Plots of Afanasiev's fairy tales. Alexander Afanasiev - Russian treasured tales

A fairy tale is an amazing creation of the people; it elevates a person, entertains him, gives him faith in his own strength and in miracles. We become acquainted with this genre of literature, perhaps the most popular and beloved, in childhood, therefore, in the minds of many people, fairy tales are associated with something simple, even primitive, understandable and small child. However, this is a deep misconception. Folk tales are not as simple as they might seem at first glance. This is a multifaceted, deep layer of folk art that carries the wisdom of generations, enclosed in a laconic and unusually figurative form.

The Russian fairy tale is a special genre of folklore; it has not only an entertaining plot and magical characters, but also an amazing poetry of language that opens up to the reader the world of human feelings and relationships; it affirms kindness and justice, and also introduces Russian culture, wise folk experience, and the native language.

Fairy tales refer to folk art, they do not have an author, but we know the names of the fairy tale researchers who carefully collected and wrote them down. One of the most famous and outstanding collectors of fairy tales was the ethnographer, historian and literary critic A. N. Afanasyev. In 1855–1864 he compiled the most complete collection of fairy tales - “Russian Folk Tales”, which included about 600 texts recorded in different parts of Russia. This book became a model fairy tale literature and a source of inspiration for many Russian writers and poets.

The heterogeneity of fairy tales, the wide range of themes and plots, the variety of motives, characters and methods of resolving conflicts make the task of defining a fairy tale by genre very difficult. However there is common feature, inherent in all fairy tales, is a combination of fiction and truth.

Today, there is a generally accepted classification of fairy tales, in which several groups are distinguished: fairy tales, tales about animals, social and everyday (or novelistic) and boring tales. A. N. Afanasyev also singled out the so-called “cherished” fairy tales, known for their erotic content and profanity.

In our collection we included fairy tales about animals and fairy tales - as the most common, vibrant and beloved folk tales.

In fairy tales about animals, fish, animals, birds and even insects act; they talk to each other, quarrel, make peace and get married. However, there are almost no miracles in these fairy tales; their heroes are very real inhabitants of the forests.

Man has long been a part of nature, constantly fighting with it, he at the same time sought its protection, which is reflected in folklore. By depicting animals, people gave these characters human traits, while at the same time preserving their real habits and “way of life.” Subsequently, a fable, parable meaning was introduced into many tales about animals.

There are relatively few tales about animals: they occupy a tenth of the fairy tale epic. Main characters: fox, wolf, bear, hare, goat, horse, raven, rooster. The most common characters in fairy tales about animals are the fox and the wolf, who have constant characteristics: the fox is cunning and treacherous, and the wolf is angry, greedy and stupid. For other animal characters, the characteristics are not so sharply defined, they vary from fairy tale to fairy tale.

Reflected in the animal epic human life with all her passions, as well as a realistic depiction of human, in particular, peasant life. Most fairy tales about animals are distinguished by a simple plot and brevity, but at the same time the plots themselves are unusually diverse. Tales about animals necessarily contain a moral, which, as a rule, is not stated directly, but follows from the content.

The main part of Russian folklore consists of fairy tales - a unique type of adventure story. oral literature. In these tales we encounter the most incredible inventions, with the spiritualization of objects and phenomena of the surrounding world. These features are characteristic of fairy tales of all peoples of the world. Their heroes perform amazing feats, kill monsters, obtain living and dead water, free from captivity and save innocents from death; they are endowed with miraculous qualities: they turn into animals, walk along the bottom of the sea, fly through the air. They emerge victorious from all dangers and trials and always achieve what they set out to do. Fantastic, unique heroes of fairy tales are well known to everyone since childhood: Baba Yaga, Koschey, the Serpent Gorynych, the Frog Princess... And who among us sometimes does not dream of having a flying carpet, a self-assembled tablecloth or magic ring, fulfilling all wishes!

