Who is the author of Russian folk tales? Famous storytellers
Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875)
More than one generation of people has grown up with the works of the Danish writer, storyteller and playwright. From early childhood, Hans was a visionary and a dreamer, he adored puppet theaters and began writing poetry early. His father died when Hans was not even ten years old, the boy worked as an apprentice at a tailor, then at a cigarette factory, and at the age of 14 he was already playing minor roles V Royal Theater in Copenhagen. Andersen wrote his first play at the age of 15, she enjoyed great success, in 1835 his first book of fairy tales was published, which many children and adults read with delight to this day. The most famous of his works are “Flint”, “Thumbelina”, “The Little Mermaid”, “Steady tin soldier», « The Snow Queen", "The Ugly Duckling", "The Princess and the Pea" and many others.
Charles Perrault (1628-1703)
The French writer-storyteller, critic and poet was an exemplary excellent student as a child. He received a good education, made a career as a lawyer and writer, he was admitted to the French Academy, wrote a lot scientific works. He published his first book of fairy tales under a pseudonym - the name of his eldest son was indicated on the cover, since Perrault feared that his reputation as a storyteller could harm his career. In 1697, his collection “Tales of Mother Goose” was published, which brought Perrault world fame. Based on the plot of his fairy tales famous ballets and opera works. As for the most famous works, few people did not read in childhood about Puss in Boots, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Gingerbread house, Thumb Boy, Bluebeard.
Sergeevich Pushkin (1799-1837)
Not only the poems and verses of the great poet and playwright enjoy the well-deserved love of people, but also wonderful fairy tales in verse.
Alexander Pushkin began writing his poetry back in early childhood, he got good home education, graduated Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum(privileged educational institution), was friends with others famous poets, including the “Decembrists”. In the poet's life there were both periods of ups and downs. tragic events: accusations of freethinking, misunderstanding and condemnation of the authorities, and finally, a fatal duel, as a result of which Pushkin received a mortal wound and died at the age of 38. But his legacy remains: the last fairy tale, written by the poet, became “The Tale of the Golden Cockerel.” Also known is “The Tale of Tsar Saltan”, “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish”, The Tale of dead princess and the Seven Bogatyrs”, “The Tale of the Priest and the Worker Balda”.
Brothers Grimm: Wilhelm (1786-1859), Jacob (1785-1863)
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were inseparable from their youth until their graves: they were bound by common interests and common adventures. Wilhelm Grimm grew up as a sickly and weak boy, only in mature age his health more or less returned to normal, Jacob always supported his brother. The Brothers Grimm were not only experts in German folklore, but also linguists, lawyers, and scientists. One brother chose the path of a philologist, studying ancient German literature, the other became a scientist. It was the fairy tales that brought the brothers world fame, although some works are considered “not for children.” The most famous are “Snow White and Scarlet Flower”, “Straw, Coal and Bean”, “Bremen Street Musicians”, “ Brave Little Tailor", "The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats", "Hansel and Gretel" and others.
Pavel Petrovich Bazhov (1879-1950)
The Russian writer and folklorist, who was the first to carry out literary adaptations of Ural legends, left us an invaluable legacy. He was born into a simple working-class family, but this did not stop him from finishing seminary and becoming a teacher of the Russian language. In 1918, he volunteered for the front, and when he returned, he decided to turn to journalism. Only on the occasion of the author’s 60th birthday was a collection of short stories published. Malachite Box", which brought Bazhov people's love. It is interesting that fairy tales are written in the form of legends: folk speech, folklore images make each piece special. The most famous fairy tales: “ Copper Mountain Mistress”, “Silver Hoof”, “Malachite Box”, “Two Lizards”, “Golden Hair”, “Stone Flower”.
