrative style, the tale of the Eastern Slavs occupies quite an exceptional place: in this regard it finds no parallel among neighboring peoples—neither in the West and South Slavic world, nor in the Germanic and Romance countries, nor in the Orient. In the Russian (Great Russian) tale these features manifest themselves, according to Polívka’s observations, with a greater brightness and abundance than in the Byelorussian or Ukrainian tale. And on the western periphery of the Ukrainian area they disappear almost entirely.

  Introductory and concluding formulas are especially cultivated in the Russian tales. The former frequently grow into elaborate jocular preludes, designed to focus and prepare the attention of the audience. They contrast strikingly with what is to come, for “that’s the flourish (priskazka), just for fun; the real tale (skazka) has not begun.” The introduction of a fairy tale may carry the listener away in advance to a certain kingdom, to a certain land, “way beyond thrice nine lands.” Or it may parody this well-known formula and humorously localize the fantastic action in the familiar Russian environment. “In a certain kingdom, in a certain land, namely, in the land where we are living, there lived a tsar, the Giver-of-Peace (mirotvorec—official epithet of Alexander III), and after him, the Vendor-of-Wine (vinopolec—Nicholas II, who instituted the state vodka monopoly)”—so began a picaresque fairy tale as told us by a sprightly narrator of the Dmitrov district, in the Moscow region, in 1916.

  The conclusion, amusingly breaking into the solemn tone of the fairy tale, returns the audience to the everyday world and, in rhymed patter, shifts attention from the tale to the teller. The epilogue of a tale recorded by the Sokolovs from one of the best narrators in the White Sea country, in the Novgorod region, goes as follows:

  It’s not to drink beer! It’s not to brew wine!

  They were wedded and whirled away to love.

  Daily they lived and richer grew

  I dropped in to visit, right welcome they made me—

  Wine runs on my lips, nary a drop in my mouth!18

  In other words, the still thirsty teller awaits his refreshment. Sometimes the allusions are more transparent: “This is the end of my tale, and now I would not mind having a glass of vodka.”

  The traditional departure in the epilogue from the utopian happy ending of the fairy tale may utilize also contemporary political topics. The best of the present-day specialists in Russian folk tales, M. Azadovskiy, quotes this concluding formula: “Daily they lived and richer grew, until the Soviets came into power.”19

  “The formal perfection of the Eastern Slavic (Russian, Byelorussian, and Ukrainian) tales is not limited to preludes and epilogues, but almost each action and each situation is conveyed by manifold, typical formulas and idioms,” says Polívka. For these purposes the Russian tale efficiently draws upon other kinds of folklore, especially upon proverbs, riddles, and incantations.20

  Sometimes the tales include ditties, but it is noteworthy that the heroic epic songs (bïlinï), although belonging to a poetic category which is closest to the fairy tale, differ sharply from them in poetics. Where the tradition of the Russian heroic epos is still alive, this difference in types of folklore is clearly felt, and a true rhapsod of bïlinï, if he also tells tales, has recourse to quite other subjects and artistic devices; but where the heroic tradition ceases, many of the usual formulas and sometimes even entire plots are taken over from the epic song by the fairy tale. The favorite sovereign of the Russian heroic songs, Vladimir, the great prince who christianized Russia at the end of the tenth century, moves from the bïlinï to the fairy tale. In his retinue we find the leading Russian valiant knight (bogatïr’, from the Persian bagadur, �
��athlete,” borrowed through the Tatar medium), Ilya Muromec, a peasant’s son, and another popular hero, Alesha, son of a pope; his historical prototype, Aleksandr Popovich, was mentioned in the Russian Chronicle under the year 1223 as being among the knights killed by the Tatars. The epic tradition ascribes to Alesha the victory over the dragon Tugarin, a poetic reflection of the Polovcian chief Tugor-Kan, and the fairy tale recounts this story.

  If the Russian fairy tales are striking by reason of their fanciful ornamentation and ceremonious style, other narrative types—the animal tales, novelettes, anecdotes—are based preponderantly on dialogue. The precipitous dialogue of the novelettes and anecdotes is sharply opposed to the devices of retardation used in the fairy tale. In the condensed and rich dialogue, Löwis of Menar is inclined to see one of the most characteristic features of Russian narrative folklore.21 The artistic significance of the dialogue is clearly felt by the tellers themselves. An eighty-year-old Siberian narrator assured Azadovskiy that the talk in the tale is the most important and the most difficult: “If any single word is wrong here, nothing will work out right. Everything has to be done quickly here.” The dialogue in the execution of the teller easily changes to scenic play. Here the tale, in its technique, borders closely on the folk drama.

  Such varieties of the tale as the novelette and the anecdote show a tendency to become a part of an actual dialogue. An excellent and well-tried storyteller of the Vereya district, a genuine master of anecdote, was unable to commence a tale without stimulation. “But when,” he said to me, “I come into an inn and people are arguing, and someone calls, ‘There is a God!’ and I, to him, ‘You lie, son of a cur,’—then I tell him a tale to prove it, until the muzhiks say: ‘You’re right. There is no God.’ But again I have to fire back: ‘Nonsense!’ And I tell them a tale about God.… I can tell tales only to get back at folks (vperechku).”