Propp historical roots of the fairy tale imprint. Vladimir Propp - Russian folklorist

Historical roots of fairy tales

Introduction

Under fairy tales Propp V.Ya. understands those fairy tales whose structure he studied in “Morphology of Fairy Tales.”

Here we will study the genre of fairy tale that begins with the infliction of some damage or harm, or with the desire to have something and develops through the sending of grief from home, a meeting with the donor, giving him a magical gift. Often, having already returned home, the brothers throw him into the abyss. Subsequently, he arrives again, is tested through difficult tasks and becomes king and marries in his kingdom. This is a short schematic summary of the composition.

Among fairy tales there is a special category - magical. They form part of folklore. Studying the structure of fairy tales shows the close relationship of these tales with each other. For us, fairy tales are something whole; all their plots are interconnected and conditioned.

Fairy tale and image

The fairy tale has a connection with the area of cults and religion. Fantastic images were initially reflected only in the mysterious forces of nature, now acquiring social attributes and now becoming representatives of historical forces.

The fairy tale has preserved traces of many rituals and customs. For example, the fairy tale tells that a girl buries the bones of a cow in the garden and waters them with water. The simplest case is the complete coincidence of ritual and custom with a fairy tale.

Fairy tale and myth

Myth and fairy tale differ not in form, but in their social function.

A fairy tale and a myth (especially the MFA of pre-class peoples) can sometimes coincide so completely with each other that in ethnography and folklore studies such myths are often called fairy tales. The beginning

From the very first words of the tale - “In a certain kingdom, in a certain state”... the listener is immediately seized by a special mood, a mood of epic calm.

Isolation of the royal children in a fairy tale

The royal children are kept in complete darkness (“They built her a prison”). The prohibition of light here is completely clear. In Georgian and Mingrelian fairy tales, the princess is called mzeфunaqav. This term can have two meanings: “not seen by the sun” and “not seen by the sun.” Closely related to this ban on light is the ban on seeing anyone.

The girl's conclusion:

· Prohibition of cutting hair

· A girl's imprisonment is usually followed by her marriage

· The motif of imprisonment of girls and women was widely used in novelistic literature

Trouble and opposition

Out of adversity and opposition a plot is created. Any trouble is the main application form. The course of action requires that the hero somehow learn about this misfortune.

Space in a fairy tale plays a dual role. On the one hand, it is in a fairy tale. On the other hand, it seems to be completely absent. All development takes place at stops and they are designed in great detail.

Types of Yaga

Yaga is a very difficult character to analyze. Her image is made up of a number of details. These details, put together from different fairy tales, sometimes do not correspond to each other, do not combine, do not merge into a single image. Basically the fairy tale knows 3 different forms of Yaga.

The entire course of development of the tale, and especially the beginning, shows that Yaga has some kind of connection with the kingdom of the dead.

propp fairy tale magic cult

The forest is Yagi's permanent accessory. Moreover, even in those fairy tales where there is no Yaga (“Kosoruchka”), the hero or heroine certainly ends up in the forest.

The forest is dense, dark, mysterious, somewhat conventional, not entirely believable. The connection between the rite of passage and the forest is so strong and constant that it is also true in reverse.

The forest in fairy tales generally plays the role of a delaying barrier. The forest into which the hero finds himself is impenetrable. This is a kind of thing that catches aliens. This function of the fairy-tale forest is clear in another motif - in the throwing of a comb, which turns into a forest and detains the pursuer. Here the forest detains not the pursuer, but the stranger, the stranger. You can't go through the forest. We see that the hero receives a horse from Yaga, on which he flies through the forest.

A hut on chicken legs

The hut in women's fairy tales has some features. The girl, before going to Yaga, goes to see her aunt, who warns her about what she will see in the hut and how to behave.

In American hunting myths you can see that in order to get into a hut, you need to know the names of its parts. There, the hut retained clearer traces of zoomorphism, and sometimes an animal appears instead of the hut.

To get into the hut, the hero must know the word. There are materials that show that he must know the name ("Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves").

The forest is the initial indispensable condition of the ritual, and subsequently the transition to another world. The fairy tale is the last link of this development.

“Give me something to drink and feed”

A constant, typical feature of Yaga: “she feeds and treats the hero.” The hero refuses to speak until he is fed. Food has a special meaning here.

