Russian Folktales
By A. N. Afanasyev.
Translated by Leonard A. Magnus.
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Dedicated
to
J. C.
Introduction
Any editor of Slav folktales starts with great advantages. Russia is a country where artistic development began very late; where popular lore was conserved with little alteration owing to the immensities of the country, the primitiveness of the people, and the punctiliousness of the compilers.
The principal source for Russian folktales is the great collection of Afanasyev, a coeval of Rybnikov, Kirěyevski, Sakharov, Bezsónov, and others who all from about 1850 to 1870 laboriously took down from the lips of the peasants of all parts of Russia what they could of the endless store of traditional song, ballad, and folktale. These great collectors were actuated only by the desire for accuracy; they appended laboriously erudite notes; but they were not literary men and did not sophisticate, or improve on their material.
But, before venturing on a brief account of the tales, something must be premised as to the position occupied by folktales in the cultural development of a people. In Pagan times, there always existed a double religion, the ceremonial worship of the gods of nature and the tribal deities—a realm of thought in which all current philosophy and idealism entered into a set form that symbolized the State—and also local cults and superstitions, the adoration of the spirits of streams, wells, hills, etc. To all Aryan peoples, Nature has always been alive, but never universalized, or romanticized, as in modern days; wherever you were, the brook, the wind, the knoll, the stream were all inhabited by agencies, which could be propitiated, cajoled, threatened, but, under all conditions, were personal forces, who could not be disregarded.
When Christianity transformed the face of the world, it necessarily left much below the surface unaffected. The great national divinities were proscribed and submerged; some of their features reappearing in the legendary feats of the saints. The local cults continued, with this difference, that they were now condemned by the Church and became clandestine magic; or else they were adopted by the Church, and the rites and sanctuaries transferred. The memory of them subsisted; the fear of these local gods degenerated into superstition; the magic of the folktales becomes half-fantastic, half-conventional, belief in which is surreptitious, usual, and optional. At this stage of disorganization of local custom, folktales arise, and into them, transmitted as they are orally and
