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

  It is generally thought that the magic tale did not fully acquire its present shape until the early medieval period. Nevertheless, something similar to the European oral magic tale can be found in many of the earliest works of written literature, and in many different parts of the world. Versions of several of the tales in this collection can be found in the Mahabharata, the Sanskrit epic from ancient India. The earliest written version of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ – the story of Amor and Psyche – is included in Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, written in Latin in the second century of the Common Era. In these and similar instances, there is little doubt that the written text draws on an earlier oral version. It is equally clear, however, that the written text then influenced subsequent oral versions. Since literature was first written down, there has always been interplay between written and oral texts.

  The magic tale, as we have seen, is remarkable both for its stability and for its fluidity. The central plots of most tales – what folklorists refer to as ‘the tale-type’ – vary little from country to country. What changes are the surface details, the ways in which the tales reflect different social, climatic and geographical realities. There are also differences of emphasis. The magic tales of all European countries, for example, include dangerous witches, but the image of Baba Yaga – the archetypal Russian witch – is especially vivid and well developed. Baba Yaga appears in many of the stories in this collection, and the American scholar Sibelan Forrester discusses her at length in an article we have included as an appendix.10

  The Russian magic tale stands out in at least one other respect. Russia’s vastness, and her backwardness compared with other European countries, meant that there was a much longer period during which it was possible for folklorists to study a relatively intact peasant culture. In many European countries, scholars began recording folklore only after industrialization was well under way; in Russia, by contrast, an entire century passed between Pushkin’s first transcriptions of folktales and the assault on the peasantry constituted by Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture. We cannot be certain how folktales were told four or five hundred years ago, but we do know that they were enjoyed by members of all social classes until the late eighteenth century. And we have reliable and detailed accounts of the social setting in which tales were told in the north of European Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here, for example, is an account by the brothers Boris and Yury Sokolov of what they call ‘the local conditions of the life of the tale’ in the Belozersk region in 1908–9:

  Here the tale lives a full life. […] The development and life of the tale in the places where we were collecting is greatly influenced by the nature of the peasants’ work. First, there is tree felling: often an entire village – men, women and children – is gathered together deep in the forest, in winter and far from any habitation. The day is taken up by heavy work but, as soon as it turns dark, everyone enjoys a well-earned rest by a blazing hearth. There in the forest they have constructed a ‘camp’; that is, a spacious hut dug into the earth with a hearth in the middle. Everyone crowds inside. And once they have warmed their frozen limbs and satisfied their hunger and thirst, they begin to while away the long winter evening. How glad they are then to see the storyteller! Deep in the forest, amid trees letting out loud cracks in the extreme cold, to the accompaniment of the howls of wolves and beside a blazing fire – what more appropriate setting, what richer soil could there be for a magic tale filled with every possible terror! [ … ] Then comes the jester, the teller of funny stories. Witticisms and mocking jibes pour out as if from a horn of plenty. The entire audience is attuned to joy and merriment. An unbroken stream of enthusiastic exclamations encourages the jester in his merry wit. Had it been possible to write down the tales with absolute stenographic exactitude, recording on paper every exclamation from the public, there is no doubt that our transcripts would create a far livelier and fresher impression. [ … ]

  Just as ‘collective’ life in the forest camp creates supportive conditions for the life of the folktale, so does fishing in the region’s lakes. The fishermen go out onto these lakes for long periods of time. After they have cast their nets, or while they are waiting for a following wind, they often have to sit through long hours of forced inactivity – and this makes them particularly well disposed towards storytellers. There was an occasion when the fishermen took advantage of our presence. They joined us in the hut where we were recording tales, listened to the different storytellers and then concluded a kind of bargain with the teller they liked most, promising him a certain proportion of the catch if he would go out onto the lake with them.

  Yet another supportive environment for stories of every kind is the mill – a peculiar kind of rural club. Large numbers of peasants gather there and sometimes they have to spend several days there as they wait for their turn. Here too there is no better way to while away the time than telling tales. The diffusion of tales is also greatly helped by people who have to travel from place to place in the course of their work, people who have the opportunity to see a great deal and to listen a great deal – people like ‘icon daubers’, tailors, soldiers, beggars and other wanderers.11

  Russian high culture, at least from the late eighteenth century, has been as sophisticated as that of any country in Europe. Until recently, however, most of the inhabitants of Russia were peasants – and until the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 the government’s intermittent moves towards modernization had barely affected their way of life. The imperial capital, St Petersburg, was an island of avowedly Western culture surrounded by a world as Asian as it was European. Even the most Western-oriented of nineteenth-century Russian writers could not help but be more familiar with folk ways and folk literature than their contemporaries in other parts of Europe. It is, indeed, often difficult to understand much of Russian literature without some knowledge of folklore.12 Because, in Russia, there has always been such a close link between the written and oral traditions, we have included in this volume not only translations of anonymous magic tales, as recorded by a number of nineteenth-and twentieth-century folklorists, but also versions of these magic tales by four great Russian writers: Aleksandr Pushkin, Nadezhda Teffi, Pavel Bazhov and Andrey Platonov.

  Andrey Platonov once described Aleksandr Pushkin as being one of a very few writers endowed with the ability ‘to enrich and inform a popular folktale with the power of [his] own creativity and endow it with the definitive, ideal combination of meaning and form that will allow this tale to continue to exist for a long time or forever’. My aim has been to include only those literary retellings to which these words seem applicable. Lev Tolstoy’s versions are omitted because they are moral fables rather than magic tales. I have omitted Aleksey Tolstoy’s well-known versions from the mid 1940s because they are no more than competent paraphrases of Afanasyev; Aleksey Tolstoy has not informed them ‘with the power of his own creativity’. I hesitated for longer over Boris Shergin. The baroque energy of his language is attractive, but in the end I came to feel that it is a surface overlay; he has not, like Platonov, entered deep into the heart of a tradition and then created afresh. I have omitted Pyotr Yershov and Marina Tsvetaeva for a different reason; their verse tales are so brilliant that they seem all-but impossible to translate.13 Lastly, I have excluded literary fairy tales with little relation to the folk tradition; this meant omitting Pogorelsky from the nineteenth century and many important representatives of Russia’s Silver Age.

  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 fo
und 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

  Notes

  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.

  PART ONE

  Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin

  (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 popul
ar 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.