Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov (Penguin Classics) Read online

  Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov

  Translated by ROBERT CHANDLER

  and ELIZABETH CHANDLER

  with SIBELAN FORRESTER, ANNA GUNIN

  and OLGA MEERSON

  Introduced by

  ROBERT CHANDLER

  with an Appendix by

  SIBELAN FORRESTER

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Introduction

  RUSSIAN MAGIC TALES FROM PUSHKIN TO PLATONOV

  PART ONE

  Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837)

  A Tale about a Priest and his Servant Balda

  A Tale about a Fisherman and a Fish

  PART TWO

  THE FIRST FOLKTALE COLLECTIONS

  Aleksandr Afanasyev (1826–71)

  The Crane and the Heron

  The Little Brown Cow

  Vasilisa the Fair

  Marya Morevna

  The Little White Duck

  The Frog Princess

  Pig Skin

  The Tsarevna in an Underground Tsardom

  The Tsarevna who would not Laugh

  Misery

  The Wise Girl

  Ivan Khudyakov (1842–76)

  The Brother (tr. Sibelan Forrester)

  The Stepdaughter and the Stepmother’s Daughter (tr. Sibelan Forrester)

  PART THREE

  EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY COLLECTIONS

  From the Journal Zhivaya starina (‘The Living Past’ 1890–1908)

  The Tsar Maiden

  Ivan Mareson

  Ivan Bilibin (1876–1942)

  Ivan Tsarevich, the Grey Wolf and the Firebird

  Nikolay Onchukov (1872–1942)

  The Black Magician Tsar

  Bronze Brow

  Olga Ozarovskaya (1874–1931)

  The Luck of a Tsarevna

  Dmitry Zelenin (1878–1954)

  By the Pike’s Command

  PART FOUR

  Nadezhda Teffi (Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, 1872–1952)

  When the Crayfish Whistled: a Christmas Horror

  A Little Fairy Tale

  Baba Yaga (1932 picture book)

  The Dog

  Baba Yaga (1947 article)

  PART FIVE

  Pavel Bazhov (1879–1950)

  The Mistress of the Copper Mountain (tr. Anna Gunin)

  The Stone Flower (tr. Anna Gunin)

  The Mountain Master (tr. Anna Gunin)

  Golden Hair (tr. Anna Gunin)

  PART SIX

  FOLKTALE COLLECTIONS FROM THE SOVIET PERIOD

  Erna Pomerantseva (1899–1980)

  The Cat with the Golden Tail

  Irina Karnaukhova (1901–59)

  Mishka the Bear and Myshka the Mouse

  Jack Frost

  Snake-Man

  The Herder of Hares

  A Cock and Bull Story

  A Marvellous Wonder

  Fyodor Tumilevich (1910–79)

  The Snake and the Fisherman

  A. V. Bardin (1888–1962)

  The Everlasting Piece

  Dmitry Balashov (1927–2000)

  How a Man Pinched a Girl’s Breast

  PART SEVEN

  Andrey Platonov (1899–1951)

  Finist the Bright Falcon

  Ivan the Giftless and Yelena the Wise

  The Magic Ring

  Ivan the Wonder

  No-Arms

  Wool over the Eyes

  (All stories in this section translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson)

  Appendix: Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East by Sibelan Forrester

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  RUSSIAN MAGIC TALES FROM PUSHKIN TO PLATONOV

  ROBERT CHANDLER has translated Sappho and Guillaume Apollinaire for Everyman’s Poetry. His translations from Russian include Aleksandr Pushkin’s Dubrovsky and The Captain’s Daughter, Nikolay Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate and The Road. With his wife Elizabeth and other colleagues he has co-translated numerous works by Andrey Platonov; Soul won the 2004 American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages award for best translation from a Slavonic language, as did his translation of The Railway by the contemporary Uzbek novelist Hamid Ismailov. His Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida is published in Penguin Classics.

