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

  In its place stood a house built of wood

  with a whitewashed brick chimney

  and two strong gates hewn from oak.

  Sitting by the window was his old woman,

  swearing at him for all she was worth:

  ‘Simple fool, fool of a simpleton,

  all you got from the fish was a house.

  Get on back, you fool, to the fish.

  I don’t want to be a lowly peasant.

  I want to be a noble lady.’

  Off he went towards the blue sea.

  (The blue sea was not calm.)

  He called out to the golden fish

  and the fish swam up and asked him,

  ‘What is it, old man, what do you want?’

  The old man bowed to the fish and said,

  ‘Have mercy on me, Sovereign Fish.

  My old woman is shouting and swearing,

  cursing me for all she is worth.

  Though I am old, she gives me no peace.

  She doesn’t want to be a lowly peasant.

  She wants to be a noble lady.’

  The golden fish replied straight away,

  ‘Take heart – and God be with you!’

  Back went the old man to his old woman –

  And what did he see? He saw a tall mansion.

  His old woman was standing there in the porch.

  She was wearing a splendid ‘soul-warmer’ –

  a precious waistcoat trimmed with sable.

  On her head was a brocade head-dress;

  round her neck hung heavy pearls

  and gold rings encircled her fingers.

  On her feet were fine red boots

  and before her stood zealous servants;

  she was slapping them and pulling their hair.

  The old man said to his old woman,

  ‘Good day, Lady Countess Baroness!

  I hope you’ve got all you want now!’

  The old woman flew at her husband

  and packed him off to work in the stables.

  A week passed, and another week.

  The old woman grew madder than ever.

  She sent her old man back to the fish:

  ‘Go back to the fish, bow low – and say

  I don’t want to be a fine lady.

  I want to be a mighty tsaritsa.’

  The old man took fright. He implored her:

  ‘What’s got into you, woman? Are you crazy?

  Have you been eating black henbane?

  You don’t know how to walk like a tsaritsa.

  You don’t know how to talk like a tsaritsa.

  You’ll be the laughing stock of your tsardom.’

  The old woman flew into a fury.

  She struck her husband across the cheek:

  ‘How dare you, peasant, answer me back?

  How dare you talk like that to a lady?

  Back you go again to the sea – or, upon my word,

  You’ll be dragged there against your will.’

  Off he went towards the blue sea.

  (The blue sea was blacker than black.)

  He called out to the golden fish

  and the fish swam up and asked him,

  ‘What is it, old man, what do you want?’

  The old man bowed to the fish and said,

  ‘Have mercy on me, Sovereign Fish.

  My old woman is raging again.

  She doesn’t want to be a fine lady.

  She wants to be a mighty tsaritsa.’

  The golden fish replied straight away,

  ‘Take heart – and God be with you!

  Your old woman shall be a tsaritsa.’

  The old man went back to his old woman.

  Before him stands a splendid palace

  and his old woman is there in the hall.

  She is a tsaritsa sitting at table.

  Nobles are standing and waiting on her,

  pouring her wines from across the seas

  while she nibbles on honeycakes.

  All around stand fierce-looking guards

  with sharp axes poised on their shoulders …

  The old man was frightened. He bowed to the ground

  and said, ‘Greetings, O dread Tsaritsa –

  and I hope you’ve got all you want now!’

  The old woman didn’t look at him;

  she just ordered him out of her sight,

  and her nobles and courtiers came running

  and shoved him out through the door;

  and the guards ran up with their axes

  and all but hacked him to pieces,

  and everyone laughed at the old man:

  ‘Serves you right, you ignorant lout!

  Let this be a lesson to you, bumpkin!

  Don’t get too big for your boots

  or sit in another man’s sleigh!’

  A week passed, and another week.

  The old woman grew madder than ever.

  She sent her courtiers to fetch her husband.

  They found him and brought him before her

  and the old woman said to her old man,

  ‘Go back, bow down to the fish.

  I don’t want to be a mighty tsaritsa,

  I want to be a Sea Empress;

  I want to live in the Ocean-Sea

  with the golden fish as my servant

  to bring me whatever I ask for.’

