The tales of anecdotal tinge manifest a disposition to verse form, which in the fairy tales occurs only in the preludes and epilogues. This form, a spoken free verse, based on a colloquial pitch and garnished with comical, conspicuous rhymes, is related to the free meters of buffoonery and wedding orations. Expert tellers possess such an abundant hoard of rhymes and syntactical clichés that they are often able to improvise such spoken verses on any given subject, much as experienced mourners are able to improvise long dirges in recitative verse.
To what extent is the repertory of the Russian tale plots original? A Leningrad scholar, Andreev, tried to find an answer to this question. He followed the system of tale cataloguing used by Antti Aarne, and completed Aarne’s European tale index with an inventory of Russian plots.22 Statistical analysis of all these data 23 indicated that the plots common to the Russian and Western European tale represent only about one-third of the entire index; about one-third are specifically Russian, and do not occur in Western Europe; again, approximately one-third are present in the Western repertory and fail to appear in the Russian tales.
For all the popularity of the fairy tales in Russia, the number of their plots is relatively small. It embraces not more than one-fifth of the whole inventory of the Russian tale plots, and the set of Russian plots unknown to the Western fairy tale is very limited. The originality of the Russian fairy tale lies not in its plot but, as has been mentioned before, in its stylistic peculiarities. The plots of Russian animal tales are even more scarce. They represent only one-tenth of the total of Russian tale plots. Most of the Western European animal tales are unknown in Russia, and the investigators link this fact to the absence of a developed animal epos in the Russian Middle Ages. The Russian animal tales are usually brief and dramatic; they are told to children and often also by children.24
The greater part of the Russian inventory of tale plots (more than 60 per cent) comprises novelettes and anecdotes, most of which are unfamiliar to the Western European world. The milieu pictured in these tales is socially lower than that of the fairy tale. In the latter, a man of the people is confronted with the court background of high titles and exalted rank; in the novelettes and anecdotes, on the contrary, the background is popular and even the speech and behavior of the crowned persons are adapted to this environment. Azadovskiy quotes a characteristic example: “Do you know, sweetheart, what has come into my head?” the wife of the tsar says to her husband. “Why do we have to spend money in a foreign hotel? ’Twere better to open our own.”
It would be extremely tempting to examine the plots current in the Russian folk tale but unknown in Western Europe, and vice versa. Are there common, unifying traits in each of these two groups? In what measure would the selection of plots and motifs, and particularly the choice of favorite motifs and plots, characterize the ideology of a certain ethnic milieu?
The tale of Ivan the Terrible quoted above was set down by Collins because he was collecting historical material about the famous tsar. But can this tale be used as an historical source? As Veselovskiy showed, the same plot has been applied to the Emperor Hadrian, Tamerlane, Duke Othon, and Wallenstein. It occurs both in the Talmud and in the Turkish folk book Adventures of Nasr-Eddin, as well as in a medieval Italian collection of short stories.25 The role of the gentleman who unsuccessfully tried to imitate the good, honest bast-shoemaker is formally similar to the function of numerous fools and enviers in international folk anecdotes. Nevertheless, the application of this migratory plot to Ivan the Terrible is far from accidental. It illustrates how the Russian popular memory evaluated this tsar and his attitudes to the common people and to the gentlefolk. And the lapti, too, are characteristic of the Russian tale. They are here a symbol of poverty, and their confrontation with the person of the tsar is traditional. Compare the rhymed anecdote about Peter the Great, which I recorded several times in the Moscow region:
Peter the First braided lapti
and put a curse on them;
“To braid lapti,” he said,
“is to eat once a day,
but to mend worn lapti,
is never to eat at all.”
