Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov (Penguin Classics) (59 page)

 2
.     One of the ancient Slavic gods, probably a god of wind and storm.

 1
.     In his preface to a collection of Sveshnikov’s drawings, the art critic Igor Golomstock writes:

To speak of ‘free creativity’ in Stalin’s camps may well sound like the height of irony. In fact it is an expression of the logic of the
absurd that governed the entire epoch. The camp authorities – unlike the authorities in the world outside – had no interest in the inner world of their wards. They looked on them as men sentenced to death and it was of no importance whether they died in the camp itself or whether – less probably – they were released to live out their final days as broken men; in either case any thoughts or ideas they might have would die with them. Sveshnikov himself looked on the fruit of his labours as an illegitimate child, a child whose birth had not been registered and who had no right to exist. He drew simply because he was no more able not to draw than he was able not to breathe or not to think. In this sense his work is an example of a pure creativity – free from both internal and external monitoring, without any admixture of pride, ambition, material interest or pragmatic calculation – such as is rarely found among people living in freedom. (Boris Sveshnikov,
The Camp Drawings
[Moscow: Obshchestvo Memorial, 2000], p. 10)

 2
.     Danilushko also, no doubt, represents Bazhov’s son Alyosha, a gifted poet and musician who died in 1935, at the age of nineteen.

 3
.     Mark Lipovetsky, ‘Pavel Bazhov’s
Skazy
’, in Marina Balina and Larissa Rudova,
Russian Children’s Literature and Culture
, pp. 281–2. I have drawn a great deal both on this article and on personal correspondence with Lipovetsky.

 4
.     See p.
452
, note 6. The date of Bazhov’s summons is unclear. His grandson Yegor Gaidar (Russia’s Acting Prime Minister during the second half of 1992) gives it as 1938, but all other sources point to 1937.

First published in 1936. Bazhov’s wife Valentina Aleksandrovna (whom he married in 1911) has written, ‘I remember how on the day of our silver wedding, beneath a linden tree in our garden, Pavel Petrovich read aloud the tale, “The Mistress of the Copper Mountain”. We were the first to listen to it and evaluate it. Each new tale was read, first of all, in the family circle’ (Pavel Bazhov,
Ural’skie skazy i byli
, p. 374).

 1
.     By the altar in St Isaac’s Cathedral, there are columns of malachite thirty feet high.

First published in May 1938.

 1
.     An important traditional midsummer holiday. It was thought that the eve of Ivan Kupala was the only day in the year when ferns bloomed.

 2
.     On 25 September all the snakes in a given area were thought to gather together in one place. Another day associated with snakes was 22 June; snakes held their weddings then and their poison was especially active.

First newspaper and journal publication in 1939, the year that also saw the publication of the first edition of
The Malachite Casket
in book form.

First published in 1939. One of Bazhov’s few tales derived from Bashkir rather than Russian folklore. Bazhov was deeply interested in the folklore of other nations – especially that of the Tatars, Bashkir and Kirghiz, many of whom lived in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) and the surrounding area. But he himself wrote, ‘I understand that, without details from everyday life, nothing comes alive – whether it is realistic or fantastical. Somewhere, for example, I have some material from Bashkir folklore, but I am not doing anything with it, because I do not feel competent enough with regard to relevant details from everyday life’ (Bazhov,
op. cit
., p. 351).

 1
.     It is the custom among the Bashkirs for the bridegroom to pay a bride price, or
kalym
, to the bride’s parents.

 1
.     Felix J. Oinas, ‘Folklore and Politics in the Soviet Union’ (
Slavic Review
, vol. 32, no. 1 [March 1973], p. 47). Much of the previous paragraph is also drawn from this article.

 2
.     Both Propp and Miller – the leading members of the Formalist and Finnish Schools – were called upon to renounce their previous views at a meeting of the Academy of Sciences in 1936. Members of the Historical School were called upon to recant soon afterwards. During the late 1940s, Propp and other scholars were attacked again. His
Historical Roots of the Wonder Tale
, which draws widely on Western scholarship, was compared in
Novy Mir
to the pages of a London or Berlin telephone directory.

A-T 311 + 431; Pomerantseva 1957, 24 (Haney 243). Recorded in 1948, in the Bashkir Republic, from E. I. Kononova. The narrator makes occasional slips, but the verve and charm of her narration more than compensates for this. This tale is known throughout Europe, but the only similar version recorded in Russia is Zelenin,
Vyat
., 16. In Zelenin’s version the sisters find three cauldrons in the third barn. One contains boiling gold, another boiling silver and the third boiling pitch. The first two sisters each burn a finger – as the bear discovers when he asks them to check his head for lice. Starting from the bandaged finger, the bear eats the sisters. Zelenin’s version ends:
Medvedya ubilo, i skazku vsyu ubilo
(literally: ‘It [i.e. the falling pestle] killed the bear, and it killed the whole story too’). Given the vast distance between Vyatka and the Bashkir Republic and the apparent absence of any common written source, the similarity between the endings of the two versions is remarkable.

 1
.     The Russian original is a feat of virtuoso rhyming. What the bear says to himself is ‘
S’est’ by na penyok, s’est’ by pirozhok!’
(literally: ‘It would be good to sit on a tree stump, it would be good to eat a little pie!’).