  The old man did not dare say a word;

  he was too frightened to open his mouth.

  Off he went towards the blue sea.

  Raging there was a black storm!

  Waves were flinging up spray;

  angry waves were crashing and howling.

  He called out to the golden fish

  and the fish swam up and asked him,

  ‘What is it, old man, what do you need?’

  The old man bowed to the fish and said,

  ‘Have mercy on me, Sovereign Fish!

  What am I to do with the wretched woman?

  She no longer wants to be a tsaritsa,

  she wants to be a Sea Empress.

  She wants to live in the Ocean-Sea

  with you as her faithful servant

  to bring her whatever she asks for.’

  Not a word did the fish reply.

  She just slapped her tail on the water

  and dived deep into the blue sea.

  The old man waited and waited

  but that was all the answer he got.

  He went back – to a hut made of mud.

  His old woman was sitting outside it;

  and before her lay a broken washtub.

  PART TWO

  The First Folktale Collections

  Aleksandr Afanasyev

  (1826–71)

  The Brothers Grimm published their famous collection of German tales in 1812. The first person to suggest that Russian folktales might also be worth recording was the poet Vasily Zhukovsky; in 1816 he wrote to his three nieces Anna, Avdotiya and Yekaterina, asking, ‘Could you not collect for me Russian tales and Russian legends, which is to say, get our village storytellers to tell stories to you and write down their tales. Don’t laugh! This is our national poetry … I would like for you … each to take two notebooks and in one write down the tales (and with as many of the exact words of the storytellers as is possible) and in the other write down miscellaneous things: superstitions, legends, and the like.’1 Anna, at least, appears to have acted on her uncle’s suggestion, but her notebooks have been lost. Over two decades later, Zhukovsky returned to this idea, suggesting that Anna and Avdotiya compile a collection to be titled ‘A Library of Folktales’. The prospective publisher went bankrupt, but the tales recorded by Avdotiya’s son Pyotr Kireyevsky were included in the collection of Russian Folktales published by Aleksandr Afanasyev – the most famous of all Russian folklorists – between 1855 and 1863. This collection, published in eight small books or ‘fascicles’, is usually seen as the Russian counterpart to the work of the Brothers Grimm. />
  Aleksandr Afanasyev was born in 1826 in a small town in the province of Voronezh, the ‘Black Earth’ region between Moscow and Ukraine. His mother died when he was very small; his father worked as a scrivener. Afanasyev first became interested in folktales as a child, and his interest seems to have remained constant. He went to school in the city of Voronezh and then studied law at Moscow University. After completing his studies, he worked briefly as a schoolteacher, but is said to have been unable to enforce discipline. From 1849 until 1862 he worked as an archivist in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This allowed him enough leisure to write numerous articles about Russian history and literature and – above all – Russian folklore. He was evidently determined and energetic, and he had an excellent knowledge of a large number of European languages.2

  Although Afanasyev himself collected only about ten tales first-hand, he gradually built up a collection of well over a thousand Russian folktales. Around a third of these were passed on to him by the Russian Geographical Society, which had been collecting folktales since 1847. Other tales were contributed by the ethnologist and lexicographer Vladimir Dal’, and still more – as we have seen – were given to him by Pyotr Kireyevsky, the chief authority on Russian folklore during the years when Afanasyev was first beginning to publish. Kireyevsky had collected a large number of songs and tales but had published little himself.

  Like many subsequent Russian folklorists, Afanasyev suffered at the hands of the authorities. The repressive nature of Russian public life lent a particular urgency and even danger to what in other countries might have been an apolitical enterprise. The main problem for Afanasyev was that most folktales portray the clergy critically or even mockingly. Afanasyev was relatively fortunate with his Russian Folk Legends (1859), which was banned only in 1860, after it had already sold out, but the page proofs of the fifth and sixth fascicles of his Russian Folktales, which he received in 1861, were – in his words – ‘slashed and crimsoned with red ink’. Afanasyev was combative in his defence of his work. When Filaret, the Moscow Metropolitan, denounced his Russian Folk Legends as ‘thoroughly blasphemous and immoral’, Afanasyev replied publicly, ‘There is a million times more morality, truth and human love in my folk legends than in the sanctimonious sermons delivered by Your Holiness.’