  ELIZABETH CHANDLER is a co-translator, with her husband, of Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter and of several titles by Andrey Platonov and Vasily Grossman.

  PROFESSOR SIBELAN FORRESTER teaches at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania. Her broad range of interests include Russian folklore, the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva and Russian Women’s Writing. She has translated many books – both poetry and prose – from Croatian, Russian and Serbian. Wayne State University Press will soon be publishing her translation of Vladimir Propp’s The Russian Folktale.

  ANNA GUNIN has translated I am a Chechen! by German Sadulaev and The Sky Wept Fire by Mikail Eldin. She is now translating a complete edition of Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales for Penguin Classics.

  PROFESSOR OLGA MEERSON teaches at Georgetown University and is the author of books about Dostoevsky, Platonov and Russian poetry. She is a co-translator, with Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, of Andrey Platonov’s Soul and The Foundation Pit.

  Introduction

  The hero has one clear, linear task. At the end of it lies his reward, usually a princess. While accomplishing the task, he encounters various helpers, whose gifts or services are all palpably material. Helpers and obstacles appear from nowhere and disappear without a trace; a dark void opens up on either side of the narrow path of the plot. Whatever is on that path, however, is lit up in brilliant primary colours: metallic reds, golds, blues. Throughout his travails the hero expresses no astonishment, curiosity, longing, or fear, and apparently does not experience pain. He never reassesses his goal or his reward.

  Caryl Emerson, The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

  Off he went towards the blue sea.

  (The blue sea was blacker than black.)

  He called out to the golden fish …

  Aleksandr Pushkin, from ‘A Tale about a Fisherman and a Fish’

  I used to be Snow White, but I drifted …

  Mae West

  The magic tale – also often called the ‘wonder tale’ or ‘fairy tale’ – is remarkably adaptable. Transformation is its central theme, and the tales themselves seem capable of almost infinite transformation. In one Russian version of the Cinderella story the heroine is helped by a doll; in another Russian version she is helped by a cow; and in a written version from seventh-century China she is helped by a fish. In different versions of ‘Beauty and the Beast’, the heroine marries a serpent, a white bear, a falcon and – in an English version recorded in the 1890s – ‘a great, foul, small-tooth dog’. And what is essentially the same tale can find a home for itself in a Walt Disney film, in a Russian peasant hut, within the sophisticated framework of The Arabian Nights, or in the nurseries of well-brought-up Victorian children.

  This adaptability, however, has obscured our understanding of these tales. What have become by far the best-known versions are those derived from Charles Perrault’s Tales of Mother Goose, which was first published in 1697. It was Perrault who established the fairy tale as a literary genre and he intended his versions for the children of the French upper and middle classes. And in 1812 the Brothers Grimm chose to follow Perrault, entitling their famous collection Children’s and Household Tales. The oral magic tale, ho
wever, is often violent, scatological and sexually explicit. It is probable that its origin lies in archaic rituals, that it was seen as endowed with occult power and that there were strict conditions as to when, where, how and by whom it could be told. Such taboos survived longer in Russia than in most European countries; according to the American scholar Jack Haney, many storytellers in the far north of European Russia observed strict taboos as late as the 1930s; tales could be told only by men, to male audiences, after dark, and never during the main Orthodox fasts. The underlying reason for these taboos was the belief that spirits of all kinds enjoyed listening to tales. At night and in winter, when a peasant’s animals were safely shut up, spirits presented less of a danger. When the animals were out in the fields, however, spirits might come and steal them – and in spring and early summer they might steal the animals’ young. 1 Haney’s view is that women storytellers first appeared in Russia only in the early nineteenth century.2 This is impossible to establish with certainty, but Haney’s broader point remains incontrovertible: the tales were not to be told lightly.

