Russia's Magic Spring

By Patricia Blake

RUSSIAN FAIRY TALES

Collected by ALEXANDER AFANASEV Translated by NORBERT GUTERMAN 662 pages. Pantheon. $12.95.

Ivan the Terrible, who suffered from insomnia and, perhaps, a bad conscience, kept three blind old men to tell him fairy stories during the long nights in the Kremlin palace. For at least seven centuries in Russia, czars, noblemen, merchants and peasants sought diversion in the wondrous skazki, the folk tales told by itinerant bards who passed on their treasure from generation to generation.

There was little else to amuse the Russians. While the rest of Europe was spawning Dante, Chaucer and Rabelais, recorded literature in Russia until the 18th century consisted mainly of sermons, lives of saints and other edifying ecclesiastical texts. The oral folk tradition in Russia was truly a magic spring. As in the fairy tale, it flowed inexhaustibly, reviving, consoling and enlightening all who partook of it.

Cockroach Milk. When Russia burst triumphantly into literary history in the 19th century, it was hardly surprising that most of her great writers were steeped in folklore. "Each one is a poem!" said Pushkin, who, like Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, used folk tales as vital elements in his work. The selection of folk tales in this English volume was made from Alexander Afanasev's classic mid-19th century collection. First published in the U.S. 30 years ago, the book has now been reprinted under the somewhat misleading rubric Russian Fairy Tales. Actually, the stories include animal fables and laconic anecdotes illustrating some scrap of peasant wisdom.

Although folk tales throughout the world bear an uncanny and unexplained family resemblance, many of these stories have an outlandish ingenuity that marks them as uniquely Russian. Take, for example, the tale of the peasant Bukhtan, whose habitation was "a stove built on pillars in the middle of a field. He lay on the stove up to his elbows in cockroach milk." Since it is axiomatic in folk tales that the more wretched a peasant, the better his chances of making good, Bukhtan naturally ends up marrying the Czar's daughter.

Foxes in Russian fables are foxier than any imagined by La Fontaine. One tries to lure his prey out of a tree by an impassioned appeal for public morality: "O chanticleer, my beloved child! You are sitting on a tall tree and thinking thoughts that are evil and accursed. You cocks keep many wives: some of you have as many as ten of them, some twenty, some thirty; with time their number reaches even forty! Come down to the ground, my beloved child, and do penance." Another crafty appeal has an oddly contemporary ring. Says fox to cock: "You should see my collection of curios! If I wanted to eat you I would have done so long ago. The truth is I like you. I want to show you the world, to develop your mind, to teach you how to live ..."

Russian giants somehow seem more gigantic than they do elsewhere. Here is one having a snack: "Tugarin Zmeevich, Son of the Dragon, put one loaf of bread in one cheek, another in the other cheek, and then he put a whole swan on his tongue, pushed it in with a pancake and swallowed everything in one gulp."

Peasant Formula. Russian tales in the oral tradition have a distinctive diction, which is here brilliantly rendered by the translator, Norbert Guterman. This involves such conventions as repetition and introductory and concluding flourishes. The traditional "and they lived happily ever after" may be replaced by the more homely peasant formula, "They celebrated their wedding, and are still alive to this very day and chewing bread." Many stories end with a hint by the storyteller that he is hungry and thirsty after his labors. "There's a tale for you and a crock of butter for me" ... "I was at their wedding and drank beer and wine: it ran down my mustache but did not go into my mouth" ... "And the knight married the princess Paliusha and gave a most wonderful feast. I dined and drank mead with them, and their cabbage was toothsome. Even now I could eat some!" The bards, bless them, deserved it. Patricia Blake

Patricia Blake

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