"Mistress of the Forest"

The peculiarity of Yaga’s image is her sharp feminine physiology. She is always a husbandless old woman.

"Yaga Problems"

Along with testing the magical power of the deceased, ideas about testing his virtue began to appear. Testing the magical power of the deceased and transferring an assistant to him for further travel through the kingdom of the dead turned into a test and reward of virtue. This is how the function of setting tasks arose.

“Exile and children taken into the forest”

When the decisive moment came, the children, one way or another, went into the forest to a scary and mysterious creature. For a folklorist, three forms are known: taking children away by their parents, staging the abduction of children into the forest, and sending the boy into the forest on his own without the participation of his parents.

If children were taken away, it was always done by the father or brother. The mother could not, because... the very place where the ritual was performed was forbidden to women.

In fairy tales, taking children into the forest is always a hostile act, although in the future things turn out very well for the exile or the one taken away.

"Stolen Children"

The creature that abducted children was Lamia. The creatures that came from the forest were disguised as animals or birds, imitating them and imitating them. The sound of rattles was heard in the forest, everyone ran away in horror.

"Severed Finger"

This is a type of self-harm. In a fairy tale, the hero, often in a hut, loses his finger, namely the little finger of his left hand. Losing a finger often occurs in the following situations:

· In Yaga and similar creatures. The finger is cut off to find out if the boy is fat enough.

· The dashing one-eyed man. Here the running hero sticks his finger to some object.

· In the house of robbers. The victim's finger is cut off because of the ring.

"Signs of Death"

This throws light on the motive of the hero or heroine being sent into the forest to die, and it is necessary to show the signs of the completed death - bloody clothes, a cut out eye, liver, heart, bloody weapon.

"Yaga Furnace"

The burning, frying, and cooking of initiates can be traced already at the earliest stages of the initiation rite known to us. Burning, roasting, roasting in all these cases leads to the greatest good, i.e. to those abilities that are needed by a full member of clan society.

"Magic Gift"

With the help of a gift, a goal is achieved. This gift is some object (Ring, ball) or animal (horse). We see how closely the image of Yaga is connected with initiation rites. The guardian assistant was associated with the totem of time.

"Travesty"

The person performing the ceremony was a woman. Yaga and the forest teacher in the fairy tale represent a mutual equivalent. Both burn or boil children in a cauldron. But when the yaga does this or unsuccessfully wants to do this, it causes a desperate struggle. If a forest teacher does this, the student acquires omniscience. But the yaga is also a beneficent creature. In some cases, we see that men dressed as women played the role. According to other evidence, all members of the unions had a common mother, an old woman. In female nature one can see a reflection of matriarchal relationships.

With the existence of an initiation rite, this process should have already ended: the rite is a condition for admission into the male union. The leader of the ceremony was dressed as a woman. Hence the connection with gods and heroes dressed as women (Hercules, Achilles), to the hermaphrodization of gods and heroes.

The departure of children into the forest was a departure to death. That is why the forest appears both as Yaga’s home and as the entrance to hell. With the advent of agricultural religion, the entire “forest” religion turns into pure evil spirits: the great magician turns into an evil sorcerer. That way of life that destroyed the ritual and its creators and bearers: the witch who burns children is herself burned by the storyteller, the bearer of the epic fairy tale tradition.

Under the way of life that replaced it and turned the sacred and terrible into a half-heroic, half-comic grotesque.

Big house and small hut

In the fairy tale there is a direct return home from the forest hut. Usually children or girls. The hero does not always meet a “big house” on his way, but often he himself builds (or encounters) a hut and remains to live in it for a long time.

Brothers range from 2 to 12, but there are also 25 and 30.

Set table

The hero sees here a different presentation of food than what he is used to.

Robbers

These are brothers. Robbery is the prerogative of the newly initiated, namely the young hero.

Distribution of duties.

This brotherhood has its own very primitive organization. It has an elder who is chosen.

Sister

A dynamic start with the appearance of a girl in this fraternity. In men's houses there are always girls who served their brothers. She lives in a special room at home. Her treatment is chivalrous. Group marriage tended to become individual marriage. Marriage sought to become individual, and children played a major role in this endeavor.

Birth of a child

· Treatment of children varies

Beauty in the coffin

Everything that was done in the men's house was a secret for the women. Temporary death is a characteristic feature of the rite of passage.

