Russian Fairy Tales Russian Fairy Tales of «Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales»: the whole text, 37 sentences and 1128 words. Every sentence has its own page with its syntax tree and pragmatics, parsed by Mova itself.
1 From the Skazki of Polevoi. 2 By R. NISBET BAIN. 3 Illustrated in Colour and Black and White by NOEL L. NISBET 4 PAGE 79] 5 COSSACK FAIRY TALES AND FOLK TALES SELECTED EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY R. NISBET BAIN ILLUSTRATED BY NOEL L. NISBET 6 LONDON: GEORGE G. HARRAP & CO. 2 & 3 PORTSMOUTH STREET KINGSWAY W.C. 7 MCMXVI 8 PRINTED AT THE COMPLETE PRESS WEST NORWOOD ENGLAND 9 CONTENTS 10 PAGE Introduction 9 Oh: The Tsar of the Forest 15 The Story of the Wind 29 The Voices at the Window 49 The Story of Little Tsar Novishny, the False Sister, and the Faithful Beasts 57 The Vampire and St Michael 83 The Story of Tremsin, the Bird Zhar, and Nastasia, the Lovely Maid of the Sea 95 The Serpent-Wife 105 The Story of Unlucky Daniel 111 The Sparrow and the Bush 123 The Old Dog 129 The Fox and the Cat 133 The Straw Ox 139 The Golden Slipper 147 The Iron Wolf 159 The Three Brothers 167 The Tsar and the Angel 173 The Story of Ivan and the Daughter of the Sun 183 The Cat, the Cock, and the Fox 191 The Serpent-Tsarevich and His Two Wives 197 The Origin of the Mole 207 The Two Princes 211 The Ungrateful Children and the Old Father Who Went to School Again 219 Ivan the Fool and St Peter's Fife 229 The Magic Egg 239 The Story of the Forty-First Brother 255 The Story of the Unlucky Days 261 The Wondrous Story of Ivan Golik and the Serpents 267 11 ILLUSTRATIONS 12 PAGE They came to the place where he had left her Frontispiece All manner of evil powers walked abroad 16 "How much do you want for that horse?" 13 24 The wind came and swept all his corn away 30 "Out of the drum, my henchmen!" 14 40 The Tsarivna arose from her coffin 86 They were both on their knees 90 Daniel waved his sword 114 His wife caressed and wheedled him 118 The girl drove the heifer out to graze 148 The Tsar's councillors went to the houses of all the nobles and princes 154 The Tsar went about inquiring of his people if any were wronged 178 The rulers of Hell laid hands upon the overseer straightway 186 Nineteen times did she cast off one of her suits of clothes 198 Suddenly St Peter appeared to him 230 Ivan Golik drew the bow 276 15 INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION 16 The favourable reception given to my volume of _Russian Fairy Tales_ has encouraged me to follow it up with a sister volume of stories selected from another Slavonic dialect extraordinarily rich in folk-tales--I mean Ruthenian, the language of the Cossacks. 17 Ruthenian is a language intermediate between Russian and Polish, but quite independent of both. 18 Its territory embraces, roughly speaking, that vast plain which lies between the Carpathians, the watershed of the Dnieper, and the Sea of Azov, with Lemberg and Kiev for its chief intellectual centres. 19 Though it has been rigorously repressed by the Russian Government, it is still spoken by more than twenty millions of people. 20 It possesses a noble literature, numerous folk-songs, not inferior even to those of Serbia, and, what chiefly concerns us now, a copious collection of justly admired folk-tales, many of them of great antiquity, which are regarded, both in Russia and Poland, as quite unique of their kind. 21 Mr Ralston, I fancy, was the first to call the attention of the West to these curious stories, though the want at that time of a good Ruthenian dictionary (a want since supplied by the excellent lexicon of Zhelekhovsky and Nidilsky) prevented him from utilizing them. 22 Another Slavonic scholar, Mr Morfill, has also frequently alluded to them in terms of enthusiastic but by no means extravagant praise. 23 The three chief collections of Ruthenian folk-lore are those of Kulish, Rudchenko, and Dragomanov, which represent, at least approximately, the three dialects into which Ruthenian is generally divided. 24 It is from these three collections that the present selection has been made. 25 Kulish, who has the merit of priority, was little more than a pioneer, his contribution merely consisting of some dozen _kazki_ (_Maerchen_) and _kazochiki_ (_Maerchenlein_), incorporated in the second volume of his _Zapiski o yuzhnoi Rusi_ ("Descriptions of South Russia," Petrograd, 1856-7). 26 Twelve years later Rudchenko published at Kiev what is still, on the whole, the best collection of Ruthenian folk-tales, under the title of _Narodnuiya Yuzhnorusskiya Skazki_ ("Popular South Russian Folk-tales"). 27 Like Linnroet among the Finns, Rudchenko took down the greater part of these tales direct from the lips of the people. 28 In a second volume, published in the following year, he added other stories gleaned from various minor manuscript collections of great rarity. 29 In 1876 the Imperial Russian Geographical Society published at Kiev, under the title of _Malorusskiya Narodnuiya Predonyia i Razkazui_ ("Little-Russian Popular Traditions and Tales"), an edition of as many manuscript collections of Ruthenian folk-lore (including poems, proverbs, riddles, and rites) as it could lay its hands upon. 30 This collection, though far less rich in variants than Rudchenko's, contained many original tales which had escaped him, and was ably edited by Michael Dragomanov, by whose name, indeed, it is generally known. 31 The present attempt to popularize these Cossack stories is, I believe, the first translation ever made from Ruthenian into English. 32 The selection, though naturally restricted, is fairly representative; every variety of folk-tale has a place in it, and it should never be forgotten that the Ruthenian _kazka_ (_Maerchen_), owing to favourable circumstances, has managed to preserve far more of the fresh spontaneity and naive simplicity of the primitive folk-tale than her more sophisticated sister, the Russian _skazka_. 33 It is maintained, moreover, by Slavonic scholars that there are peculiar and original elements in these stories not to be found in the folk-lore of other European peoples; such data, for instance, as the magic handkerchiefs (generally beneficial, but sometimes, as in the story of Ivan Golik, terribly baleful), the demon-expelling hemp-and-tar whips, and the magic cattle-teeming egg, so mischievous a possession to the unwary. 34 It may be so, but, after all that Mr Andrew Lang has taught us on the subject, it would be rash for any mere philologist to assert positively that there can be anything really new in folk-lore under the sun. On the other hand, the comparative isolation and primitiveness of the Cossacks, and their remoteness from the great theatres of historical events, would seem to be favourable conditions both for the safe preservation of old myths and the easy development of new ones. 35 It is for professional students of folk-lore to study the original documents for themselves. 36 R. N. 37 B. next → Oh: the Tsar of the Forest↑ back to Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg29672/1/