  In 1858, Afanasyev founded the literary and historical journal Bibliographical Notes. When articles intended for this journal fell foul of the censor, Afanasyev sent them abroad to be published in the Free Russian Press, a journal published by the exiled writer and political thinker Aleksandr Herzen, whom Afanasyev later met while on a visit to London, and with whom he corresponded. His links with Herzen were probably the reason why, in 1862, Afanasyev’s apartment was subjected to a police search and he was forced to leave his post as an archivist. This may also have been connected to his completion, that year, of the collection of tales known in manuscript as Russian Folk Tales – Not for Print; some of these tales were unpublishable because of their obscenity, others because they were seen as anti-clerical. A selection from Russian Folk Tales – Not for Print was first published two years after Afanasyev’s death – anonymously and in Geneva. It was not until 1997 that the collection was published in full.

  The last years of Afanasyev’s life were difficult. For four years he was unable to find work, and was reduced to selling most of his huge library. In an attempt to exclude draughts from his cold apartment, he used to tear up copies of his Bibliographical Notes and lay them in thick layers on the floor. Eventually he managed to make a living and support his family through poorly paid secretarial jobs. In spite of these hardships he continued with his work as a folklorist; between 1865 and 1869 he published the three volumes of what he himself saw as his most important work, The Poetic Outlook of the Slavs on Nature.

  Serious folktale collecting had begun with the Romantic Movement, and both the Brothers Grimm and Aleksandr Afanasyev belonged to the then dominant ‘mythological school’ of folklorists. They tended to see folktales essentially as the remnants of ancient myths – often about the changing seasons, the movements of the sun and moon or other celestial phenomena. Although Afanasyev is now remembered primarily for his collection of folktales, his real ambition was to use these tales as a basis for the reconstruction of an archaic Slavic mythology, few written records of which had survived. The mysterious Balda, for example, appears in a large number of oral tales as well as in Pushkin’s well-known version; Afanasyev makes a convincing case for Balda being an incarnation of an ancient thunder god – a god half-preserved and half-forgotten in the memory of the people.

  In 1870 Afanasyev published a collection of sixty-one of his folktales, omitting dialect words and material he thought unsuitable for children, under the title Russian Children’s Tales. Though even this collection was criticized because of the supposed immorality of the tales’ many trickster heroes, it has always been popular. Many of the finest nineteenth-and twentieth-century Russian artists have illustrated it, and it has been reprinted many times. Afanasyev was also working at this time on a second, annotated edition of his Russian Folktales, but this was published only posthumously.

  In 1870 Afanasyev was diagnosed with tuberculosis – poverty had undermined his health – and he died in 1871. In a letter to the poet Afanasy Fet, the novelist Ivan Turgenev wrote, ‘Afanasyev died recently, from hunger, but his literary merits, my dear friend, will be remembered long after both yours and mine are covered by the dark of oblivion.’3

  Afanasyev was a pioneer, and an editor of genius. Many important collections of Russian folktales were published during the hundred years after his death, but none has won such popularity. Afanasyev’s particular gift was his blend of pragmatic good sense and an intuitive sympathy with his material, a kind of literary tact. Little of his archive has survived, but it is clear that, for the main part, he followed some kind of middle path. It would, in any case, have been difficult for Afanasyev to adhere to any more rigorous methodology, since the texts he received came from a variety of different sources and had been transcribed with varying degrees of fidelity. He also appears to have recognized that much of the charm of folktales lies in their variety; unlike the Brothers Grimm, he did not attempt to combine different variants into a single ‘ideal’ version. Often he includes up to six or seven versions of a single tale. Sometimes the differences between these versions are a matter of plot details, sometimes more a matter of language – Afanasyev often includes not only Russian but also Ukrainian and/or Belarusian versions of a single tale.

