Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov (Penguin Classics)

by Unknown

  A Cock and Bull Story

  Karnaukhova 145; A-T 1920H (also 1885, 1889K, 1889P and 1900). Both parts of this tale are common in Russia. Many of the motifs probably derive from creation myths or shamanic rituals; the hero of the inserted story appears first to climb the world tree to the upper world, then to descend to the lower world. The tale was recorded from Irinya Aleksandrovna Sharygina, who was seventy-five years old and blind. Karnaukhova writes:

  She looks after her two little grandsons. [ … ] When asked to tell a tale, she refused point blank. Her daughter called me when she began telling tales to her grandson, and I was extremely careful about how I listened and noted down her tales. In spite of this, the old woman realized what we had done and she began shouting out that we had put her to shame and not pitied her in her blindness. We had to convince her that no one in the village would know what had happened. ‘I must die soon, and I have been led into sin,’ she kept saying.

  Karnaukhova says nothing about why Sharygina might have felt so guilty and ashamed. It seems likely that she believed she had infringed one of the many taboos around the telling of tales.

  Karnaukhova adds that Sharygina began telling this story after her youngest granddaughter demanded that they light the stove. Sharygina told her that they had run out of matches and then – to calm her – said, ‘Sit down – and I’ll tell you how well Ivan did for himself without any matches at all.’ (op. cit., p. 508)

  1. Compare:

  In ancient times, evidently, there existed a strict law concerning the continuity of the folktale. The language of the folktale was sacred, and to disrupt it was forbidden. In Old Russia … the narrator would warn his listeners: ‘Mind you don’t interrupt the tale, because if you do, a snake will take you by the throat’. [ … ] Also significant is another old aphorism: ‘A tale begins at the beginning, and is told to the end, without a break from then until then.’ The custom of not interrupting the folktale goes back, of course, to those distant times when folktales were meant not only for people, but for spirits, and the telling of tales was akin to magic. [ … ] In antiquity the process of telling a tale was connected with the movements and processes in the mystical world around man. This is why the tale had to be continuous. [ … ] Man surrounds himself with the folktale’s continuousness, as with a fence, and keeps out misfortune. [ … ] The folktale is like a sleepwalker who is afraid of falling down and hurting himself should someone wake him at the wrong moment. The folktale seems to sense that we are not alone, that someone important is coming as the speech proceeds, going through mountains, through walls, building bridges across chasms and crossing them thanks to the thread that the storyteller is pulling and knitting – to help himself and to save us. Interrupt him and he will fall down or get stuck, and something important in our life will collapse or come undone. But let him finish and everything will come out all right. (Andrey Sinyavsky, Ivan the Fool, pp. 84–5 and 98)

  2. Literally: ‘the size of a cubit, with a nose like a large chest.’ But what matters is the rhyme: sam s kolotok, a nos s korobok.

  A Marvellous Wonder

  A-T 571; Karnaukhova 148; see also Af. 256. Karnaukhova heard this from Nikon Demyanovich Chelakov, who was fifty-one years old and whom she describes as, ‘a merry fellow who liked to tell jokes and indecent stories’. She continues, ‘I managed to record stories from him while he was working on the road. He stopped me as I went by. Without any preamble, leaning on his spade, he began. A crowd of peasants quickly gathered around him. They clearly expected something amusing from him and were smiling already.’ Karnaukhova knows no other variant in which the goose is given this name, and she is sure it is Chelakov’s invention. She adds that the image of a magic creature (in northern versions, often a silkworm) to which a whole string of people become stuck is to be found in many variants of ‘The Tsarevna who would not Laugh’. See p. 70.

  FYODOR TUMILEVICH

  The Snake and the Fisherman

  A-T 507C*; Tumilevich, 1958, no. 6 (Haney 284). ‘Old Hospitality is Soon Forgotten’ (Af. 27) has a similar moral.

  A. V. BARDIN

  1. http://kraeved.opck.org/biblioteka/enciklopedii/obe/b.php and http://www.nivestnik.ru/2002_1/23.shtml

  The Everlasting Piece

  A-T 613D*; Bardin 208 (Haney 338).