And he cast away the awl.26
“The tale is an invention; the song, a truth,” declares a Russian proverb.27 Even the tale’s demonology differs sharply from the Russian folk beliefs, which have known neither Koshchey the Deathless, Baba Yaga, the Sea King, the Firebird, nor other fantastic figures appearing in the native fairy tale. This pantheon still presents many enigmas. Oversimplified romantic interpretation of supernatural beings in the folk tale as relics of prehistoric myths about the forces of nature was rejected by later critics, but the question of the genesis of the Russian magic world and its original peculiar traits still awaits further delving and resolution. Among these demonic names there are both common Slavic remainders and old Turkic borrowings. Thus, for instance, Baba Yaga together with the Polish jendza baba and such a Czech equivalent as jezinka, as well as the old Church Slavonic jendza and an old Serbian jeza “illness, nightmare”—originate in the primitive Slavic form enga, related, for instance, to the Old English inca “grudge, quarrel.” On the other hand the name of the chained and imprisoned demon Koshchey signified in Old Russian, as well as its Turkic prototype koshchi, simply prisoner. The intercourse and struggle of ancient Russia with the nomadic Turkic world bequeathed, in general, many names and attributes to the Russian tales.
A fairy tale fulfills the role of a social utopia. According to the definition of Boris Sokolov, it is a type of dream compensation. It is a dream about the conquest of nature—about a magic world where “at the pike’s command, at my own request,” all the pails will go up the hill by themselves, the axes will chop by themselves, the unharnessed sleighs will glide to the forest, and the firewood will poke itself into the stove. It is a dream about the triumph of the wretched, about the metamorphosis of a hind into a tsar. Modern technical and social advances, therefore, easily give new attributes to the tale. In the latest tale records we find an aeroplane with levers “to direct it to right and to left,” instead of the wooden eagle on which the hero had traveled before. And the biography of the tsar dethroned by the hero has recently been enriched with a curious detail. The exiled monarch laments: “I was once a tsar; now I am become the lowest huckster.” He is asked to present some identification, “but the tsar had no papers to show.”28
It is not by chance that in the epoch when borders between utopia and reality are being effaced, the question of the ideology of the folk tale begins to come sharply into focus. The epoch of revolutionary storms inspired one of the most whimsical Russian poets, Velimir Khlebnikov, to revise the traditional images of the folk tale. The Russian fairy tale knows the magic carpet called Self-Flyer (samolet), and a magic tablecloth that lays itself to feed the hero and is named Self-Victualler (samobranka). The name Self-Flyer was borrowed by modern Russia for the aeroplane. “Self-Flyer,” writes Khlebnikov in a poem, “walks through the sky. But where is Tablecloth, Self-Victualler, wife of Self-Flyer? Is she by accident delayed, or thrown into prison? I credit the fairy tales; they were just fairy tales, they will become truth.” During the same civil war, Lenin was fascinated by the Russian folk tales and noted that, if one were to examine them from a sociopolitical viewpoint, “he could write from this material beautiful studies about the hopes and longings of our people.” At the same time, in the opposite camp, the philosopher and essayist, Evgeniy Trubetzkoy, meditating on Afanas’ev’s tales, tried to define precisely these longings in a study of the “other realm” and its seekers in the Russian folk tale.29 In the particular emphatic stress on such quests the author discerned a striking feature of the Russian fairy tale. The outcasts wend their way to another realm to look for a “better place” and “easy bread.” In pursuit of this aim the good fellow has to master a “cunning science,” or, maybe, simply to “follow his eyes.” And the hero declares: “I will go I know not where; I will bring back I know not what.” He believes: “It’s thr
ee years by a crooked way, or three hours by the straight—only there is no thoroughfare.” But the dreamlike fantasy contracts the journey: “Whether his way was long or short, he got in.” The tale paints this other realm in extremely earthy tones. The door of Paradise opens—“And what a tidy room it is! It’s large and clean. The bed is wide and the pillows are of down.”
