Russian Fairy Tales: A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore. Anonymous. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Anonymous
Издательство: Bookwire
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Жанр произведения: Языкознание
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isbn: 4057664139160
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       Anonymous

      Russian Fairy Tales: A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore

      Published by Good Press, 2019

       [email protected]

      EAN 4057664139160

       PREFACE.

       STORY-LIST.

       RUSSIAN FOLK-TALES.

       CHAPTER I.

       INTRODUCTORY.

       CHAPTER II.

       MYTHOLOGICAL.

       Principal Incarnations of Evil.

       CHAPTER III.

       MYTHOLOGICAL.

       Miscellaneous Impersonifications.

       CHAPTER IV.

       MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.

       CHAPTER V.

       GHOST STORIES.

       CHAPTER VI.

       LEGENDS.

       I

       About Saints.

       II.

       About Demons.

       INDEX.

       Table of Contents

      The stories contained in the following pages are taken from the collections published by Afanasief, Khudyakof, Erlenvein, and Chudinsky. The South-Russian collections of Kulish and Rudchenko I have been able to use but little, there being no complete dictionary available of the dialect, or rather the language, in which they are written. Of these works that of Afanasief is by far the most important, extending to nearly 3,000 pages, and containing 332 distinct stories—of many of which several variants are given, sometimes as many as five. Khudyakof’s collection contains 122 skazkas—as the Russian folk-tales are called—Erlenvein’s 41, and Chudinsky’s 31. Afanasief has also published a separate volume, containing 33 “legends,” and he has inserted a great number of stories of various kinds in his “Poetic views of the Old Slavonians about Nature,” a work to which I have had constant recourse.

      The stories which have thus been preserved have no small interest of their own, but they cannot be considered as fair illustrations of Russian folk-lore, for their compilers in many cases took them from any sources to which they had access, whether eastern or western, merely adapting what they borrowed to Russian forms of thought and speech. Through some such process, for instance, seem to have passed the very popular Russian stories of Eruslan Lazarevich and of Bova Korolevich. They have often been quoted as “creations of the Slavonic mind,” but there seems to be no reason for doubting that they are merely Russian adaptations, the first of the adventures of the Persian Rustem, the second of those of the Italian Buovo di Antona, our Sir Bevis of Hampton. The editors of these “chap-book skazkas” belonged to the pre-scientific period, and had a purely commercial object in view. Their stories were intended simply to sell.