Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov (Penguin Classics) (3 page)

As for the oral tales, reading all the published Russian collections might take five years, and reading all the archival material – a lifetime. And the more one reads, the harder the task of selection. An element of randomness seems inescapable. All I can say is that I have listened out for the vivid image, the flash of wit, or the compelling rhythmic structure that can make one version of a well-known story more memorable than another. I have tried to give a sense both of the variety of different tale-types and of the no less remarkable variety that can often
be found within a single tale-type. And I have included as much material as possible that allows us a glimpse of the individuality of the storytellers.

To the best of our ability, my co-translators and I have translated accurately. When we have taken liberties with the meaning in order to reproduce a rhyme, we have included a literal translation in the notes. We have kept the language clear, colloquial and energetic, but we have not tried to reproduce the peasant dialect of many of the originals; contemporary English is too far removed from any peasant culture for this to be possible. We have not ironed out the logical hiccups or sudden jumps that are typical of oral storytelling. Nor have we imposed any false stylistic consistency; the tales were told by many different tellers to several different collectors, each of whom tried in his or her own way to reproduce their tone and rhythms. And the tales were recorded over a long period – from the early nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century – during which two somewhat contradictory tendencies were at work; folk traditions were dying out, but folklorists were being ever more precise in their ways of recording them.

I am grateful to Sibelan Forrester for allowing me to include an abridged version of her article about Baba Yaga. The complete version is included in
Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Folklore
. And I am especially grateful to Jack Haney for his generous help and enlightening correspondence. Readers in search of a more comprehensive collection of Russian oral folktales should turn at once to his seven-volume
Complete Russian Folktale
.

Robert Chandler, July 2011

The A-T numbers refer to the comprehensive index of folktales begun by the Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne and further developed by Stith Thompson. The standard Russian index, the
Comparative Index of Types: The East Slavic Tale
(Barag
et al
., 1979), often referred to as SUS after the initial letters of its Russian title, uses the same numbers.
The A-T index has recently been further revised. See Hans-Jörg Uther,
The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography
, 3 vols. (FF Communications No. 284. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 2004). Intimidating as these indices may seem, they are indispensable to anyone wishing to compare variants of a particular tale-type from different cultures.

The most comprehensive collection of Russian folktales in English is the seven-volume
The Complete Russian Folktale
by Jack Haney. In these notes I refer to this collection in two different ways. A parenthesis, as in ‘(Haney 290)’, indicates that Haney, too, has translated the tale in question and that it appears in his collection as no. 290; where I have used the words ‘see also’, as in ‘see also Haney 270’, this indicates that Haney has translated a different variant of this tale-type.

I have used the following abbreviations: ‘Af.’ for Afanasyev,
Narodnye russkiye skazki
; ‘Zelenin,
Vyat
.’ for D. K. Zelenin,
Velikorusskiye skazki Vyatskoy gubernii
; ‘Haney,
Complete
’ for Haney,
The Complete Russian Folktale
; ‘Haney,
Intro
.’ for Haney,
An Introduction to the Russian Folktale
. I give chapter, rather than page, references to Sibelan Forrester’s translation of Propp’s
The Russian Folktale
, since this is only now being prepared for publication. In any cases where further publication details are needed, the reader should refer to the Bibliography.

 
1
.     See D. K. Zelenin, ‘Religiozno-magicheskaya funktsiya fol’klornykh skazok’ in Yu. Krachkovsky,
Sergeyu Ol’denburgu. Sbornik statey
(Leningrad, 1934), pp. 215–40.

 
2
.     Haney,
Complete
, vol. 3, p. xxxviii. The Hungarian scholar Linda Degh also sees men ‘as the storytellers among European peoples’ (
Folktales and Society
, pp. 91–3). Propp has written, ‘According to Irina Karnaukhova’s observations, almost every woman tells folktales, while among men not everyone tells them. However, if a man does know folktales, he knows more of them than women do, and men’s repertoire is richer, since they leave home in the wandering trades, enriching their repertoire, while women rarely leave the boundaries of their home areas’ (
The Russian Folktale
, chapter 7). According to Jack Zipes, the nineteenth-century Sicilian folklorist Salvatore Salomone-Marino ‘reports that there were specific occasions like sowing and harvesting when men would also tell the stories. Within the family, however, the prominent storytellers were women, which is why women also figure predominantly as the narrators in the dialect collections of Pitrè and Salomone-Marino and in Gonzenbach’s book’ (
Beautiful
Angiola
, Routledge, 2003), pp. xvii–xviii. Most of the main Russian collections were recorded from male narrators, but this may simply reflect the fact that most early Russian folklorists were male and it was hard for them to win the trust of peasant women.