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
Famous writer, poet and reformer. Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay (India), at the age of 6 he was brought to England; he later called those years “years of suffering”, because the people who raised him turned out to be cruel and indifferent. Future writer received his education, returned to India, and then went on a journey, visiting many countries in Asia and America. When the writer was 42 years old, he was awarded Nobel Prize– and to this day he remains the youngest writer laureate in his category. Kipling’s most famous children’s book is, of course, “The Jungle Book”, the main character of which is the boy Mowgli. It is also very interesting to read other fairy tales: “The Cat That Walks by itself”, “Where does a camel get its hump?”, “How the leopard got his spots,” they all tell about distant lands and are very interesting.
Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776-1822)
Hoffmann was a very versatile and talented man: composer, artist, writer, storyteller. He was born in Koeningsberg, when he was 3 years old, his parents separated: his older brother left with his father, and Ernst stayed with his mother; Hoffman never saw his brother again. Ernst was always a mischief-maker and a dreamer; he was often called a “troublemaker.” It’s interesting that there was a women’s boarding house next to the house where the Hoffmanns lived, and Ernst liked one of the girls so much that he even started digging a tunnel to get to know her. When the hole was almost ready, my uncle found out about it and ordered the passage to be filled up. Hoffmann always dreamed that after his death a memory of him would remain - and so it happened; his fairy tales are read to this day: the most famous are “The Golden Pot”, “The Nutcracker”, “Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober” and others.
Alan Milne (1882-1856)
Which of us doesn't know funny bear with sawdust in your head - Winnie the Pooh and his funny friends? – the author of these funny tales and is Alan Milne. The writer spent his childhood in London, he was wonderful educated person, then served in the Royal Army. The first tales about the bear were written in 1926. Interestingly, Alan did not read his works to his own son Christopher, preferring to raise him on more serious literary stories. Christopher read his father's fairy tales as an adult. The books have been translated into 25 languages and are very popular in many countries around the world. In addition to stories about Winnie the Pooh famous fairy tales “Princess Nesmeyana”, “ An ordinary fairy tale", "Prince Rabbit" and others.
Alexey Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1882-1945)
Alexey Tolstoy wrote in many genres and styles, received the title of academician, and was a war correspondent during the war. As a child, Alexey lived on the Sosnovka farm in his stepfather's house (his mother left his father, Count Tolstoy, while pregnant). Tolstoy spent several years abroad studying literature and folklore different countries: this is how the idea arose to rewrite it in new way fairy tale "Pinocchio". In 1935, his book “The Golden Key or the Adventures of Pinocchio” was published. Alexey Tolstoy also released 2 collections of his own fairy tales, called “Mermaid Tales” and “Magpie Tales”. The most famous “adult” works are “Walking in Torment”, “Aelita”, “Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin”.
Alexander Nikolaevich Afanasyev (1826-1871)
He is an outstanding folklorist and historian, who has been interested in folk art and researched it since his youth. He first worked as a journalist in the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at which time he began his research. Afanasyev is considered one of the most outstanding scientists of the 20th century; his collection of Russian folk tales is the only collection of Russian East Slavic fairy tales, which may well be called “ folk book“, after all, more than one generation has grown up with them. The first publication dates back to 1855, since then the book has been reprinted several times.
When Russian children reach a certain age, they begin to read Russian folk tales, for example, “The Ryaba Hen”, “Turnip”, “Kolobok”, “The Fox and the Hare”, “The Cockerel - the Golden Comb”, “Sister Alyonushka and Brother Ivanushka”, “Geese-Swans”, “The Little Thumb Boy”, “The Frog Princess”, “Ivan Tsarevich and Gray wolf", and many others.
And everyone understands that if fairy tales are “Russian folk”, it means that they were written by the Russian people. However, all the people cannot engage in writing at once. This means that fairy tales must have specific authors, or even one author. And there is such an author.
The author of those fairy tales that have been published in the USSR since the early 1940s and are now published in Russia and the CIS countries as “Russian folk” was Russian Soviet writer Alexey Nikolaevich Tolstoy, better known as the author of such novels as “Peter the Great”, “Aelita”, “Engineer Garin’s Hyperboloid”.
