The fairy tale, one of the most ancient and ambiguous folk genres, was a central concern of Russian folkloristics for a remarkably long period (from the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century). Influential folkloristic theories arising from Russian scholarship (e.g., those of M. Azadovskiy, A. Nikiforov, V. Propp, and E. Meletinsky) were often based on the study of fairy tales. Politicizing Magic: An Anthology of Russian and Soviet Fairy Tales adds to a long tradition of folk and literary tale studies. This book combines the traditional interest in fairy tale origins, motifs, and characters with the study of fairy tale motifs in literature and contemporary popular culture. The editors modestly call it an anthology, but the three introductory chapters (one by each of the authors) make it significantly more than a collection of texts. The book is divided into three parts: traditional Russian fairy tales, Soviet (primarily Stalin-era) literary tales for children, and Soviet literature that uses fairy tale elements subversively. Each part is preceded by an introduction. The book’s overarching theme is the political appropriation of traditional fairy tale motifs.
The first part collects twelve traditional Russian folk fairy tales, offered as representative samples of the Russian fairy tale tradition. Helena Goscilo’s introduction argues for an approach to fairy tales that is “synthetic, drawing on structuralism, psychology, feminism, and sociology” (11). She uses this synthetic approach to analyze the basic structure of Russian fairy tales and their characters. A brief overview of the most influential methods used by scholars (with special attention being paid to the concepts of Bruno Bettelheim, Freud, and neo-Freudians) is given.
Goscilo’s approach toward fairy tales and explanation of their appeal to adults and children have their benefits, but may also be the reason why Goscilo undervalues more traditional folkloristic theories and approaches. As a result, readers occasionally run into questionable claims, such as “…Propp on principle ignores the significance of the tales’ contents” (6). First, in such works as Istoricheskie korni volshebnoy skazki (Moscow: Labirint, 2000) and Russkaya skazka (LGU, 1984) (though not in Morphology of Fairy Tales), Propp focused primarily on the content of the tale, its ritual nature, protagonists, origins, etc. Second, Politicizing Magic itself cites Propp’s analysis of fairy tale content (234). Frequent attempts to portray Propp as a pure structuralist or formalist were made in the Soviet era and were opposed first by E. Meletinsky and then by K. Chistov. It should be pointed out as well that in neither Russian nor Ukrainian folkloristics is A. Nikiforov regarded as a structuralist (7), even though he analyzed the structure of folk tales.
The second part consists of five literary tales written by Soviet writers for children, primarily during the Stalinist era. Five texts, of which three are excerpted, would seem to be insufficient material for a scholarly survey, but they should satisfy an intellectual non-scholar curious about Soviet ideology as it appeared in children’s literature. In her introduction to this part, Marina Balina stresses the appropriation of the traditional fairy tale protagonist in Soviet literary tales for children. She also stresses the incorporation of concrete aspects of Soviet reality into the fairy tale plot during the Stalinist era, the aim of which was to equate the fairy tale’s happy ending with Soviet utopia and to show “the triumph of Soviet reality over any fantasy” (108).
To a folklorist, the choice of texts in the book’s second part is questionable, given the introduction’s theoretical emphasis. Some of the selected texts make scant use of fairy tale motifs and lack traditional elements of Russian fairy tales (e.g., “The Old Genie Khottabych…” or “Tale of the Military Secret…”). Since the first part of the book is devoted to Russian folk fairy tales, the fact that not all five texts in the second part make use of Russian fairy tale motifs makes the connection between these parts tenuous.
The third part includes five texts (all of which are excerpts) drawn from a broad range of Soviet literary genres, from Strugatsky’s science fiction to Shukshin’s “village prose,” in which fairy tale discourse is used by the authors to satirize Soviet society. While in the selections of the book’s second part, fairy tale motifs are used in the propaganda of Soviet utopia, in the third part they are used “to reveal the utopia’s dark secrets” (234). Mark Lipovetsky’s introduction to the third part explains how satiric prose of the 1960s and 1970s “turned the entire paradigm of Soviet fairy-tale archetypes upside down” (248).
The editors’ approaches and choices of material do not accord with folkloristics, as practiced by East Slavic or Western folklorists. However, Politicizing Magic should prove very useful across other disciplines, given its thought-provoking use of methods from literary criticism, gender studies, and the psychology of literature to examine psychological and historical aspects of Soviet dictatorship. Despite the editors’ careful and reasoned decision to the contrary, this anthology would have benefited from the inclusion of nineteenth-century Russian literary tales, which, while not having been written for “propagandistic purposes,” nevertheless had a strong tendency to use fairy tale motifs not merely to examine the inner lives of individuals, but also to satirize politics and society. The anthology would have benefited, too, from the inclusion of “fakelore” (fairy tales about Lenin, Stalin, the Great Patriotic War, etc.) written by Soviet officials for the formal training of village performers, who were required to retell them as propaganda. Such texts can be found in folkloristic archives of the former Soviet Union and would strengthen Politicizing Magic’s main arguments.
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[Review length: 919 words • Review posted on April 13, 2006]