  Magic tales are perhaps easier to recognize than to define. Most involve some kind of quest – often into the underground realm of a dangerous witch; this may be like a vestige of some shamanic initiation rite. Often the hero is able to achieve his goal only thanks to the wisdom and practical help provided by birds, fish or other creatures whom he has helped earlier in the tale; this, too, is reminiscent of a shaman calling on his spirit helpers. Sometimes the hero is transformed from bird or animal to human, or vice versa; sometimes he is cut to pieces, then put together again. Just as all initiation rites involve some kind of transformation and/or symbolic dismemberment, so do all magic tales.

  One of the first scholars to articulate these understandings was the Soviet folklorist Vladimir Propp, in his Historical Roots of the Wonder Tale (first published as long ago as 1946 but still not translated into English in full).3 Propp’s view was that participants were prepared for an initiation ritual by being given some indication of what they were about to undergo. The rituals eventually ceased to be practised, but the accounts – or metaphorical accounts – of their content went on being told and eventually took on a life of their own, as ‘magic tales’.4 Propp’s theories may, of course, be too absolute, and there is no reason to suppose that all magic tales have the same origin.5 Nevertheless, it is not difficult to see that many magic tales do indeed reflect traditional rites of passage. A clear example from the present volume is ‘Mishka the Bear and Myshka the Mouse’. A girl is sent out into the forest by a cruel stepmother. She is required to play blindman’s bluff with a murderous bear; a mouse, however, takes the girl’s place, leaping around the hut from bench to floor and back up onto the bench again. Eventually the bear admits defeat and rewards the girl. This motif is reminiscent of the ‘search for the bride’ that, in some regions of Russia, still remains a part of peasant weddings. It closely parallels an anonymous account of a mid nineteenth-century peasant wedding: ‘The guests began to chant to the bride, “Do not go, our child; do not go, our dear Annushka, along your father’s benches; do not leap, do not leap; don’t play about […]; jump, jump into your [wedding] tunic.” To which the bride replied, “If I want to, I’ll jump; if I don’t, I won’t.” ’6 And in some parts of Russia the groom and bride were known as ‘the he-bear’ and ‘the she-bear’.

  ‘The Tsarevna who would not Laugh’ affords a still more striking example of the link between the magic tale and archaic rituals. Afanasyev’s version (p. 70) begins with the tsarevna sitting miserably in her room, unable to laugh or take any joy in life. Her father promises her in marriage to whoever first makes her laugh. A peasant has been working hard for three years, making his master’s crops grow and his animals multiply even in the most unpropitious conditions. While on his way to the city, this peasant shows kindness to a mouse, a beetle and a catfish. He then falls down in the mud outside the tsar’s palace. The three creatures appear and express their gratitude to him by cleaning him up. The tsarevna sees all this from her window and laughs. A rival tries to take the credit for her laughter, but the tsarevna points to the peasant and says that it was he who made her laugh. The tsarevna then marries the peasant. Propp relates this tale to the Eleusinian mysteries and the myth of Demeter, one of whose titles was ‘the unlaughing one’ (agelastos). Citing evidence from many different cultures, he establishes that laughter was once credited with the power to evoke life and – after the beginning of agriculture – with the power to bring fertility to crops. Then he summarizes the story of how Demeter, in mourning for her lost daughter, subjected the earth to months of famine. The famine ended only when an old woman by the name of Baubo lifted her skirt and exposed herself to Demeter; this made Demeter laugh – and the earth then regained her fertility. Demeter and Afanasyev’s tsarevna are evidently one and the same figure; the tsarevna must be made to laugh in order for the crops to grow.

