Russian Fairy Tales | Page 5

than to explore its birthplace or to divine its original
meaning.
We often hear it said, that from the songs and stories of a country we
may learn much about the inner life of its people, inasmuch as popular
utterances of this kind always bear the stamp of the national character,
offer a reflex of the national mind. So far as folk-songs are concerned,
this statement appears to be well founded, but it can be applied to the
folk-tales of Europe only within very narrow limits. Each country
possesses certain stories which have special reference to its own
manners and customs, and by collecting such tales as these, something
approximating to a picture of its national life may be laboriously pieced
together. But the stories of this class are often nothing more than
comparatively modern adaptations of old and foreign themes; nor are
they sufficiently numerous, so far as we can judge from existing
collections, to render by any means complete the national portrait for
which they are expected to supply the materials. In order to fill up the
gaps they leave, it is necessary to bring together a number of fragments
taken from stories which evidently refer to another clime--fragments
which may be looked upon as excrescences or developments due to the

novel influences to which the foreign slip, or seedling, or even
full-grown plant, has been subjected since its transportation.
The great bulk of the Russian folk-tales, and, indeed, of those of all the
Indo-European nations, is devoted to the adventures of such fairy
princes and princesses, such snakes and giants and demons, as are quite
out of keeping with ordinary men and women--at all events with the
inhabitants of modern Europe since the termination of those internecine
struggles between aboriginals and invaders, which some commentators
see typified in the combats between the heroes of our popular tales and
the whole race of giants, trolls, ogres, snakes, dragons, and other
monsters. The air we breathe in them is that of Fairy-land; the
conditions of existence, the relations between the human race and the
spiritual world on the one hand, the material world on the other, are
totally inconsistent with those to which we are now restricted. There is
boundless freedom of intercourse between mortals and immortals,
between mankind and the brute creation, and, although there are certain
conventional rules which must always be observed, they are not those
which are enforced by any people known to anthropologists. The
stories which are common to all Europe differ, no doubt, in different
countries, but their variations, so far as their matter is concerned, seem
to be due less to the moral character than to the geographical
distribution of their reciters. The manner in which these tales are told,
however, may often be taken as a test of the intellectual capacity of
their tellers. For in style the folk-tale changes greatly as it travels. A
story which we find narrated in one country with terseness and
precision may be rendered almost unintelligible in another by
vagueness or verbiage; by one race it may be elevated into poetic life,
by another it may be degraded into the most prosaic dulness.
Now, so far as style is concerned, the Skazkas or Russian folk-tales,
may justly be said to be characteristic of the Russian people. There are
numerous points on which the "lower classes" of all the Aryan peoples
in Europe closely resemble each other, but the Russian peasant has--in
common with all his Slavonic brethren--a genuine talent for narrative
which distinguishes him from some of his more distant cousins. And
the stories which are current among the Russian peasantry are for the

most part exceedingly well narrated. Their language is simple and
pleasantly quaint, their humor is natural and unobtrusive, and their
descriptions, whether of persons or of events, are often excellent.[13] A
taste for acting is widely spread in Russia, and the Russian folk-tales
are full of dramatic positions which offer a wide scope for a display of
their reciter's mimetic talents. Every here and there, indeed, a tag of
genuine comedy has evidently been attached by the story-teller to a
narrative which in its original form was probably devoid of the comic
element.
And thus from the Russian tales may be derived some idea of the
mental characteristics of the Russian peasantry--one which is very
incomplete, but, within its narrow limits, sufficiently accurate. And a
similar statement may be made with respect to the pictures of Russian
peasant life contained in these tales. So far as they go they are true to
nature, and the notion which they convey to a stranger of the manners
and customs of Russian villagers is not likely to prove erroneous, but
they do not go very far. On some of the questions which are likely to be