To be more precise, Count Alexei Tolstoy was the author not of the plots of these fairy tales, but of their currently generally accepted texts, their final, “canonical” edition.
Beginning in the second half of the 1850s, individual enthusiasts from among the Russian nobles and commoners began to record the tales that different grandmothers and grandfathers told in the villages, and subsequently many of these recordings were published in the form of collections.
In the 1860s - 1930s in Russian Empire and in the USSR such collections as “Great Russian Tales” by I.A. were published. Khudyakova (1860-1862), “Russian folk tales” by A.N. Afanasyev (1864), “Fairy tales and legends Samara region» D.N. Sadovnikova (1884), “Krasnoyarsk collection” (1902), “Northern Tales” by N.E. Onchukov (1908), “Great Russian Tales of the Vyatka Province” by D.K. Zelenina (1914), “Great Russian Tales Perm province» the same D.K. Zelenin (1915), “Collection of Great Russian fairy tales from the Archives of the Russian Geographical Society” by A.M. Smirnova (1917), “Tales of the Verkhnelensky region” by M.K. Azadovsky (1925), “The Five Speeches” by O.Z. Ozarovskaya, “Tales and Legends of the Northern Territory” by I.V. Karnaukhov (1934), “Tales of Kuprianikha” (1937), “Tales of the Saratov Region” (1937), “Tales” by M.M. Korgueva (1939).
The general principle of constructing all Russians folk tales is the same and understandable - good defeats evil, but the plots and even interpretations of the same plot in different collections were completely different. Even the simple 3-page fairy tale “The Cat and the Fox” was written down in dozens of different versions.
Therefore, publishing houses and even professional literary scholars and folklore researchers were constantly confused in this multitude different texts about the same thing, and often disputes and doubts arose about which version of the tale to publish.
At the end of the 1930s A.N. Tolstoy decided to sort out this chaotic accumulation of records of Russian folklore, and prepare uniform, standard texts of Russian folk tales for Soviet publishing houses.
What method did he use to do this? Here is what Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoy himself wrote about this:
“I do this: from the numerous variants of a folk tale, I choose the most interesting, indigenous one, and enrich it from other variants with vivid language turns and plot details. Of course, when collecting tales like this, I have to individual parts, or “restoration” of it, add something yourself, modify something, supplement what’s missing, but I do it in the same style.”
A.N. Tolstoy carefully studied all of the above collections of Russian fairy tales, as well as unpublished records from old archives; in addition, he personally met with some folk storytellers and wrote down their versions of fairy tales.
For each fairy tale, Alexey Tolstoy kept a special file cabinet in which the advantages and disadvantages were recorded. various options their texts.
Ultimately, he had to write all the fairy tales anew, using the method of “assembling a fairy tale from separate parts,” that is, compiling fragments, and at the same time, fragments of fairy tales were very seriously edited and supplemented with texts of his own composition.
In the comments of A.N. Nechaev to the 8th volume of the Collected Works of A.N. Tolstoy in ten volumes (M.: State Publishing House fiction, 1960, p. 537-562) are given specific examples, how Alexey Nikolaevich Tolstoy very significantly modified the “source books” of Russian folk tales, and how his author’s texts differ quite seriously from the original versions of the corresponding fairy tales in other collections.
The result of the author's processing by A.N. Tolstoy's collections of Russian folk tales were published in 1940 and 1944. The writer died in 1945, so some fairy tales were published from manuscripts posthumously, in 1953.
Since then, in almost all cases when Russian folk tales were published in the USSR, and then in the CIS countries, they were published based on the original texts of Alexei Tolstoy.
As already mentioned, the author’s adaptation of the “folk” versions of fairy tales by A.N. Tolstoy was very different.
Is it good or bad? Definitely good!