Unwashed

The hero is often dirty, smeared with soot. He makes an alliance with the devil and is forbidden to wash himself. For this, the devil gives him untold wealth, after which the hero marries.

Forbidden closet

The motif of the forbidden closet goes back to the “big houses” complex. There was a forbidden room in which there was an animal carved from wood. The closet can be in the “big house”, in the house of robbers, in the parental home, in the next world.

Grateful animals

Combined characters (assistants). A fairy tale knows no compassion. If the hero releases the animal, then he does it not out of compassion, but on the basis of an agreement.

Magic gifts

Assistant

Helper is an expression of strength and ability. All assistants represent one group of characters.

Transformed Hero

The transformed hero in a fairy tale can be considered a helper as a personified ability of the hero.

Transfers the hero to another kingdom. The motif of feeding the eagle is created based on an existing event. There is a close connection between the eagle and the shaman.

winged horse

The horse did not appear to replace forest animals, but in completely new economic functions. The horse dresses in the form of a bird. The horse and the eagle are the hero’s only assistants.

Claws, hair, skins, teeth.

Many magical objects were parts of an animal’s body: skins, hairs, teeth. Upon initiation, young men received power over animals.

Items that summon spirits.

Representing force as an invisible being is a further step towards creating the concept of force. This creates the concept of rings and other objects from which a spirit can be summoned.

Living and dead water

“Alive and dead” are the same as strong and weak. A raven flying away with two bubbles brings exactly this water. A dead man trying to get to another world uses only water. A living person who wants to get there also uses only one water. A person who has set foot on the path of death and wants to return to life uses both types.

Crossing

An emphasized, convex, bright moment of the hero’s spatial movement.

Crossing as a hero.

In a fairy tale, the hero, in order to cross to another kingdom or back, sometimes turns into an animal.

· The bird is knitted with the sea

· This is an image of freedom, peace, pride

In Rome, when emperors died, an eagle was released to carry the soul of the ruler to heaven. In Christianity, in the image of winged angels carrying away the soul, we have the last remnants of this faith.

With the death of totemism, the forms change. All crossing methods have one new origin. They reflect the idea of the deceased’s journey to the afterlife. Even such forms as a ladder, a tree and a belt reveal their original animal form when compared.

Serpent Form

· Motif of snake fighting

· He is sometimes assimilated into the appearance of the hero and is represented by a horseman. The horse stumbles under the serpent.

Connection with the mountains

The snake lives in the mountains. Such a location does not prevent him from being a sea monster at the same time. Sometimes he lives on the mountains, but when the hero approaches him, he comes out of the water.

Snake Snatcher

He kidnaps women with lightning speed and unexpectedly.

Ritual absorption and coughing up

Fight => chase => attempt to swallow the hero

· The hero finds diamonds in the snake’s stomach or head,

· The girl in the fairy tale is placed in a glass coffin.

· The crunch of the mountain in which the snake lives.

· The princess sits on a glass tower.

The center of gravity of heroism shifts from absorption to killing. With the advent of cattle breeding and agriculture, this process ends.

Myths

In Greek myth, there is no kidnapping of a girl by a dragon. This idea could live among the people without being attested in Greek literature, through which we know the myth.

Functionally, he is close to the snake of our fairy tale. He has 3 dog heads, poisonous resin drips from his mouth, and he has a snake tail with which he stings

The fairy tale reflects all stages of development, starting from the more ancient ones, like acquiring knowledge of a bird’s language through a snake, and transitional ones, like carrying a fish in the stomach to foreign lands.

Far away.

Everything connected with the distant state can take on a golden color (golden palace). Pig - golden bristles, duck - golden feathers, golden-horned deer, golden-tailed deer, golden-maned and golden-tailed horse, etc.

3 kingdoms

A fairy tale about how the hero on his way finds himself in the kingdom of copper, silver and gold. Copper and silver are the passing stages, gold is the arrival stage.

There is no uniformity. There is diversity.

They live in a palace, reminding us of the animal-like inhabitants of the “big house”. In the next world people are snakes, lions, bears, mice. Those. animals in the totemic sense.

Sometimes the princess is depicted as a hero, a warrior; she is skilled in shooting and running, rides a horse, and enmity towards the groom can take the form of open competition with the hero.

2 types of bride:

· One is freed by the hero from the snake, he is her savior. This is the type of meek bride.

