Russian Fairy Tales

Russian Fairy Tales, by W. R. S.
Ralston

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Russian Fairy Tales, by W. R. S.
Ralston This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and
with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: Russian Fairy Tales A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore
Author: W. R. S. Ralston
Release Date: August 22, 2007 [EBook #22373]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RUSSIAN
FAIRY TALES ***

Produced by David Starner, Sam W. and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

Russian Fairy Tales.
A CHOICE COLLECTION

--OF--
MUSCOVITE FOLK-LORE.
--BY--
W. R. S. RALSTON, M. A.,
OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM, CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF
THE IMPERIAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY OF RUSSIA,
AUTHOR OF "THE SONGS OF THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE,"
"KRILOF AND HIS FABLES," ETC.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK: HURST & CO., PUBLISHERS, 122 NASSAU
STREET.

[Illustration: The King got on the Eagle's back. Away they went
flying.--Page 131.]

To the Memory of
ALEXANDER AFANASIEF
I Dedicate this Book,
TO HIM SO DEEPLY INDEBTED.

PREFACE.
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.
From the stories contained in what may be called the "chap-book
literature" of Russia, I have made but few extracts. It may, however, be
as well to say a few words about them. There is a Russian word lub,
diminutive lubok, meaning the soft bark of the lime tree, which at one
time was used instead of paper. The popular tales which were current in
former days were at first printed on sheets or strips of this substance,
whence the term lubochnuiya came to be given to all such productions
of the cheap press, even after paper had taken the place of bark.[1]
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.
A German version of seventeen of these "chap-book tales," to which
was prefixed an introduction by Jacob Grimm, was published some

forty years ago,[2] and has been translated into English.[3] Somewhat
later, also, appeared a German version of twelve more of these tales.[4]
Of late years several articles have appeared in some of the German
periodicals,[5] giving accounts or translations of some of the Russian
Popular Tales. But no thorough investigation of them appeared in print,
out of Russia, until the publication last year of the erudite work on
"Zoological Mythology" by Professor Angelo de Gubernatis. In it he
has given a summary of the greater part of the stories contained in the
collections of Afanasief and Erlenvein, and so fully has he described
the part played in them by the members of the animal world that I have
omitted, in the present volume, the chapter I had prepared on the
Russian "Beast-Epos."
Another chapter which I have, at least for a time, suppressed, is that in
which I had attempted to say something about the origin and the
meaning of the Russian folk-tales. The subject is so extensive that it
requires for its proper treatment more space than