Alexei Tolstoy was unsurpassed master artistic word, in my opinion, he was the best Russian writer of the first half of the 20th century, and with his talent he could “bring to mind” even very weak texts.
The most typical and well-known example:
Alexey Nikolaevich Tolstoy took a very mediocre book Italian writer Carlo Collodi wrote “Pinocchio, or the Adventures of the Wooden Puppet”, and based on this plot he wrote a brilliant fairy tale“The Golden Key, or the Adventures of Pinocchio,” which turned out to be many times more interesting and exciting than the original.
Many images from “The Adventures of Pinocchio” have become part of daily life, in Russian folklore, and in Russian mass consciousness. Remember, for example, the classic saying “I work like Papa Carlo,” or the TV show “Field of Miracles” (and the Field of Miracles in the tale about Pinocchio, by the way, was in the Land of Fools), there are a lot of jokes about Pinocchio, in a word, Alexei Tolstoy managed to turn Italian plot in a truly Russian way, and beloved by the people for many generations.
:
7. Masha and the Bear
8. Morozko
9. The Man and the Bear (Tops and Roots)
10. Cockerel - Golden comb and millstones
11. At the behest of the pike
13. Sister Alyonushka and brother Ivanushka
14. Sivka-Burka
15. Snow Maiden
16. Teremok
5. Legless and armless heroes
6. Legless and blind heroes
8. Birch and three falcons
9. Hunter Brothers
10. Well done Bulat
11. Bukhtan Bukhtanovich
14. The Witch and the Sun's Sister
15. Prophetic boy
16. Prophetic dream
17. There is a sun in the forehead, a month on the back of the head, stars on the sides
18. Mushroom War
19. Magic water
22. Magic berries
23. Magic horse
24. Clay guy
28. Two from the bag
29. Girl in the well
30. Wooden eagle
31. Elena the Wise
32. Emelya the Fool
33. The Firebird and Vasilisa the Princess
34. The Enchanted Princess
35. Animal milk
36. Golden Slipper
37. Golden Cockerel
38. Dawn, evening and midnight
39. Ivan - widow's son
40. Ivan - son of a cow
41. Ivan - peasant son and Miracle Yudo
42. Ivan - a peasant's son
43. Ivan the Bestalent and Elena the Wise
44. Ivan is a peasant son and a peasant himself with a mustache for seven miles
45. Ivan Tsarevich and the White Polyanin
47. Kikimora
51. Horse, tablecloth and horn
52. Korolevich and his uncle
55. Flying ship
57. Dashing one-eyed
58. Lutonyushka
59. Boy with Thumb
60. Marya Morevna
61. Marya-Krasa - long braid
62. Masha and the Bear
63. Medvedko, Usynya, Gorynya and Duginya heroes
64. Copper, silver and golden kingdoms
67. Wise maiden
68. The wise maiden and the seven thieves
69. Wise wife
70. Wise answers
71. Nesmeyana the Princess
72. Night dancing
73. Petrified Kingdom
74. Shepherd's pipe
75. Cockerel - Golden comb and millstones
76. Feather of Finist the clear falcon
77. Legs up to the knees in gold, arms up to the elbows in silver
78. At the behest of the pike
79. Go there - I don’t know where, bring that - I don’t know what
80. Truth and Falsehood
81. Fake illness
82. About a stupid snake and a smart soldier
83. Bird's tongue
84. Robbers
85. Seven Simeons
86. Silver saucer and pouring apple
87. Sister Alyonushka and brother Ivanushka
88. Sivka-Burka
89. The Tale of Vasilisa, the Golden Braid, and Ivan the Pea
90. The Tale of the Bonebreaker Bear and Ivan, the Merchant's Son
91. Tale of rejuvenating apples and living water
92. The Tale of Ivan the Tsarevich, the Firebird and the Gray Wolf
93. Tales of the brave knight Ukrom-Tabunshchik
94. Tablecloth, ram and bag
95. Fast messenger
96. Snow Maiden
97. Snow Maiden and Fox