In a Russian fairy tale, the image positive hero is central, the entire interest of the story is focused on his fate. He embodies the popular ideal of beauty, moral strength, kindness, and popular ideas about justice. Numerous dangers, miracles, unexpected trials await the hero, and he is often threatened with death. But everything ends well - this is the main principle fairy tale, which reflected popular ideas about good and evil, and the heroes became the embodiment of fighters for age-old popular ideals.

Descriptions are reflected in the fantastic, magical form of Russian fairy tales national life, psychology and folk customs, which gives fairy tales additional cultural value. And the abundance of apt comparisons, epithets, figurative expressions, songs and rhythmic repetitions makes the reader, forgetting about everything, plunge headlong into magical reality.

All peoples of the world have fairy tales. We found it interesting to compare fairy tales that are found in world folklore, trace them national traits, differences and similarities, composition features. Based on the work of famous fairy tale researchers and our own observations, we included in this book comments on some fairy tales with so-called “wandering” plots.

Before you is not just a collection of fairy tales, but a real chest with gems folk wisdom, the colors and brilliance of which can be admired endlessly. Over the centuries, these imperishable jewels have taught us to love good and hate evil, inspire us with the heroism and resilience of heroes and can serve as real consolation and entertainment in any life situation.

Birds of Sirina. Popular illustration

Once upon a time there was a man; he had a cat, but it was so mischievous that it was a disaster! The guy is tired of him. So the man thought and thought, took the cat, put it in a bag, tied it up and carried it into the forest. He brought it and threw it in the forest: let it disappear! The cat walked and walked and came across a hut in which the forester lived; he climbed into the attic and lies down for himself, and if he wants to eat, he will go through the forest to catch birds and mice, eat his fill and go back to the attic, and he won’t have enough grief!

One day a cat went for a walk, and a fox met him, saw the cat and was surprised:

“I’ve been living in the forest for so many years, but I’ve never seen such an animal.”

She bowed to the cat and asked:

“Tell me, good fellow, who are you, how did you come here - and what should I call you by name?”

And the cat threw up his fur and said:

“I was sent to you from the Siberian forests as a mayor, and my name is Kotofey Ivanovich.”

“Oh, Kotofey Ivanovich,” says the fox, “I didn’t know about you, I didn’t know; Well, let's go visit me.

The cat went to the fox; She brought him to her hole and began to treat him to various game, and she herself asked:

- What, Kotofey Ivanovich, are you married or single?

“Single,” says the cat.

- And I, fox, - maiden, marry me.

The cat agreed, and they began to feast and have fun.

The next day the fox went to get supplies so that she and her young husband could have something to live with; and the cat stayed at home.

Publisher: Rech, 2017

Series: Gift of Speech

ISBN: 978-5-9268-2471-8

Pages: 320 (Offset)

The book was made to order from Labyrinth, so it is sold only there!

A luxurious collection of Russian folk tales was published by the Rech publishing house. Just a holiday for the soul! A collection of fairy tales with illustrations by Tatyana Mavrina!

Tatyana Alekseevna Mavrina is called “the most Russian of all artists.” Mavrina is the only one Soviet artist, awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Prize for his contribution to the illustration of children's literature.

Her works are easily recognizable. Opening a book, any book illustrated by Tatyana Mavrina, you immediately find yourself in a fairy tale. She creates her own fairy world from bright colors and colors. They're jumping here good fellows on mighty horses, there is a hut on chicken legs in a deep forest, beauties live in high towers.

The book includes 23 full-page illustrations.

Not enough - it will be(

There is no such thing as too much beauty)

Tatyana Mavrina also drew an intricate initial letter for each fairy tale.

The book is in a convenient format. Embossed cover. The spine is fabric. The book was printed in Latvia.

The book contains a large number of fairy tales. It is impossible to list all the tales included in this collection. The contents of the book alone span three pages. There are 70 fairy tales in total.

These tales are truly folk tales, because they were collected by Alexander Nikolaevich Afanasyev, an outstanding Russian scientist, cultural historian, ethnographer and folklorist. Many of us grew up reading these fairy tales.

Moreover, for this edition, Rech selected the most interesting and not the most famous fairy tales.