  DMITRY BALASHOV

  How a Man Pinched a Girl’s Breast

  A-T 449*B; Balashov 50 (Haney 249). Collected in 1957 from Yelizaveta Ivanovna Sidorova, born 1887, from the coast of the White Sea. Balashov describes how he used to visit her in the day, while her son and daughter-in-law were out at work: ‘After telling several tales, she would say, “Well, that’s enough for today. I’m tired. Show me how much paper you’ve covered!” And a smile would appear on her kind, wrinkled face. “Well, come back again tomorrow. I’ll remember something else for you” ’ (Skazki Terskogo berega Belogo morya, p. 13).

  PART SEVEN

  ANDREY PLATONOV

  1. In a letter of 20 November 1947, Platonov wrote to Sholokhov, ‘I have several questions for you. [ … ] One – the most important – is the matter of bringing about the publication of Russia’s epos. You understand yourself how important this is. We can’t get this done without you, but with your help it will be easy.’ (Strana filosofov, vol. 5 [Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2003], p. 965)

  2. Aleksey Tolstoy’s versions, though competent, cannot be compared with Pushkin’s or Platonov’s. Platonov may have genuinely overvalued them – or he may simply have wanted to invoke a prestigious authority.

  3. Masterskaya (Moscow: Sovetskaya Rossiya, 1977), p. 80.

  4. A famous and beautifully produced émigré art periodical, published in Berlin and Paris between 1921 and 1926, was titled The Firebird (Zhar-Ptitsa). As well as stories and poems by nearly all the leading émigré writers, it included reproductions of work by – among others – Leon Bakst, Ivan Bilibin, Marc Chagall, Natalya Goncharova, Konstantin Somov and Boris Kustodyev.

  Finist the Bright Falcon

  A-T 432; see also Haney 244. Platonov’s version – the first of his versions of Russian skazki – is drawn mainly from Afanasyev 234 (and 235) and from a version published in 1941 by the Voronezh storyteller Anna Korolkova.

  1. This motif occurs in nearly all Russian variants of this tale. According to Propp, ‘It reflects some features of the ancient funeral rite. It was supposed that the deceased would make his way on foot into the other world. Therefore he was given a staff, to lean on, sound footwear, which with the advent of the Iron Age becomes iron, and finally he would be given bread to take along.’ (The Russian Folk Tale, chapter 3)

  2. The motif of Finist’s marriage is enigmatic. After admitting to some uncertainty, Propp writes,

  In the clan system both young men and young women were supposed to have two marriages. Married life began [ … ] in a distant sacred place, where the girl became as it were the wife of a god. Such is the pre-form of the fairytale palace where a girl lived with a monster, a creature of divine order and a human creature at one and the same time. It is as if she receives a marriage consecration. Once she returns home, she may enter into an ongoing marriage and begin a family. But with the development of the paired family such an order collided with its interests, which allowed no form of mutual life other than the married one. So a plot arises in which the beast-husband or god-husband is not replaced by a man, but becomes one, turns into the heroine’s ongoing husband. (The Russian Folk Tale, chapter 3)

  Ivan the Giftless and Yelena the Wise

  A-T 4011. Af. 237 (Haney 220) was certainly one of Platonov’s sources. This version ends with the maid successfully hiding Ivan behind the mirror. When Yelena smashes the mirror in frustration, Ivan at last appears to her.

  1. The little old man seems to be an unusual incarnation of the leshy or forest spirit. The leshy – also referred to as the lesnoy khozyain or ‘master of the forest’ – is sometimes described, as on the first page of this tale, as ‘moss-covered’. He appears only seldom in oral skazki
. Haney has suggested (personal correspondence) that this is because peasants – at least until the early twentieth century – really believed in him and that there was a taboo on pronouncing his name. With characteristic subtlety, Platonov simultaneously observes and infringes this taboo.

  The Magic Ring

  A-T 560; Platonov’s version draws, above all, on Af. 191 (Haney 315).

  1. In Russian folk belief, Skarapeya was a snake with power over all other snakes. Her name often appears in magic spells.

  2. A monstrous snake with multi-coloured wings that shone like precious stones.

  Ivan the Wonder

  Some motifs from this can be found in ‘Ivan Medvedevich’ (A-T 302C*; Korguev 14 and Haney 262) and ‘Fear-Bogatyr’ (A-T 510B + 315A; Haney, Anthology, 112); both these stories end with the hero killing, rather than forgiving, his mother. ‘The Milk of Wild Beasts’ (A-T 314A* + 315; Af. 201–205 and Haney 182) includes the motifs of wolf’s milk, bear’s milk, lion’s milk and the eggs of the firebird. Af. 206, ‘Feigned Illness’, is probably Platonov’s most important source. ‘Ivan the Wonder’ is the least ‘magical’ and most ‘psychological’ of Platonov’s skazki; no traditional teller would so emphasize Ivan’s emotional maturation and his eventual willingness to pardon his mother. See V. N. Mineyev’s unpublished ‘Skazka A. P. Platonova Ivan-Chudo’.