 
3
.     Propp’s understandings were anticipated by the Belgian folklorist Arnold van Gennep, in his
Les rites de passage
(1909).

 
4
.     See Anatoly Liberman’s introduction to Vladimir Propp,
Theory and History of Folklore
, p. lxvii.

 
5
.     The most important of the criticisms made of Propp is that he seems to assume that all cultures, throughout the world, pass through identical stages.

 
6
.     This discussion is summarized from Haney,
Intro
., pp. 58–9 and p. 117, note 7.

 
7
.     ‘Ivanushko-durachok’, Zelenin,
Vyat
., p. 91.

 
8
.     And in Zelenin’s tale, the peasant buys the pigs from a ploughman; the pigs were following him down the furrow he was ploughing.

 
9
.     Propp,
ibid
., p. 69 (translation adapted by R.C.).

 
10
.   A longer version of this serves as an introduction to a forthcoming collection of tales about Baba Yaga: Sibelan Forrester, Helena Goscilo and Martin Skoro,
Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Folklore
.

 
11
.   Sokolov,
Russky fol’klor
, pp. 306–7.

 
12
.   The American Slavist Linda Ivanits writes in the preface to her excellent
Russian Folk Belief
that this mini-encyclopaedia of Russian folklore began as a set of background notes for the students on her Dostoevsky course.

 
13
.   Though Angela Livingstone’s translation of
The Ratcatcher
(Tsvetaeva’s retelling of the Pied Piper legend) is one of the finest translations into English of any Russian poetry.

(1799–1837)

Aleksandr Pushkin composed the first significant works in a great variety of literary genres. He was also the first Russian poet to pay serious attention to the folktale or
skazka
.

Our first clear evidence of Pushkin’s interest in folklore is from his period in exile in Mikhailovskoye, his mother’s family estate in northern Russia. The person he saw most during these two years of isolation was Arina Rodionovna
,
a household serf who had once been his nurse and who always remained something of a mother to him. In 1824, in a letter to his brother Lev, Pushkin described how in the evenings he would listen to Arina Rodionovna telling folktales: ‘I thus compensate for the shortcomings in my cursed upbringing. How charming these tales are! Each one is a whole poem …’
¹
According to Jack Haney, the versions of these tales that Pushkin recorded are ‘the oldest surviving versions of tales in Russian taken down from popular storytellers in something akin to the popular language’.
²
These versions are concise summaries rather than transcripts, but Pushkin reproduces both the tales’ rhythmic structure and the vividness of the language. Pushkin’s grasp of the language of folk poetry and folktale seems to have been nearly perfect; he once gave Pyotr Kireyevsky (Vasily Zhukovsky’s great-nephew) a file containing his own imitations of folksongs together with genuine folksongs that he had transcribed, challenging Kireyevsky to figure out which were which. Kireyevsky – an acknowledged authority in this field – was unable to do this.

Pushkin’s attitude towards folk literature was respectful. He did not see it merely as a source of raw material to exploit, but he seems to have understood that a verbatim transcription is
not always enough to convey its power and vitality. As if to compensate for the loss of the immediacy of living speech, he composed all his own
skazki
in verse, and their rhythmic energy is one of their most striking features. Pushkin’s
skazki
(the Russian word can be applied both to true folktales and to literary adaptations) have always been popular with children, and illustrated editions continue to be published in large print-runs. They have also inspired paintings and provided librettos for operas. Rimsky-Korsakov composed operas based on ‘The Tale of Tsar Saltan’ and ‘The Golden Cockerel’, and Shostakovich wrote the music for a never-completed cartoon film based on ‘A Tale about a Priest and his Servant Balda’.