Fairy tales are not suitable for very young children. There is no Turnip or Kolobok here) The tales are intended for older children. For primary school age.

The font is unusual, the letters are slightly elongated. Comfortable for reading.

The book will become one of the pearls of your home library.

Just like Mavrina’s Fairytale ABC!

"Russians cherished tales"A.N. Afanasyev were published in Geneva more than a hundred years ago. They appeared without the name of the publisher, sine anno. On title page, under the title, it was only indicated: “Balaam. Typical art of the monastic brethren. Year of obscurantism." And on the counter-title there was a note: “Printed exclusively for archaeologists and bibliophiles in a small number of copies.”

Extremely rare already in the last century, Afanasyev’s book has become almost a phantom these days. Judging by the works of Soviet folklorists, only two or three copies of “Treasured Tales” have been preserved in the special departments of the largest libraries in Leningrad and Moscow. The manuscript of Afanasyev’s book is in the Leningrad Institute of Russian Literature of the USSR Academy of Sciences (“Russian folk tales not for publication,” Archive, No. R-1, inventory 1, No. 112). The only copy of “Fairy Tales” that belonged to the Paris National Library disappeared before the First World War. The book is not listed in the catalogs of the British Museum library.

By reprinting Afanasyev’s “Treasured Tales,” we hope to introduce Western and Russian readers to a little-known facet of the Russian imagination - “raunchy”, obscene fairy tales, in which, in the words of the folklorist, “genuine folk speech flows with a living spring, sparkling with all the brilliant and witty sides of the common people.” .

Obscene? Afanasyev did not consider them that way. “They just can’t understand,” he said, “what’s in these folk stories a million times more moral than in sermons full of school rhetoric.”

“Russian Treasured Tales” is organically connected with Afanasyev’s collection of fairy tales, which has become a classic. Fairy tales of immodest content, like the tales of the famous collection, were delivered to Afanasyev by the same collectors and contributors: V.I. Dal, P.I. Yakushkin, Voronezh local historian N.I. Vtorov. In both collections we find the same themes, motifs, plots, with the only difference being that the satirical arrows of “Treasured Tales” are more poisonous, and the language is in some places quite rude. There is even a case when the first, quite “decent” half of the story is placed in a classic collection, while the other, less modest, is in “Treasured Tales”. It's about about the story “A Man, a Bear, a Fox and a Horsefly.”

There is no need to dwell in detail on why Afanasyev, when publishing “Folk Russian Fairy Tales” (issues 1–8, 1855–1863), was forced to refuse to include that part, which a decade later would be published under the title “Folk Russian Fairy Tales Not for Printing” (the epithet “cherished” appears only in the title of the second and last edition of “Fairy Tales”). Soviet scientist V.P. Anikin explains this refusal this way: “It was impossible to publish anti-popov and anti-lord tales in Russia.” Is it possible to publish - in an uncut and uncleaned form - “Treasured Tales” in Afanasyev’s homeland today? We do not find an answer to this from V.P. Anikin.

The question remains open of how immodest fairy tales got abroad. Mark Azadovsky suggests that in the summer of 1860, during his trip to Western Europe, Afanasiev handed them over to Herzen or another emigrant. It is possible that the publisher of Kolokol contributed to the release of Fairy Tales. Subsequent searches, perhaps, will help illuminate the history of the publication of “Russian Treasured Tales” - a book that stumbled over the obstacles of not only tsarist, but also Soviet censorship.

The publication of our cherished fairy tales... is almost a unique phenomenon of its kind. It could easily be that this is precisely why our publication will give rise to all kinds of complaints and outcries, not only against the daring publisher, but also against the people who created such tales in which popular imagination bright paintings and, not at all embarrassed by expressions, she deployed all the strength and all the richness of her humor. Leaving aside all possible complaints against us, we must say that any outcry against the people would be not only injustice, but also an expression of complete ignorance, which for the most part, by the way, is one of the inalienable properties of a screaming pruderie. Our cherished fairy tales are a one-of-a-kind phenomenon, as we said, especially because we do not know of another publication in which genuine folk speech would flow in such a living way in a fairy-tale form, sparkling with all the brilliant and witty sides of the common people.