  Afanasyev was working in the first decades of folklore studies, before any consensus had been reached as to how best to record tales. Some scholars looked on the language of the peasantry with contempt; others insisted on the need for verbatim transcription. Some critics attacked Afanasyev for including too many vulgarisms, too many dialect words and too many repetitions; others attacked him for over-polishing his texts. And he himself criticized his younger contemporary Ivan Khudyakov both for using too many bookish words – i.e. over-editing – and for failing to clarify obscure passages – i.e. under-editing. This is interesting not so much for what it tells us about Khudyakov, who was very gifted, as for the light it casts on Afanasyev himself; a scrupulous scholar but a still more scrupulous artist.

  The Crane and the Heron

  There was an owl, a merry fowl. She flew and flew, then sat a while. She span her tail, she looked around, she flew and flew, then sat a while. She span her tail, she looked around, then flew and flew … I’ve rhymed my rhyme – so now it’s time, high time indeed, to tell my tale.

  The crane and the heron both lived in a bog. They built themselves huts at opposite ends of this bog. The crane began to find it lonely on his own. He decided to marry. ‘I’ll ask for the hand of the heron,’ he said. ‘She’s like me. She’s got a long nose and long legs.’

  The crane set off. He waded five miles through the bog. He waded and waded all the way to the heron’s hut. ‘Heron,’ he called, ‘are you at hom
e?’ ‘Yes,’ said the heron, ‘I am.’ ‘Marry me.’ ‘No, crane, I won’t marry you. You have long legs and your coat is too short. You fly badly and you won’t be able to provide for me. Go away, spindleshanks!’

  Hanging his head, the crane went off back home. Then the heron thought better of it, ‘It’s lonely being on my own,’ she thought. ‘I’d do better to marry the crane!’ She went to the crane and said, ‘Crane, take me to wife!’ ‘No, heron, you’re no good to me. I don’t want to marry you. I won’t take you to wife. Be off with you!’ The heron wept with shame and went back home. Then the crane thought better of it and said to himself, ‘I did wrong not to marry the heron. I feel lonely all on my own. I’ll go and marry her now.’ He went back to the heron and said, ‘Heron! I’ve made up my mind to marry you. Be my wife.’ ‘No, crane, I won’t be your wife!’ And the crane went back home.

  And now the heron thought better of it. ‘Why did I refuse him?’ she said to herself. ‘It’s no fun living alone. I’d do better to marry the crane!’ She went off to ask him, but the crane refused. And to this day each goes on proposing marriage – but they’re not married yet.

  The Little Brown Cow

  In a certain land, in a certain tsardom, there lived a tsar and tsaritsa, and they had one daughter, Marya Tsarevna.1 When the tsaritsa died, the tsar took another wife, Yagishna.2 This Yagishna gave birth to two daughters; one had two eyes, the other three. And she took against her stepdaughter, Marya Tsarevna.3 One day she sent her out to take Buryonushka, the little brown cow, to pasture. For her dinner she gave the girl a crust of dry bread.

  The tsarevna went out into open steppe, bowed to Buryonushka’s right leg – and found food and drink and fine attire, all a lady could require. All day long, dressed as a lady, she followed Buryonushka. When the day was over, she bowed a second time to the little cow’s right leg, took off her fine clothes, went back home and put her crust of bread on the table. ‘How does the bitch stay alive?’ wondered Yagishna. The next day she gave Marya Tsarevna the very same crust of bread and sent her out together with her elder daughter. She said to her daughter, ‘Keep an eye on Marya Tsarevna. See what she’s finding to eat.’

  They reached open steppe, and Marya Tsarevna said to her sister, ‘Let me look through your hair for you’ (See Appendix, p. 424). She began to look and as she looked, she said, ‘Sleep, sleep, little sister. Sleep, sleep, my dear one. Sleep, sleep, little eye. Sleep, sleep, other eye.’ Her sister fell fast asleep. Marya Tsarevna got to her feet, went up to Buryonushka, bowed to her right leg, ate and drank her fill, put on her fine attire and walked about all day like a lady. When it was evening, Marya Tsarevna took off her fine clothes and said, ‘Wake up, little sister. Get up, my dear one. It’s time to go home.’ ‘Dear, oh dear,’ thought the sister. ‘I’ve slept through the whole day. I haven’t seen anything at all. Mother will be angry with me.’