Alexandr Afanas’ev’s collection of Russian folktales, Narodnye Russkie Skazki, is probably the largest of the nineteenth-century anthologies of national folktales that followed the example of the Grimms’ Kinder und Hausmärchen. The fat volume here includes nearly a third of the approximately 575 tales: two more volumes are planned. Afanas’ev obtained his texts from a variety of sources—from publications, from the archives of the Russian Geographical Society, from other scholars, and a few he collected himself. The original languages were Russian, Ukrainian, and Byelorussian, plus transitional dialects. Alternate versions were presented sequentially or placed in annotations, which illustrated the variety in oral tradition and minimized the conflation of variants. First published from 1855 through 1863, the collection was later edited by internationally known scholars such as M. Azadovski, N. Andreev, and Y. Sokolov (3 vols., 1936-1940) and V. Propp (3 vols., 1957). The edition of L. G. Barag and N. V. Novikov (3 vols., 1984-1986) is the source for the present translation.
Although selections have been translated into English, this is the first time the entire work will be available in this language. The translator, Jack Haney, has already published an even larger project, The Complete Russian Folktale, which, in seven volumes, gives an English-language example of every tale type (not including anecdotes, ATU 1200 and greater) known in Russia. His translation of Afanas’ev’s folktales, which is slightly wordier than N. Guterman’s (Russian Fairy Tales, Pantheon books, 1945) works well both for silent reading and for reading aloud. Haney’s introduction describes Afanas’ev’s checkered life and his other folklore and ethnographic works.
In volume 1, half of the texts are animal tales (through no. 91), a genre which, because of its world-wide distribution, nineteenth-century scholars considered to be primitive. A clever fox often gets the better of some other animal such as a wolf, or tricks a bird so he can catch it. The animals often speak to each other or to humans. Many of the texts consist of chains of different tale types (when they are repeated in other variants, such a chain can be treated as a tale type that consists of a series of episodes). Numbers 92 through 178 are magic tales, which tend to be longer. They include, for example, Russian icons like Koschei the Deathless, Baba Yaga, the firebird, animal brothers-in-law, and various magic horses, as well as widespread themes like the dragon slayer, the kind and unkind girls, the wild man as helper, and truth and lies.
Notes at the end of the volume give, for each text, its provenance and tale type number, followed by comments from the translator about such matters as the popularity of the tale type, the uniqueness of the text, and any remarkable motifs. In many cases, earlier, non-Russian versions are mentioned. Considering their brevity, Haney’s notes are remarkably effective in situating each text in the traditions of Russia and of Europe. Occasionally, e.g., nos. 45, 49, 55, 74, reference to The Types of the Folktale (AT), rather than to The Types of International Folktales (ATU), renders outdated his assessment of the already-known tradition. The overall arrangement of the entire collection is animal tales first, magic tales second, and tales of peasant life at the end. Volume 2, presumably, will contain the rest of the magic tales, leaving the realistic and jocular tales for volume 3.
Afanas’ev’s work was motivated by his fascination with the Russian past, which he, like many of his contemporaries, envisioned as part of an inherited Indo-European tradition containing survivals of archaic elements such as rituals, folk beliefs, and solar mythology, as well as archaic language. Because of the productivity of his folklore research, he is often compared to the Grimm brothers. Coming a generation later, Afanas’ev benefitted from the surge of nineteenth-century international scholarship that valued the various manifestations of folklore. Other substantial works by Afanas’ev include collections of legends and children’s tales, and a three-volume book, The Poetical Views of the Slavs on Nature, which has been compared to J. Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology. Comparatively little of Afanas’ev’s work is available in non-Slavic languages. However, because of Russian censorship, Afanas’ev sent his “secret” (bawdy and otherwise anti-establishment) tales out of Russia. These were published posthumously in French in Geneva (1883). In Europe and America, they are the best-known of Afanas’ev’s tales but were first published in Russian only in 1992.
Afanas’ev’s folktales have long been used in important comparative research. Kaarle Krohn’s early studies of animal tales focused on types contained in this collection, as did Antti Aarne’s studies of magic tales. For those who are familiar with V. Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, these are the tales (through no. 270) used there as examples. Afanas’ev tale numbers were revised in 1936, so references found in early sources such as Bolte and Polívka’s Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm must be converted from the old numbers to the current ones. Questions such as the relative influence of oral and literary traditions, and the local or cosmopolitan nature of European folktales, are still unsettled, and Afanas’ev’s tales can now easily be used by Anglophone scholars to help resolve these and other issues. Furthermore, this translation is part of a recent upsurge in Anglophone research on and translations of Russian folktales and folktale research.
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[Review length: 878 words • Review posted on May 4, 2015]