The literatures of other nations present many similar treasured stories and have long been ahead of us in this regard. If not in the form of fairy tales, then in the form of songs, conversations, short stories, farces, sottises, moralites, dictons, etc., other peoples have a huge number of works in which the popular mind, just as little embarrassed by expressions and pictures, marked it with humor, hooked me with satire and sharply exposed different aspects of life to ridicule. Who doubts that Boccaccio's playful stories are not drawn from folk life that countless French novellas and faceties of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries are not from the same source as satirical works Spaniards, Spottliede and Schmahschriften Germans, this mass of lampoons and various flying leaflets in all languages, which appeared on various private and public life, - Not folk works? In Russian literature, however, there is still a whole section of unprintable folk expressions, not for publication. In the literatures of other nations there have long been such barriers folk speech does not exist.

...So, accusing the Russian people of crude cynicism would be equivalent to accusing all other peoples of the same thing, in other words, it naturally comes down to zero. The erotic content of cherished Russian fairy tales, without saying anything for or against the morality of the Russian people, simply points only to that side of life that most gives free rein to humor, satire and irony. Our fairy tales are transmitted in the unartificial form as they came from the lips of the people and were recorded from the words of the storytellers. This is their peculiarity: nothing has been touched in them, there are no embellishments or additions. We will not dwell on the fact that in different parts of wider Rus' the same fairy tale is told differently. There are, of course, many such options, and most of them, no doubt, pass from mouth to mouth, without having yet been overheard or written down by collectors. The options we present are taken from among the most famous or most characteristic for some reason.

Let us note... that that part of the fairy tales, where the characters are animals, perfectly depicts all the ingenuity and all the power of observation of our commoner. Far from cities, working in the fields, forests, and rivers, everywhere he deeply understands the nature he loves, faithfully spies and subtly studies the life around him. The vividly captured aspects of this silent, but eloquent life for him, are themselves transferred to his brothers - and full of life and light humor the story is ready. The section of fairy tales about the so-called “foal breed” by the people, of which we have so far presented only a small part, clearly illuminates both the attitude of our peasant to his spiritual shepherds and his correct understanding of them.

Our treasured tales are curious in addition to many aspects in the following respect. They provide an important scientist, a thoughtful researcher of the Russian people with a vast field for comparing the content of some of them with stories of almost the same content by foreign writers, with the works of other peoples. How did Boccaccio’s stories (see, for example, the fairy tale “The Merchant’s Wife and Clerk”), satires and farces of the French of the 16th century penetrate into the Russian backwaters, how did the Western short story degenerate into a Russian fairy tale, what are their public side, where and, perhaps, even from whose side are traces of influence, what kind of doubts and conclusions from the evidence of such an identity, etc., etc.

“The Treasured Tale” about a toothy bosom and a pike head
from Afanasyev's collection

Bibliothèque nationale de France

In the 1850s, folklore collector Alexander Afanasyev traveled through the Moscow and Voronezh provinces and recorded fairy tales, songs, proverbs and parables local residents. However, he managed to publish little: like French fabliaux, German Schwanks and Polish facets, Russian fairy tales contained erotic and anticlerical plots, and therefore Afanasyev’s collections were censored.

From the prohibited texts, Afanasyev compiled a collection called “Russian Folk Tales Not for Printing” and secretly smuggled it to Europe. In 1872, many of the texts included in it were published in Geneva, without the name of the compiler, under the title “Russian cherished tales.” The word “treasured” means “protected”, “secret”, “secret”, “holy kept”, and after the publication of “Russian cherished proverbs and sayings” collected by Vladimir Dahl and Pyotr Efremov, and Afanasyev’s “Treasured Tales”, it began to be used in as a definition of a corpus of obscene, erotic folklore texts.

In Russia, Afanasyev’s collection was published only in 1991. Arzamas publishes one of the texts included in it.