  1. In November 1935 Stalin had declared that ‘Life has become better, life has become merrier.’ These words became the most important slogan of the time – repeated on banners and posters, in radio programmes and newspaper articles, and in speeches at May Day parades and other public events. Platonov’s allusion to this slogan is provocative.

  No-Arms

  A-T 706. This tale-type is common throughout Europe, and most of the main collections of Russian folktales include a version; Afanasyev includes several (279–82). Platonov’s version, however, differs so greatly from all the recorded versions that it is hard to be certain which he knew and which he did not know.

  1. This detail is one of Platonov’s additions.

  2. The old man’s death is a detail added by Platonov. And in most traditional versions the old man’s wife is still alive. Platonov accentuates both the old man’s loneliness and the suffering he brings upon himself by obeying what he supposes to be his son’s request.

  3. The image of ‘the commander’ is complex. There is something of Stalin in him; in some respects he seems aloof. He watches the battle ‘from a distance’, and he appears slow to send reinforcements to fight beside his wife and son. On the other hand, through the commander’s words about ‘the people being a father to all fathers’, Platonov is obliquely criticizing Stalin, who liked to speak of himself as ‘the father of nations/peoples’ (otets narodov). In a speech at a victory reception in the Kremlin on 24 May 1945, two weeks after VE Day, Stalin praised the Russian people for its ‘intelligence, steadfastness and patience’ and its ‘trust in the Soviet government’ (Edward Acton and Tom Stableford, The Soviet Union: A Documentary History [Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007], vol. 2, p. 154). The humility of Platonov’s commander’s ‘I am less than they’ is in striking contrast to this.

  4. This whole section – the son going to serve as a soldier, No-Arms fighting beside him, and the final recognition scene – is Platonov’s addition. Platonov’s is also the only version in which the heroine’s arms reappear three times; in all the traditional versions her arms reappear only once, in order to save her son from the well, and then remain with her. The twin themes of mutilation and orphanhood are central throughout Platonov’s work. Only in ‘No-Arms’, however, is a crippled hero or heroine restored to wholeness.

  5. In most versions it is only the wife who is put to death. Onchukov’s ‘The Nine Brothers’ is probably the only version in which the brother dies too. There are no versions, other than Platonov’s, in which the brother first confesses, then dies at his own hand (Mikhail Mikheyev, V mir Platonova cherez ego yazyk, p. 353).

  Wool over the Eyes

  A-T 664B. Platonov’s version follows Af. 375–7.

  APPENDIX

  Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East

  1. Hubbs, Mother Russia, p. 46.

  2. The length of the Russian term for a female cousin, Dvoyurodnaya sestra, encourages speakers to abbreviate it to its second half, sestra, which means just ‘sister’. Sometimes it is hard to know whether a Russian is referring to a sibling or to a cousin.

  Bibliography

  1. Russian folktales in English translation

  Afanasyev, Aleksandr, Russian Fairy Tales (Pantheon, 1984); Russian Secret Tales (Clearfield, 1998)

  Balina, Marina, Helena Goscilo and Mark Lipovetsky, Politicizing Magic: An Anthology of Russian and Soviet Fairy Tales (Northwestern University Press, 2004)

  Bazhov, Pavel, Malachite Casket: Tales from the Urals (Fredonia Books, 2002)

  Forrester, Sibelan, Helena Goscilo and Martin Skoro, Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Folklore (University Press of Mississippi, 2013)

  Haney, Jack, The Complete Russian Folktale (M. E. Sharpe, 1998–2005; 7 volumes, published individually); An Anthology of Russian Folktales (M. E. Sharpe, 2009). This distillation of The Complete Russian Folktale is essential reading.

  Ransome, Arthur, Old Peter’s Russian Tales (Jane Nissen Books, 2003); The War of the Birds and the Beasts (Puffin, 1986)

  Tsvetaeva, Marina, The Ratcatcher, tr. Angela Livingstone (Angel Books, 1999), a superb translation of Tsvetaeva’s version of the Pied Piper legend.