Pushkin seldom, if ever, repeats himself, and his six
skazki
differ greatly from one another. For this collection I have chosen the two that are most obviously Russian in both style and content. ‘A Tale about a Priest and his Servant Balda’ is based on one of the tales Pushkin recorded from Arina Rodionovna. The deftness with which he reproduces folktale rhythms, images and turns of phrase is remarkable; many of his most brilliant inventions are now often taken for genuine traditional sayings. Pushkin wrote this
skazka
in September 1830, during the first of his astonishingly creative ‘Boldino autumns’, when he was confined – because of quarantine restrictions due to a cholera epidemic – to his father’s remote estate in southeastern Russia. Only the previous day he had written the short poem ‘Demons’ – the vision of evil from which Dostoevsky took the title of one of his greatest novels. It is clear from Pushkin’s manuscript that ‘Demons’ was first conceived as something lighter and more comic; a darker vision – of swarms of snowflakes as swarms of demons – seems to have imposed itself on him almost against his will. ‘A Tale about a Priest and his Servant Balda’ seems to have been Pushkin’s counter-spell, an attempt to laugh off this dark vision, to ridicule these terrifying demons. Some lines from the manuscript of ‘Demons’ (e.g. the description of the ‘devillet’ as mewing like a hungry kitten) ended up almost unchanged in the
skazka.
³

‘A Tale about a Fisherman and a Fish’ was written three years later, in October 1833, during the second of Pushkin’s ‘Boldino autumns’. Pushkin’s immediate source was the Brothers
Grimm, but this would be hard to guess. Not only do the rhythms and images seem completely Russian, but the tale also reflects Pushkin’s concern with Russian history. Pushkin’s greatest achievement of these months was the narrative poem ‘The Bronze Horseman’, which is devoted to the figure of Peter the Great; but he also wrote several works relating to Catherine the Great. As well as composing the whole of his short story ‘The Queen of Spades’, which includes reminiscences of her reign, he completed the final draft of ‘A History of Pugachov’, a historical account of a peasant and Cossack rebellion that Catherine managed to suppress only with great difficulty. ‘A Tale about a Fisherman and a Fish’ also – though less obviously – belongs to this cycle of works about Catherine the Great.

The tale’s hidden meaning is revealed by what appears at first to be no more than a careless slip. It seems odd that Pushkin’s old woman should consider ruling over the sea as a higher destiny than that of being ‘a mighty tsaritsa’. Catherine the Great, however, was eager to rule over the Black Sea; between 1768 and 1792 she fought two wars against Turkey in order to achieve this ambition. And Catherine, like Pushkin’s old woman, had usurped her husband’s place, having deposed her husband Peter III in 1762, before these wars. In reality Catherine was generous to her favourite Prince Potyomkin and her subsequent lovers, but Pushkin evidently saw her as having treated her male favourites abusively – as the old woman does in this
skazka
. In
The Captain’s Daughter
(most of which was written two to three years later) Pushkin presents a positive picture of Catherine, but in his historical works he is extremely critical.
⁴

It seems likely that folktales and folk poetry were important to Pushkin above all for their language. In his ‘Refutations of Criticism’, for example, Pushkin wrote, ‘The study of old songs, tales, etc., is essential for a complete knowledge of the particular qualities of the Russian language. Our critics are wrong to despise these works.’
⁵
Pushkin’s very greatest creation was that of a literary language capable of giving expression to all realms of human thought and experience. Establishing a free and easy relationship with the language of the peasantry was an important step towards this achievement.

A priest, thick

as a brick,

was wandering about the fair

when he met Balda.

‘Father, what’s brought
you
here

so bright and early?’

‘I need a servant, a burly

carpenter, a sterling

cook, an able

stable-boy.

I can’t offer much

in the way

of pay.

Where should I look?’

‘No further, Father!

I’ll do all you ask,

whatever you wish,

in return for a daily dish

of wheaten porridge

and three flicks,

when the year’s up,

on your priestly forehead.’

The priest was worried;

he scratched his forehead.

There was danger,

he knew,

in the flick of a finger;

but payment day

was a year away

and he placed his faith,

as Russians do,

in the ways of fate.