Pike head

Once upon a time there lived a man and a woman, and they had a daughter, a young girl. She went to harrow the garden; harrowed and harrowed, and they just called her into the hut to eat pancakes. She went, and left the horse completely with the harrow in the garden:
- Let him stand while I toss and turn.
Only their neighbor had a son - a stupid guy. He had long wanted to hook this girl, but he couldn’t figure out how. He saw a horse with a harrow, climbed over the fence, unharnessed the horse and led him into his garden. Although he left the harrow
in the old place, but stuck the shafts through the fence towards him and harnessed the horse again. The girl came and marveled:
- What would it be like - a harrow on one side of the fence, and a horse on the other?
And let's beat your nag with a whip and say:
- What the hell got you! She knew how to get in, know how to get out: well, well, take it out!
And the guy stands, looks and chuckles.
“If you want,” he says, “I’ll help, just give me...
The girl was a thief:
“Perhaps,” she says, and she had in mind an old pike head,
she was lying in the garden with her mouth open. She lifted that head, stuck it in her sleeve
and says:
“I won’t come to you, and you shouldn’t come here either, so that no one will see, but let’s better go through this gap.” Hurry up and put the gag in, and I’ll instruct you.
The guy jerked the gag and pushed it through the tyn, and the girl took the pike's head, opened it and sat it on the bald head. He pulled and he scratched his *** until it bled. He grabbed the gag with his hands and ran home, sat in the corner and kept quiet.
“Oh, her mother,” she thinks to herself, “how painfully her ***** bites!” If only *** healed, otherwise I’ll never ask any girl!
Now the time has come: they decided to marry this guy, matched him with a neighbor’s girl and married him. They live a day, and another, and a third, they live for a week, another
and the third. The guy is afraid to touch his wife. Now we need to go to my mother-in-law, let's go. The dear young woman says to her husband:
- Listen, dear Danilushka! Why did you get married and what are you doing with me?
don't have it? If you can’t, what was the point of wasting someone else’s life for nothing?
And Danilo told her:
- No, now you won’t deceive me! Your ***** bites. My gag has been hurting for a long time since then, and it was difficult to heal.
“You’re lying,” she says, “I was joking with you at that time, but now
don't be afraid. Go ahead and try it on the road, you’ll love it yourself.
Then the hunt took him, he turned up her hem and said:
“Wait, Varyukha, let me tie your legs, if it starts to bite, I can jump out and leave.”
He untied the reins and twisted her bare thighs. He had a decent instrument, how he pressed Varyukha, how she screamed with good obscenities,
and the horse was young, got scared and started mooing (the sleigh was going here and there), threw the guy out, and Varyukha, with bare thighs, rushed to her mother-in-law’s yard. The mother-in-law looks out the window, sees: it’s her son-in-law’s horse, and she thought, right, it was he who brought beef for the holiday; I went to meet her because it was her daughter.
“Oh, mother,” he shouts, “untie him quickly, no one has seen Pokedov.”
The old woman untied her and asked her what and how.
-Where is your husband?
- Yes, his horse fell out!
They entered the hut, looked out the window - Danilka was walking, approached the boys who were playing at grandmas, stopped and looked into it. His mother-in-law sent his eldest daughter for him.
She comes:
- Hello, Danila Ivanovich!
- Great.
- Go to the hut, you’re the only one missing!
- And you have Varvara?
- We have.
“Has her bleeding stopped?”
She spat and left him. His mother-in-law sent his daughter-in-law for him, and this one pleased him.
“Come on, let’s go, Danilushka, the blood has long since subsided.”
She brought him to the hut, and his mother-in-law met him and said:
- Welcome, dear son-in-law!
- And you have Varvara?
- We have.
“Has her bleeding stopped?”
- I stopped a long time ago.
So he pulled out his gag, showed it to his mother-in-law and said:
- Look, mother, this was all sewn in her!
- Well, well, sit down, it's time for lunch.
They sat down and began to drink and eat. When they served scrambled eggs, the fool wanted them all
eat it alone, so he came up with the idea, and deftly pulled out the gag and hit
over his bald head with a spoon and said:
- This was all that was happening in Varyukha! - and began to stir the scrambled eggs with his spoon.
There’s nothing to do here, everyone climbed out of the table, and he ate the scrambled eggs alone
and began to thank his mother-in-law for the bread and the salt. 