98. The soldier delivers the princess
99. Sun, Moon and Raven Voronovich
100. Suma, give me some wisdom!
101. Tereshechka
102. Three kingdoms - copper, silver and gold
103. Finist - clear falcon
105. Tricky science
106. Crystal Mountain
107. Princess solving riddles
110. Tsar Maiden
111. Tsar Bear
112. Chivy, chivy, chivychok...
113. Wonderful shirt
114. Wonderful little shoes
115. Wonderful box
8. Wolf, quail and jerk
10. Crow and cancer
11. Where was the goat?
12. Stupid wolf
13. Crane and heron
14. For a bast shoe - a chicken, for a chicken - a goose
16. Hares and frogs
17. Animals in the pit
18. Winter quarters of animals
19. Golden horse
20. Golden Cockerel
21. How the wolf became a bird
22. How the fox learned to fly
23. How the fox sewed a fur coat for the wolf
27. Cat - gray forehead, goat and ram
28. Cat and Fox
29. Cat, Rooster and Fox
30. Kochet and chicken
31. Crooked duck
32. Kuzma is soon rich
33. Chicken, mouse and black grouse
34. Lion, pike and man
35. Fox is a wanderer
36. Fox and blackbird
37. Fox and crane
38. Fox and goat
39. Fox and jug
40. Fox and bast shoe
41. Fox and cancer
44. Fox Confessor
45. Fox midwife
46. The fox-maiden and Kotofey Ivanovich
47. Fox-sister and wolf
48. Masha and the Bear
49. Bear - fake leg
50. Bear and fox
51. Bear and dog
52. The Man and the Bear (Tops and Roots)
53. Man, bear and fox
54. Mouse and Sparrow
55. Scared wolves
56. Scared bear and wolves
57. Wrong court of birds
58. No goat with nuts
59. About Vaska - Muska
60. About the toothy pike
61. Sheep, fox and wolf
62. Rooster and bob
63. Rooster and hen
64. Cockerel
65. Cockerel - Golden comb and millstones
66. At the behest of the pike
67. Promised
68. About the toothy mouse and about the rich sparrow
69. About the old lady and the bull
71. Mitten
72. The Tale of Ersha Ershovich, Shchetinnikov’s son
73. The Tale of Ivan the Tsarevich, the Firebird and the Gray Wolf
74. Tar goby
75. The Old Man and the Wolf
Hans Christian Andersen
Danish novelist and poet, international author famous fairy tales for children and adults: " Ugly duck", "The King's New Dress", "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", "The Princess and the Pea", "Ole Lukoye", "The Snow Queen" and many others. Despite the fact that Hans Christian Andersen is one of the best storytellers, he had a very bad character. In Denmark there is a legend about Andersen's royal origin.
In Denmark there is a legend about Andersen's royal origin
This is due to the fact that in his early autobiography the author himself wrote about how as a child he played with Prince Frits, later King Frederick VII, and he had no friends among the street boys. Only the prince. Andersen’s friendship with Frits, according to the storyteller’s fantasy, continued into adulthood, until the latter’s death, and, according to the writer himself, he was the only one, with the exception of relatives, who was allowed to visit the coffin of the deceased.
Charles Perrault
Few people know that Perrault was an academician French Academy, author of famous scientific works. But it was not serious books, A wonderful tales“Cinderella”, “Puss in Boots”, “Bluebeard”, “Little Red Riding Hood”, “Sleeping Beauty”.
Perrault was an academician of the French Academy, the author of scientific works
Perrault published his fairy tales not under own name, and under the name of his 19-year-old son Perrault d’Armancourt, apparently trying to protect his already established literary reputation from accusations of working with the “low” genre of fairy tales.