There is in the Russian tradition a most characteristic tale about the peasant who contrives to climb to heaven and finds there: “ ‘In the middle of a mansion, an oven; in the oven, a goose roasting, a suckling pig, and pies, pies, pies …! In a word: There is all that the soul desires.” It is true the peasant’s expedition ends with his tumbling into a bog—a pitiful return to miserable reality, as Trubetzkoy points out mockingly. But the rhymed epilogue of this tale catches far better the function of the fairy dream:
Not this is the miracle of miracles,
That the muzhik fell from heaven;
But that is the miracle of miracles:
That he had climbed into heaven.30
ROMAN JAKOBSON
NOTES
1. Lapti: Russian peasant shoes woven of bast.
2. The best edition (by Azadovskiy, Andreev, and Yuriy Sokolov) is Narodnïe russkie skazki, I-III, Moscow-Leningrad, 1936-1940. Besides his main collection, Afanas’ev published Russkie narodnïe legendï, Moscow, 1860, and in the sixties, in Geneva, Russkie zavetnïe skazki.
3. I. Khudyakov, Velikorusskie skazki, I-III, St. Petersburg, 1860-1862; A. Erlenveyn, Narodnïe skazki, sobrannïe sel’skimi uchitelyami, Moscow, 1863; E. Chudinskiy, Russkie narodnïe skazki, pribautki i pobasenki, Moscow, 1864.
4. A. Afanas’ev, Poeticheskie vozzreniya slavyan na prirodu, I-III, Moscow, 1865-1869.
5. A. Pïpin, Russkie narodnïe skazki, Otechestvennïe zapiski, 1856.
6. Sovremennik, LXXI, 1858.
7. B. Sokolov, Skaziteli, Moscow, 1924; M. Azadovskiy, Eine sibirische Märchenerzählerin, Folklore Fellows Communications, No. 68, Helsinki, 1926; E. Gofman, K voprosu ob individual’nom stile skazochnika, “Khudozhestvennïy fol’klor,” IV-V, 1929.
8. B. Sokolov, Russkiy fol’klor, I-II, Moscow, 1929-1930; Y. Sokolov, Fol’kloristika i literaturovedenie, Pamyati P. N. Sakulina, Moscow, 1931, and Russkiy fol’klor, Moscow, 1938 (a detailed survey of the research in Russian folklore).
9. P. Bogatyrev and R. Jakobson, Die Folklore als besondere Form des Schaffens, Donum natalicum Schrijnen, Utrecht, 1929.
10. A. N. Nikiforov, K voprosu o morfologicheskom izuchenii narodnoy skazki, Sbornik Otd. rus. yaz. i slov. Akademii nauk CI, 1928; V. Propp, Morfologiya skazki, Leningrad, 1928, and Transformacii volshebnïkh skazok, Poetika, IV, 1928.
11. An excellent anthology of Russian tales from different collections is that of M. Azadovskiy, Russkaya skazka, I-II, Leningrad, 1931-1932.
12. The most important collections of folk tales recorded in prerevolutionary Russia are: D. Sadovnikov, Skazki i predaniya Samarskogo kraya, St. Petersburg, 1884; V. Dobrovol’skiy, Smolenskiy etnograficheskiy sbornik, 2 vols., 1891-1903; N. Onchukov, Severnïe skazki, St. Petersburg, 1909; D. Zelenin, Velikorusskie skazki Permskoy gubernii, St. Petersburg, 1914, Velikorusskie skazki Vyatskoy gubernii, St. Petersburg, 1915; B. and Y. Sokolov, Skazki i pesni Belozerskogo kraya, Moscow, 1915; A. Smirnov, Sbornik velikorusskikh skazok arkhiva Russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva, I-II, St. Petersburg, 1917. The most detailed history of collection and investigation of Russian tales up to the first world war is that of S. Savchenko, Russkaya narodnaya skazka, Kiev, 1914.