· Another was taken by force. She is kidnapped or taken against her will by a cunning man who has solved her problems and mysteries.

· The hero is shown that he must search, go there and return or die.

· Get the golden branch

Palace, garden, bridge. The task itself of building a palace is incomprehensible. The motif of the golden palace, from the thirtieth kingdom, and the golden one are one and the same palace. The garden is mysterious and beautiful. A bridge is a barrier, an obstacle.

Bathhouse test

The task is to sit in a hot bath. This challenge may involve a food challenge.

Competitions

Usually before the wedding

· On the strength and dexterity of the hero

· Running, shooting

The wedding night

Often this is where the fairy tale ends. Sometimes all the villagers mysteriously die on the first night. Fear of the wedding night is fear of the not yet established power of the Tsar-Maiden.

Fairy tale as a whole

Development proceeds through layering, replacement, reinterpretation, and on the other hand, through new formation.

Fairy tale as a genre

The plot and composition of a fairy tale are determined by the tribal system at that stage of its development. The tale has passed on from earlier eras

Folklore, and in particular fairy tales, is not only uniform, but despite its uniformity it is extremely rich and diverse.

Preface

The proposed work is provided with an introductory chapter, and therefore the preface can be limited to some technical remarks.

The book often contains references to fairy tales or excerpts from them. These excerpts should be considered as illustrations and not as evidence. Behind the example lies a more or less common phenomenon. When analyzing the phenomenon, one should give not one or two illustrations, but all available cases. However, this would reduce the book to an index that would be larger than the entire work. This difficulty could be circumvented by reference to existing indexes of plots or motifs. However, on the one hand, the distribution of fairy tales by plots and plots by motives, adopted in these indexes, is often very arbitrary, on the other hand, references to fairy tales appear several hundred times in the book, and it would be necessary to give references to the indexes several hundred times . All this forced me to abandon the tradition of giving a type number for every plot. The reader will understand that the materials provided are samples.

The same applies to examples from the field of customs, rituals, cults, etc. All the given facts are nothing more than examples, the number of which could be arbitrarily increased or decreased, the given examples could be replaced by others. Thus, the book does not report any new facts, only the connection established between them is new, and it is the center of gravity of the entire book.

It is necessary to make another reservation regarding the method of presentation. The motifs of a fairy tale are so closely related to each other that, as a rule, not a single motif can be understood in isolation. It has to be presented in parts. Therefore, at the beginning of the book there are often references to what will still be developed, and from the second half to what has already been stated above.

The book is one whole and should not be read from the middle for reference on individual topics.

In this book the reader will not find an analysis of many of the motives that he has the right to look for in such work. Much did not fit in it. The emphasis is on the analysis of the main, most important fairy-tale images and motifs, the rest has been partly published before and is not repeated here, and partly, perhaps, will appear in the form of separate essays in the future.

The work came out of the Leningrad Order of Lenin State University. Many of my workmates supported me, willingly sharing their knowledge and experience. I especially owe a lot to the corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, prof. Ivan Ivanovich Tolstoy, who gave me valuable instructions both on the ancient material I used and on general issues of the work. I offer him my deepest and sincere gratitude.

Chapter I. Background

1. Main question.

What does it mean to specifically research a fairy tale, where to start? If we limit ourselves to comparing fairy tales with each other, we will remain within the framework of comparativism. We want to expand the scope of our study and find the historical basis that brought the fairy tale to life. This is the task of studying the historical roots of a fairy tale, formulated so far in the most general terms.

At first glance, it seems that there is nothing new in the formulation of this problem. Historically, there have been attempts to study folklore before. Russian folkloristics knew a whole historical school headed by Vsevolod Miller. Thus, Speransky says in his course on Russian oral literature: “When studying the epic, we try to guess the historical fact that underlies it, and, starting from this assumption, we prove the identity of the plot of the epic with some event known to us or their circle "(Speransky 222). We will neither guess historical facts nor prove their identity with folklore. For us, the question is fundamentally different. We want to explore what phenomena (not events) of the historical past the Russian fairy tale corresponds to and to what extent it actually conditions and causes it. In other words, our goal is to find out the sources of the fairy tale in historical reality. The study of the genesis of a phenomenon is not yet the study of the history of this phenomenon. The study of history cannot be carried out immediately - it is a matter of many years, the work of more than one person, it is a matter of generations, a matter of the Marxist folkloristics that is emerging in our country. The study of genesis is the first step in this direction. This is the main question posed in this work.