Eh, I don’t like “other people’s” second-hand books. Keyword- "stranger". Somehow I’m disdainful of buying books that I don’t know where they stood, lived and read. The book is alive. It absorbs the energy of the one who turns the pages...
As a child, I had a book that made me love reading. For the current younger generation this is the book “Harry Potter” (as a rule, it is from this book that children get into reading as a process), but for me it was Afanasyev’s fairy tales with illustrations by Mavrina. But somewhere this book got lost and, unfortunately, disappeared...
I looked for a long time for an alternative, a reissue, but unfortunately I didn’t find it.
There are a lot of fairy tale books on the book market!
But, in my opinion, Afanasyev’s collection is the most accurate, the most consistent and the most correct. Fairy tales are arranged in ascending order - from simple tales to more complex ones. The tales are amazing and Russian!
In search of my book, from new editions I bought:

Compiled by: Alexander Afanasyev, O. Sklyarova
Languages: Russian
Publisher: Olma Media Group
Series: Classics in illustrations
ISBN 978-5-373-05338-9; 2013

A good edition, excellent cover, paper, excellent print quality, but not the same... That’s not the same at all.. There is no integrity in the book, no fabulousness. The illustrations are all different, sometimes even out of topic. The content is very limited. There are only 45 fairy tales in the book. The book is very flawed.

Illustrator: Nina Babarkina
Editor: Natalya Morozova
Languages: Russian
Publisher: Bright City
ISBN 978-5-9663-0141-5; 2009

I knew that it was not Afanasyev. But I bought it anyway. Do you know what I didn't like? The book is very pretentious and museum-like. Inanimate. Fairy tales shouldn't be like that.

This edition is more or less close to the original.
But in terms of content - only 59.3% (slightly more than half) of the tales are from the old edition.
IN this collection only 70 tales out of 118 tales contained in the Soviet edition.
Everything is processed by Afanasiev. The illustrations are black and white, but this is not a minus.
Disadvantages: large format, dividing the text into two horizontal parts (some kind of nonsense, AST probably hired some kind of fan of dividing the text into two parts - several books have already been laid out using this method, including The Lord of the Rings).
And the illustrations are varied. It feels like everything that was was dumped in a heap.
Here, as an example, is a photo of the spreads (I didn’t take any photos, I took the photo from the Labyrinth):

In general, the conclusion is that I didn’t like it.

Without thinking twice (in this situation), I finally ordered a second-hand book edition of the “good old” Afanasyev with his fairy tales)

Second-hand book edition
Publisher: Fiction
State of preservation: Good
ISBN 5-280-01040-5; 1990

The publication is old, not from 90, but from 89. The book is supported.
You can’t say this, but after I leafed through this book I wanted to wash my hands...((Well, I don’t know who held this book in my hands! I can’t help it.. Probably this will pass and the book will become MINE!
And the book itself is, of course, gorgeous! And it’s as if it came from a fairy tale. I don’t understand why I have these feelings? This is probably personal and very subjective)

There are ALL 118 fairy tales in the book! They are arranged in a special way: as I said above - from simple to complex. There’s Baba Yaga, and Koschey, and “you’ll go to the right..” - in general, that’s it!) Such a self-sufficient book in content.

And these are page spreads with wonderful illustrations by T. Mavrina:

And what cool “Boring Tales” at the end!!!)))

Just a fairy tale, not a book!)

P.S.: to sum up what has been said, I have a question for experts: please tell me a good alternative to the above edition from a recently published one. I'm sure I missed something. I will be very grateful!
I also really hope that some publishing house will decide and take on this book. And it will make it just as fabulous, readable and bookish. Let it not be just another soulless “fairy tale”, but let it be fairy tales)