  In the same context, Propp discusses another tale (not included here) in which the tsar promises his daughter not to whoever can make her laugh, but to whoever can say what birthmarks she has on her body. A peasant with miraculous power over animals (in a version published in 1915 by Dmitry Zelenin he is accompanied by dancing pigs,7 while in ‘The Herder of Hares’ ( p. 304) he has power over hares) sells her three of his animals on condition she expose herself to him. He then tells the tsar that his daughter has a golden hair to the right of her groin and a birthmark under her right breast. The peasant discredits an aristocratic rival by tricking him into smearing himself with his own shit, then marries the tsarevna. The Demeter myth and the two Russian tales are evidently different arrangements of the same constituent elements. The association of hares with fertility is universal and, since Baubo was married to a swineherd, the dancing pigs are no less closely linked to the theme of Demeter and the earth’s fertility.8 And there is, of course, no fertility without manure. In Afanasyev’s tale it is the hero who falls into the mud, while in Zelenin’s it is the hero’s rival who ends up smeared with shit. As so often, what is important in a magic tale is the presence of a particular motif; which character is associated with it seems to be of only secondary importance.

  In Russia, Propp is best known for his Historical Roots of the Wonder Tale. In the English-speaking world, however, he is best known for an earlier study, The Morphology of the Folktale. At first glance, this almost-mathematical analysis of the structure of magic tales may seem like the work of a different writer. These two studies, however, were originally conceived as a single book, and there is a clear link between them. In The Morphology of the Folktale, Propp establishes that all magic tales share a common structure; only then can he go on, in Historical Roots of the Wonder Tale, to show how this common structure mirrors the structure of initiation rites. Propp himself has provided the best summary of his understandings and how he first came to them:

  In a series of wonder tales about the persecuted stepdaughter I noted an interesting fact: in ‘Jack Frost’ [p. 300] the old woman sends her stepdaughter into the forest to Jack Frost. He tries to freeze her to death, but she speaks to him so sweetly and so humbly that he spares her, gives her a reward, and lets her go. The old woman’s daughter, however, fails the test and perishes. In another tale the stepdaughter encounters not Jack Frost but a forest spirit, in still another, a bear. But surely it is the same tale! Jack Frost, the forest spirit and the bear test the stepdaughter and reward her each in his own way, but the plot does not change. [ … ] To Afanasyev, these were different tales because they contained different characters. To me they were identical because the actions of the characters were the same. […] I devised a very simple method of analyzing wonder tales in accordance with the characters’ actions – regardless of the shape these actions took. To designate these actions I adopted the term ‘functions’. [ … ] It turned out [ … ] that all wonder tale plots consisted of identical functions and had identical structures.9

  Soviet folklorists collected a vast number o
f tales and made a still undervalued contribution to our historical understanding of them, but they said little about why these tales should still hold our interest. In Europe and the United States, however, a great deal has been written about the psychological and moral truths concealed in these seemingly primitive tales. Carl Jung and his colleague Marie-Louise von Franz look on magic tales as illustrations of universal patterns of psychological maturation and the obstacles that stand in its way. Often they see these tales as expressing values, or giving a place to images, that are compensatory to the dominant values and images of a particular culture; they see the image of the folktale witch, for example, as a necessary balance to the image of the Virgin Mary. The Freudian analyst Bruno Bettelheim, in The Uses of Enchantment, also sees magic tales as illustrating universal patterns, though he focuses more exclusively on the transitions of childhood and adolescence. These psychological approaches to the magic tale complement – but do not in any way contradict – Propp’s historical and structural analyses. Jung did not have the opportunity to read Propp, but he would have valued Propp’s elaboration of the parallels between magic tales and archaic rituals; he himself saw both tales and rituals – along with dreams, alchemical texts and accounts of religious practices of every kind – as a guide to the innermost structure of the psyche.

  The magic tale usually says little or nothing about the emotions experienced by a hero or heroine; situations and actions are left to speak for themselves. It is, no doubt, frightening to be approached in the forest by Jack Frost, but the storyteller’s reticence leaves the listener or reader free to sense this fear as much or as little as they choose. This is part of what lends these tales so universal an appeal. Every transition in life – from childhood to adolescence, from adolescence to adulthood, from being single to being married – is frightening. The magic tale speaks of these transitions succinctly, vividly and in a language that can be understood by all of us.