A-T 480*C; Karnaukhova 27 (Haney 275). Recorded in 1926 from Pelagiya Nikiforovna Korennaya, aged sixty-four. It was in her hut that Karnaukhova and her colleagues lodged during their stay in the
village. Karnaukhova describes Pelagiya as ‘tall, lively and very young for her age’. She no longer worked in the fields, but she worked hard managing the household and looking after her grandsons. One of her sons was a respected village schoolteacher. She herself,

probably in part thanks to the influence of her son [ … ] has a great love of magic tales, sees herself as a custodian of them and is always glad to tell them. She is [ … ] a true mistress of her art. Her tales are vivid and poetic, and her northern speech [ … ] makes them still more expressive. Lively and merry, always occupied with her housework and obliged at the same time to entertain a child, she tells her tales without standing or sitting still for even a moment. I had to write them down while she lit the stove, got the samovar going, gutted fish, swaddled babies and was generally and indefatigably busy. Her small grandchildren were a constantly present audience. She spoke quickly, expressively and emotionally. She sometimes even acted the main figures, putting her hands to the crown of her head to imitate the movements of a hare’s ears, and so on. She spoke the dialogue in different voices. Her bear talks slowly, in a deep bass voice, hesitantly. Her fox babbles away very sweetly. Her hare stammers. Although she speaks quickly, she slightly draws out the vowels and so her voice is rich, clear and, in a way of its own, singing. Her general musicality and her love of song constantly make themselves felt. She tells nearly all her tales in a strongly rhythmic language and with considerable use of rhyme. Many of her tales even include little songs. (
op. cit
., p. 445)

A-T 480; Karnaukhova 28; see also Af. 95 and 96. Another tale told by Korennaya. Around forty different Russian versions of this have been found, but it is best known in the two versions collected by Afanasyev. In Af. 95, the woman has not one but two daughters of her own. After the stepdaughter’s unexpected return, she sends both her daughters out into the frost together. As they sit there, the girls quarrel: if only one bridegroom should appear, which of them will he take? The words spoken by the good daughter to Jack Frost also vary a great deal. In Af. 95, the girl politely insists that she is not feeling in the least cold, even though she is so frozen that she can barely get the words out. In Af. 96, she welcomes Jack Frost with the words, ‘No doubt God has sent you to fetch my sinful soul.’

A-T 425M; Karnaukhova 59; see also Haney 237. This tale was told to Karnaukhova by Nastya Gribanova, aged twelve, whose grandfather was a well-known storyteller. Karnaukhova comments on the simplicity with which Nastya tells the story, the scrupulousness with which she observes the threefold repetitions and the realism of the details. She adds that Nastya had spoken earlier about people being transformed into other beings; for Nastya, this tale confirmed that such transformations really do happen (
op. cit
., p. 396). This tale-type has been recorded most often in the south Baltic countries. In other Russian versions, the girl lives in the lake with her snake husband and claims to have a good life there. The bird into which she is transformed is nearly always a cuckoo, but her children are transformed into different birds in different versions. Erlenvein 2 (published 1863), ends with the bereaved young wife turning her daughter into a goldcrest and her son into a nightingale. ‘The Beetle-Husband from the Lake’ (Balashov 42) ends with the young wife turning her daughter into a goldcrest and her son into a dove; it is because she is an eternal widow – the narrator explains – that the cuckoo is unable to build a nest of her own. Magic tales usually end with the restoration to human form of all the positive characters. This particular tale-type is unusual in that it ends tragically. Though classified as a magic tale, it should really be seen as a myth of origin. This distinction, however, was certainly not drawn by the peasants who told these tales.

 1
.     In the original text, the snake emerges not from a lake but from a stream. We have changed the stream to a lake because the rhyme with snake makes it possible to reproduce at least something of the laconic power of the words through which the girl summons the snake: ‘
Vyd’, moy lyubezny, gadom, stan’ parnem.
’ Most other versions of the story, in any case, describe the snake as living at the bottom of a lake.

A-T 570; Karnaukhova 75 (Haney 328). This was told by Agrafena Efimovna Chernousova, a woman of fifty-five whom Karnaukhova describes as a fine storyteller with a repertoire of at least forty tales – as well as many jokes and anecdotes. Nearly all her repertoire, however, was obscene, and Karnaukhova felt unable to record more than a fraction of it. Karnaukhova heard Chernousova tell this tale twice: ‘The first time was in the company of other women of her own
age. This version was very witty but impossible to reproduce in print. Then she told the story in the presence of her young niece – and this version was entirely respectable.’ What Karnaukhova recorded is, of course, the second version. All we know of the first version is that the birthmark, irrelevant in the recorded version, plays a more important role in it (as in Zelenin,
Vyat
. 12 and other versions). By threatening to divulge what he has seen, the herder compels the landlord to give him his daughter in marriage.

 1
.     Though uncommon in most of Russia, this tale-type has been recorded several times in the far north. Onchukov 103 has a witty and complex ending. The landlord tells the herder he must tell a whole sackful of stories – only when he has filled the sack will he receive his pay. The herder tells his wife and his daughters (in this version there are three daughters) to hold the sack by the corners while the landlord pushes the stories further down, to make room for more. The herder then recounts his meetings with each member of the family. One daughter after another runs out of the room, complaining that the sack is too heavy. When the herder gets to his meeting with the wife, she says, ‘That’s enough now – the sack’s full.’ But the herder continues. As he recounts his meeting with the landlord, the landlord says, ‘That’s enough now, that’s enough now – tie up the sack!’ The landlord tries to escape. Not realizing that the herder is clinging to the bottom of the carriage, he drives off with his family. At the first post station, the herder demands, and at last receives, his payment.

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.