  2. Scholarship in English

  Bailey, James and Tatyana Ivanova, An Anthology of Russian Folk Epics (M. E. Sharpe, 1998)

  Balina, Marina and Larissa Rudova, Russian Children’s Literature and Culture (Routledge, 2008)

  Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam and Ronald Radzai, ed., Russian Traditional Culture (M. E. Sharpe, 1992)

  Bettelheim, Bruno, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (Random House, 1998)

  Degh, Linda, Folktales and Society (Indiana University Press, 1969)

  Emerson, Caryl, The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2008)

  Haney, Jack, An Introduction to the Russian Folktale (M. E. Sharpe, 1999). This introduction to The Complete Russian Folktale, published on its own as a small paperback, is also essential reading.

  Hilton, Alison, Russian Folk Art (Indiana University Press, 1995)

  Hubbs, Joanna, Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture (Indiana University Press, 1993)

  Ivanits, Linda, Russian Folk Belief (M. E. Sharpe, 1992)

  Johns, Andreas, Baba Yaga: The Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale (Peter Lang, 2004)

  Kononenko, Natalie, Slavic Folklore: A Handbook (Greenwood Press, 2007)

  Lüthi, Max, The European Folktale: Form and Nature (Indiana University Press, 1986)

  Propp, Vladimir, Morphology of the Folktale (University of Texas Press, 1968); The Russian Folktale, tr. Sibelan Forrester (Wayne State University Press, 2012); Theory and History of Folklore (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)

  Sinyavsky, Andrei, Ivan the Fool: Russian Folk Belief, tr. Joanne Turnbull (Glas, 2007)

  Tatar, Maria, The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales (Norton, 2003)

  von Franz, Marie-Louise, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales (Shambhala Publications, 1995)

  Warner, Elizabeth, Russian Myths (British Museum Press, 2002)

  Warner, Marina, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (Vintage, 1995)

  Zipes, Jack, The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales (Oxford: OUP, 2000)

  3. Individual collections of folktales in Russian

  Afanasyev, A. N., Narodnye russkie skazki (Moscow: Al’fa Kniga, 2008); Narodnye russkie legendy (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1990)

  Balashov, D. M., Skazki Terskogo berega Belogo morya (Leningrad: Nauka, 1970)

  Bardin, A. V., Fol’klor Chkalovskoy oblasti (Chkalov, 1940)

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sp; Karnaukhova, I. V., Skazki i predaniya severnogo kraya (Moscow: OGI, 2009)

  Khudyakov, I. A., Velikorusskie skazki (St Petersburg: Tropa troianova, 2001)

  Onchukov, N. E., Severnye skazki (St Petersburg: Mir, 2008); Zavetnye skazki (Moscow: Ladomir, 1996)

  Ozarovskaya, O. E., Pyatirechiye (St Petersburg: Tropa troianova, 2000)

  Pomerantseva, E. V., Russkie narodnye skazki (Moscow: 1957)

  Tumilevich, F. V., Skazki i predaniya kazakov-nekrasovtsev (Rostov on Don: 1958)

  Zelenin, D. K., Velikorusskiye skazki Permskoy gubernii (St Petersburg: Russian Academy of Sciences, 1997); Velikorusskiye skazki Vyatskoy gubernii (St Petersburg: Tropa troianova, 2002)

  4. Anthologies of folktales in Russian

  Azadovsky, Mark, Russkaya skazka: Izbrannye mastera (Leningrad: Akademiya, 1932)

  Korepova, K. E., Russkaya volshebnaya skazka (Moscow: Vysshaya shkola, 1992)

  Kruglov, Yu. G., Russkie narodnye skazki (Biblioteka russkogo fol’klora) (Moscow: Sovietskaya Rossiya, 1988)

  5. Books by individual writers in Russian

  Bazhov, Pavel: Malakhitovaya shkatul’ka. Available in, literally, hundreds of editions. The collection Ural’skie skazy i byli (Moscow: Novy klyuch, 2009) contains valuable extracts from letters and memoirs

  Platonov, Andrey: Volshebnoye kol’tso has been republished many times, but many editions are incomplete. All Platonov’s skazki and other children’s stories are included in Sukhoy khleb (vol. 6 of the Sobraniye published by Vremya, 2009–11)

  Pushkin, Aleksandr: There are countless editions of his Skazki. Both for its illustrations (variations on Pushkin’s own drawings) and for the accompanying article, I recommend Pushkin, Skazki, ed. V. S. Nepomnyashchy (Moscow: Planeta, 2008)