2. The meaning of premises.

Each researcher proceeds from some prerequisites that he has before he starts work. Veselovsky, back in 1873, pointed out the need, first of all, to understand one’s positions and to be critical of one’s method (Veselovsky 1938, 83-128). Using the example of Gubernatis's book "Zoological Mythology", Veselovsky showed how the lack of self-examination leads to false conclusions, despite all the erudition and combinatorial abilities of the author of the work.

Here we should give a critical outline of the history of the study of fairy tales. We won't do this. The history of the study of the fairy tale has been outlined more than once, and we do not need to list the works. But if we ask ourselves why there are still no completely solid and universally accepted results, we will see that this often happens precisely because the authors proceed from false premises.

The so-called mythological school proceeded from the premise that the external similarity of two phenomena, their external analogy testifies to their historical connection. Thus, if the hero grows by leaps and bounds, then the hero’s rapid growth supposedly responds to the rapid growth of the sun rising on the horizon (Frobenius 1898, 242). Firstly, however, the sun does not increase for the eyes, but decreases, and secondly, an analogy is not the same as a historical connection.

One of the premises of the so-called Finnish school was the assumption that the forms that occur more often than others are also inherent in the original form of the plot. Not to mention the fact that the theory of plot archetypes itself requires proof, we will have occasion to repeatedly see that the most archaic forms are very rare, and that they are often replaced by new ones that have become widespread (Nikiforov 1926).

There are a lot of such examples that can be cited, and in most cases it is not at all difficult to find out the fallacy of the premises. The question arises: why didn’t the authors themselves see their mistakes, which were so clear to us? We will not blame them for these mistakes - the greatest scientists made them; the fact is that they often could not think differently, that their thoughts were determined by the era in which they lived and the class to which they belonged. In most cases, the question of prerequisites was not even raised, and the voice of the brilliant Veselovsky, who himself repeatedly revised his premises and retrained himself, remained a voice crying in the wilderness.

For us, this implies that we need to carefully check our premises before starting the study.

3. Isolation of fairy tales.

We want to find and explore the historical roots of a fairy tale. What is thought of as historical roots will be discussed below. Before doing this, it is necessary to define the term “fairy tale”. The fairy tale is so rich and varied that it is impossible to study the entire phenomenon of the fairy tale in its entirety and among all peoples. Therefore the material must be limited, and I limit it to fairy tales. This means that I have the premise that there are some special fairy tales that can be called magical. Indeed, I have such a premise. By fairy tales I will understand those fairy tales whose structure I studied in “Morphology of Fairy Tales.” In this book, the fairy tale genre is highlighted quite accurately. Here we will study the genre of fairy tales that begins with the infliction of some kind of damage or harm (kidnapping, exile, etc.) or with the desire to have something (the king sends his son for the firebird) and develops through the hero’s departure from home, meeting with a donor who gives him a magical remedy or an assistant with the help of which the object of the search is found. In the future, the fairy tale gives a duel with the enemy (its most important form is snake fighting), return and pursuit. Often this composition gives a complication. The hero is already returning home, his brothers throw him into the abyss. Subsequently, he arrives again, is tested through difficult tasks and becomes king and marries either in his kingdom or in the kingdom of his father-in-law. This is a brief schematic presentation of the compositional core that underlies so many and varied subjects. Fairy tales that reflect this scheme will be called fairy tales here, and they form the subject of our study.

So, the first premise says: among fairy tales there is a special category of fairy tales, usually called fairy tales. These tales can be isolated from others and studied independently. The very fact of isolation may raise doubts. Isn't the principle of connection in which we must study phenomena violated here? However, in the end, all the phenomena of the world are interconnected, meanwhile, science always distinguishes the phenomena that are subject to its study from among other phenomena. It's all about where and how the border is drawn.

Although fairy tales form part of folklore, they do not represent a part that would be inseparable from this whole. They are not like a hand in relation to a body or a leaf in relation to a tree. They, being a part, at the same time constitute something whole and are taken here as a whole.

Studying the structure of fairy tales shows the close relationship of these tales with each other. The kinship is so close that it is impossible to accurately distinguish one plot from another. This leads to two further, very important premises. Firstly:

not a single plot of a fairy tale can be studied without the other, and secondly: not a single motif of a fairy tale can be studied without its relationship to the whole.