13. The most important collections of Russian tales made after the revolution are: M. Serova, Novgorodskie skazki, Leningrad, 1924; M. Azadovskiy, Skazki iz raznïkh mest Sibiri, Irkutsk, 1928, Verkhnelenskie skazki, Irkutsk, 1938, Skazki Magaya, Leningrad, 1940; O. Ozarovskaya, Pyatirech’e, Leningrad, 1931; I. Karnaukhova, Skazki i predaniya Severnogo kraya, Moscow, 1934; V. Sidel’nikov and V. Krupyanskaya, Volzhskiy fol’klor, Moscow, 1937; T. Akimova and P. Stepanov, Skazki Saratovskoy oblasti, Saratov, 1937; A. Nechaev, Belomorskie skazki, rasskazannïe M. M. Korguevïm, Leningrad, 1938; M. Krasnozhenova, Skazki Krasnoyarskogo kraya, Leningrad, 1938.
14. N. Grinkova, Skazki Kupriyanikhi, Khudozhestvennïy fol’klor, I, 1926; I. Plotnikov, Skazki Kupriyanikhi, Voronezh, 1937.
15. N. Brodskiy, Sledï professional’nïkh skazochnikov v russkikh skazhakh, Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, 1904; R. Volkov, Skazka, Odessa, 1924; J. Polívka, Slovanské pohádky, I, Prague, 1932.
16. Krasna pesnya ladom, a skazka skladom.
17. Sklad luchshe pesni.
18. Ne pivo pit’—ne vino kurit’,
Povenchali—i zhit’ pomchali,
Stali zhit’ pozhivat’—i dobra nazhivat’.
Ya zakhodil v gosti,—ugostili khorosho:
Po gubam teklo,—a v rot ne popalo.
19. M. Azadovskiy, Literatura i fol’klor, Moscow, 1938.
20. E. Eleonskaya, Nekotorïe zamechaniya o roli zagadki v skazke, Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, 1907; Nekotorïe zamechaniya po povodu slozheniya skazok, ibid., 1912.
21. Löwis of Menar, Russische Volksmärchen, Jena, 1914; M. Gabel’, Dialog v skazke, Kharkov, 1929.
22. A. Aarne and S. Thompson, The Types of the Folk-Tale, Folklore Fellows Communications, No. 74, 1928; N. Andreev, Ukazatel’ skazochnïkh syuzhetov po sisteme Aarne, Leningrad, 1929.
23. N. Andreev, K obzoru russkikh skazochnikh syuzhetov, Khudozhestvennïy fol’klor, II-III, Moscow, 1927.
24. L. Kolmachevskiy, Zhivotnïy epos na zapade i u slavyan, Kazan, 1882; V. Bobrov, Russkie narodnïe skazki o zhivotnïkh, Warsaw, 1908; A. Nikiforov, Narodnaya detskaya skazka dramaticheskogo zhanra, Skazochnaya komissiya v 1927 g., Leningrad, 1928.
25. A. Veselovskiy, Skazki ob Ivane Groznom, Sobranie sochineniy XVI, Leningrad, 1938.
26. Petr Pervïy lapti plel,
da ikh za eto i proklel.
I skazal: “lapti plest’—
odnova na den’ est’,
a starïe kovïryat’—
ni odnova ne velyat’!”
I kochedïk zabrosil.
27. Skazka—skladka, pesnya—bïl’.
28. M. Schlauch, Folklore in the Soviet Union, Science and Society, VIII, 1944.
29. E. Trubetzkoy, “Inoe carstvo” i ego iskateli v russkoy narodnoy skazke, Russkaya mïsl’, Prague, 1923.
30. Ne to chudo iz chudes,
chto muzhik upal s nebes,
a to chudo iz chudes,
kak tuda on vlez.
THE AUTHOR
Aleksandr Nikolayevich Afanas’ev (1826-1871), a lawyer by education, was the Russian counterpart of the Grimm brothers. His collections of folklore, published from 1866 on, were instrumental in introducing Russian popular tales to world literature.
THE ILLUSTRATOR
Alexander Alexeieff, Russian by birth and education, has illustrated many English, French, and Dutch volumes, including Doctor Zhivago. He has also designed sets and costumes for various Russian theaters and was among the pioneers instrumental in developing a technique of motion picture animation. Mr. Alexeieff combines superb technical ability with an authentic knowledge of Russia and her traditions.
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