Brothers Grimm
Brothers Grimm: Jacob and Wilhelm - explorers of German folk culture and storytellers. They were born in the city of Hanau. For a long time lived in the city of Kassel. ANDstudied the grammar of Germanic languages, the history of law and mythology. The fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm are known all over the world. They collected folklore and published several collections called Grimm's Fairy Tales, which became very popular. At the end of their lives, they began creating the first dictionary of the German language.
Pavel Petrovich Bazhov
In 1939, a collection of Bazhov’s tales “The Malachite Box” was published.
He was born in the city of Sysert, Yekaterinburg district, Perm province. Graduated religious school Yekaterinburg, and later the Perm Theological Seminary. He worked as a teacher, political worker, journalist and editor of Ural newspapers. In 1939, a collection of Bazhov’s tales “The Malachite Box” was published.In 1944, “The Malachite Box” was translated into English and published in London and New York, then in Prague, and in 1947 in Paris. Translated into German, Hungarian, Romanian, Chinese, Japanese languages. In total, according to the library. Lenin, - into 100 languages of the world.
Astrid Lindgren
Lindgren's fairy-tale works are close to folk art, in them there is a tangible connection between fantasy and the truth of life.Author of a number of worldwide famous books for children, including "Baby and Carlson, who lives on the roof"and tetralogies about« Pippi Long stocking » . In Russian, her books became known and very popular thanks to translationLilianna Lungina.
Lindgren dedicated almost all of her books to children. “I have not written books for adults and I think that I will never do so,” Astrid stated decisively. She, along with the heroes of the books, taught children that “If you don’t live according to habit, whole life there will be a day!
The writer herself always called her childhood happy (there were many games and adventures in it, interspersed with work on the farm and in its environs) and pointed out that it served as a source of inspiration for her work.
Rudyard Kipling
Famous writer, poet and reformer. Heborn in Bombay (India), at the age of 6 he was brought to England; he later called those years “years of suffering”. When the writer was 42 years old, he was awarded the Nobel Prize - and to this day he remains the youngest writer to win his nomination.
Kipling's most famous children's book is The Jungle Book.
Kipling’s most famous children’s book is, of course, “The Jungle Book”, the main character of which is the boy Mowgli. It is also very interesting to read other fairy tales: “The cat that walks by itself”, “Where does a camel get its hump?”, “How the leopard got his spots,” they all tell about distant lands and are very interesting.
When Russian children reach a certain age, they begin to read Russian folk tales, for example, “The Ryaba Hen”, “Turnip”, “Kolobok”, “The Fox and the Hare”, “The Cockerel - the Golden Comb”, “Sister Alyonushka and Brother Ivanushka”, “Geese-Swans”, “Tom Thumb”, “The Frog Princess”, “Ivan Tsarevich and the Gray Wolf”, and many others.
And everyone understands that if fairy tales are “Russian folk”, it means that they were written by the Russian people. However, all the people cannot engage in writing at once. This means that fairy tales must have specific authors, or even one author. And there is such an author.
The author of those fairy tales that have been published in the USSR since the early 1940s and are now published in Russia and the CIS countries as “Russian folk” was the Russian Soviet writer Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoy, better known as the author of such novels as “Peter the Great”, “ Aelita", "Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin".
To be more precise, Count Alexei Tolstoy was the author not of the plots of these fairy tales, but of their currently generally accepted texts, their final, “canonical” edition.
Beginning in the second half of the 1850s, individual enthusiasts from among the Russian nobles and commoners began to record the tales that different grandmothers and grandfathers told in the villages, and subsequently many of these recordings were published in the form of collections.