This puts the work on a fundamentally new path.

Until now, the work was usually carried out like this: one particular motif or one particular plot was taken, all the recorded options were collected if possible, and then conclusions were drawn from the comparison and comparison of materials. Thus, Polivka studied the formula “it smells of the Russian spirit,” Radermacher studied the motif about those swallowed and vomited by a whale, Baumgarten studied the motif about those sold to the devil (“give back what you don’t know at home”), etc. (Polivka 1924, 1-4 ; Radermacher 1906; Baumgarten 1915). The authors do not come to any conclusions and refuse to draw any conclusions.

Individual plots are studied in the same way. Thus, Mackensen studied the tale of the singing bone, Liljeblad - of the grateful dead, etc. (Mackensen 1923; Liljeblad 1927) There are quite a lot of such studies, they have greatly advanced our knowledge of the prevalence and life of individual plots, but questions of origin in these works have not been resolved. Therefore, for now, we completely abandon the plot-by-plot study of the fairy tale. For us, a fairy tale is something whole; all its plots are interconnected and conditioned. This also makes it impossible to study the motive in isolation. If Polivka had collected not only all the varieties of the formula “it smells like the Russian spirit,” but had asked himself the question of who makes this exclamation, under what conditions it is issued, who is greeted with this exclamation, etc., that is, if he studied it in connection with the whole, it is very possible that he would come to the right conclusion. The motive can be studied only in the plot system; plots can only be studied in their connections relative to each other.

4. A fairy tale as a phenomenon of a superstructural nature.

These are the premises gleaned from a preliminary study of the structure of a fairy tale. But the matter does not stop there.

It was stated above that the premises from which the authors proceed are often a product of the era in which the researcher lived.

We live in the era of socialism. Our era has also developed its own prerequisites on the basis of which it is necessary to study the phenomena of spiritual culture. But unlike the preconditions of other eras that lead the humanities to a dead end, our era has created the preconditions that lead the humanities to the only correct path.

The premise in question here is a general premise for the study of historical phenomena: “The method of production of material life determines the social, political and spiritual processes of life in general” (Marx, Engels 13; 7). From this it follows quite clearly that we must find in the past the mode of production that determines the fairy tale.

What was this method of production? A very cursory acquaintance with a fairy tale is enough to say that, for example, capitalism does not condition a fairy tale. This, of course, does not mean that the capitalist mode of production is not reflected in the fairy tale. On the contrary, here we will find a cruel factory owner, a greedy priest, an officer-secun ("sec-major"), an enslaving master, a runaway soldier, and a poor, drunken and ruined peasantry. Here it must be emphasized that we are talking specifically about magical, and not novelistic fairy tales. The real fairy tale with winged horses, fiery snakes, fantastic kings and princesses, etc. is clearly not caused by capitalism, it is clearly older than it. Without wasting unnecessary words, let's say that a fairy tale is older than feudalism - this will be clear from the entire course of the study.

However, what happened? It turned out that the fairy tale does not correspond to the form of production in which it widely and firmly exists. We will also find an explanation for this discrepancy in Marx. “With a change in the economic basis, a revolution occurs more or less quickly in the entire enormous superstructure” (ibid.). The words "more or less quickly" are very important. A change in ideology does not always occur immediately after a change in economic fundamentals. The result is a “discrepancy” that is extremely interesting and valuable for the researcher. It means that the fairy tale was created on the basis of pre-capitalist forms of production and social life, and which ones exactly should be investigated.

Let us remember that it was precisely this kind of discrepancy that allowed Engels to shed light on the origins of the family. Quoting Morgan and referring to Marx, Engels writes in “The Origin of the Family”: “The family,” says Morgan, “is an active principle; it never remains unchanged, but moves from a lower to a higher form as society develops from a lower to a higher stage. In contrast, kinship systems are passive; only at long intervals do they register the progress made by the family during this time, and undergo radical changes only when the family has already radically changed." "And in exactly the same way," adds Marx, "the situation is with political, legal, religious , philosophical systems in general" (21, 36). Let us add that the situation is exactly the same with a fairy tale.

So, the emergence of a fairy tale is not connected with the production basis on which it began to be written down from the beginning of the 19th century. This leads us to the next premise, which for now is formulated in a very general form: the fairy tale must be compared with the historical reality of the past and its roots must be sought in it.