In the 1860s - 1930s, such collections as “Great Russian Tales” by I.A. were published in the Russian Empire and the USSR. Khudyakova (1860-1862), “Russian folk tales” by A.N. Afanasyev (1864), “Tales and legends of the Samara region” by D.N. Sadovnikova (1884), “Krasnoyarsk collection” (1902), “Northern Tales” by N.E. Onchukov (1908), “Great Russian Tales of the Vyatka Province” by D.K. Zelenin (1914), “Great Russian Tales of the Perm Province” by the same D.K. Zelenin (1915), “Collection of Great Russian fairy tales from the Archives of the Russian Geographical Society” by A.M. Smirnova (1917), “Tales of the Verkhnelensky region” by M.K. Azadovsky (1925), “The Five Speeches” by O.Z. Ozarovskaya, “Tales and Legends of the Northern Territory” by I.V. Karnaukhov (1934), “Tales of Kuprianikha” (1937), “Tales of the Saratov Region” (1937), “Tales” by M.M. Korgueva (1939).
The general principle of constructing all Russian folk tales is the same and clear - good triumphs over evil, but the plots and even interpretations of the same plot in different collections were completely different. Even the simple 3-page fairy tale “The Cat and the Fox” was written down in dozens of different versions.
Therefore, publishing houses and even professional literary scholars and folklore researchers were constantly confused in this multitude of different texts about the same thing, and disputes and doubts often arose about which version of the fairy tale to publish.
At the end of the 1930s A.N. Tolstoy decided to sort out this chaotic accumulation of records of Russian folklore, and prepare uniform, standard texts of Russian folk tales for Soviet publishing houses.
What method did he use to do this? Here is what Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoy himself wrote about this:
“I do this: from the numerous variants of a folk tale, I choose the most interesting, indigenous one, and enrich it from other variants with vivid language turns and plot details. Of course, when collecting a fairy tale from separate parts in this way, or “restoring” it, I have to add something myself, modify something, supplement what is missing, but I do it in the same style.”
A.N. Tolstoy carefully studied all of the above collections of Russian fairy tales, as well as unpublished records from old archives; in addition, he personally met with some folk storytellers and wrote down their versions of fairy tales.
For each fairy tale, Alexei Tolstoy kept a special card index, which recorded the advantages and disadvantages of various versions of their texts.
Ultimately, he had to write all the fairy tales anew, using the method of “assembling a fairy tale from separate parts,” that is, compiling fragments, and at the same time, fragments of fairy tales were very seriously edited and supplemented with texts of his own composition.
In the comments of A.N. Nechaev to the 8th volume of the Collected Works of A.N. Tolstoy in ten volumes (Moscow: State Publishing House of Fiction, 1960, pp. 537-562) provides specific examples of how Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoy very significantly modified the “source codes” of Russian folk tales, and how his author’s texts differ quite seriously from the original versions corresponding tales in other collections.
The result of the author's processing by A.N. Tolstoy's collections of Russian folk tales were published in 1940 and 1944. The writer died in 1945, so some fairy tales were published from manuscripts posthumously, in 1953.
Since then, in almost all cases when Russian folk tales were published in the USSR, and then in the CIS countries, they were published based on the original texts of Alexei Tolstoy.
As already mentioned, the author’s adaptation of the “folk” versions of fairy tales by A.N. Tolstoy was very different.
Is it good or bad? Definitely good!
Alexey Tolstoy was an unsurpassed master of artistic expression; in my opinion, he was the best Russian writer of the first half of the 20th century, and with his talent he could “bring to mind” even very weak texts.
The most typical and well-known example:
Alexey Nikolaevich Tolstoy took a very mediocre book by the Italian writer Carlo Collodi, “Pinocchio, or the Adventures of a Wooden Doll,” and based on this plot he wrote an absolutely brilliant fairy tale, “The Golden Key, or the Adventures of Pinocchio,” which turned out to be many times more interesting and exciting than the original.
Many images from “The Adventures of Pinocchio” have become firmly established in everyday life, in Russian folklore, and in Russian mass consciousness. Remember, for example, the classic saying “I work like Papa Carlo,” or the TV show “Field of Miracles” (and the Field of Miracles in the tale about Pinocchio, by the way, was in the Land of Fools), there are a lot of jokes about Pinocchio, in a word, Alexei Tolstoy managed to turn Italian plot in a truly Russian way, and beloved by the people for many generations.