Such a premise contains an unexplored concept of the “historical past.” If the historical past of the pony/is given as Vsevolod Miller understood it, then it is very possible that we will come to the same thing that he came to, arguing, for example, that the snake-fighting of Dobrynya Nikitich developed on the basis of the historical fact of the baptism of Novgorod.

We, therefore, need to decipher the concept of the historical past, determine what exactly from this past is necessary to explain the fairy tale.

5. Fairy tale and social institutions of the past.

If a fairy tale is considered as a product that arose on a known production basis, then it is clear that it is necessary to consider what forms of production are reflected in it.

Very little and rarely is produced directly in the fairy tale. Agriculture plays a minimal role, hunting is more widely reflected. They usually plow and sow only at the beginning of the story. The beginning is the easiest to change. In the subsequent narrative, archers, royal or free hunters, play a large role, and all kinds of forest animals play a large role.

However, the study of forms of production in a fairy tale only from the side of its object or technique advances us little in the study of the sources of the fairy tale. What is important is not the production technique as such, but the social system corresponding to it. This is how we get the first clarification of the concept of the historical past in relation to the fairy tale. The whole study comes down to determining under what social system the individual motives and the entire fairy tale were created.

But “system” is a very general concept. We need to take specific manifestations of this system. One such manifestation of a system is the institutions of this system. Thus, one cannot compare a fairy tale with the tribal system, but one can compare some motifs of the fairy tale with the institutions of the tribal system, since they are reflected in it or conditioned by it. From this follows the premise that the fairy tale must be compared with the social institutions of the past and its roots must be sought in it. This introduces further clarification into the concept of the historical past, in which the origin of the fairy tale must be sought. So, for example, we see that the fairy tale contains different forms of marriage than now. The hero is looking for a bride in the distance, and not at home. It is possible that the phenomena of exogamy are reflected here: obviously, for some reason the bride cannot be taken from one’s own environment. Therefore, the forms of marriage in a fairy tale must be examined and the system, that stage or phase or stage of social development in which these forms actually existed must be found. Further, for example, we see that the hero very often reigns. Whose throne does the hero occupy? It turns out that the hero takes the throne not of his father, but of his father-in-law, whom he very often kills. Here the question arises about what forms of succession of power are reflected in the fairy tale. In short, we proceed from the premise that the fairy tale has preserved traces of vanished forms of social life, that these remains need to be studied, and that such study will reveal the sources of many of the fairy tale's motifs.

But that's not all, of course. Many motifs in the tale, however, are explained by the fact that they reflect institutions that once existed, but there are motifs that are not directly related to any institutions. Therefore, this area is not enough as a material for comparison. Not everything is explained by the presence of certain institutions.

6. Fairy tale and ritual.

It has long been noted that fairy tales have some connection with the area of cults, with religion. Strictly speaking, a cult, a religion, can also be called an institution. However, just as the system is manifested in institutions, the institution of religion is manifested in certain cultic actions; each such action can no longer be called an institution, and the connection between the fairy tale and religion can be isolated into a special issue arising from the connection between the fairy tale and social institutions. Engels in Anti-Dühring quite accurately formulated the essence of religion. “But every religion is nothing more than a fantastic reflection in the heads of people of those external forces that dominate them in their everyday life - a reflection in which earthly forces take the form of unearthly ones. At the beginning of history, the objects of this reflection are, first of all, forces of nature... But soon, along with the forces of nature, social forces also come into play - forces that confront man as just as... inexplicable to him as the forces of nature... Fantastic images, in which initially reflected only the mysterious forces of nature, now also acquire social attributes and become representatives of historical forces" (328-329).

But just as a fairy tale cannot be compared with any social system in general, it cannot be compared with religion in general, but must be compared with specific manifestations of this religion. Engels establishes that religion is a reflection of the forces of nature and social forces. This reflection can be twofold: it can be cognitive and result in dogmas or teachings, it is manifested in ways of explaining the world, or it can be volitional and result in acts or actions aimed at influencing nature and subjugating it. We will call such actions rituals and customs.

Rite and custom are not the same thing. So, if people are buried by burning, then this is a custom, not a ritual. But custom is surrounded by rituals, and it is methodologically incorrect to separate them.

The fairy tale has preserved traces of many rituals and customs: many motifs receive their genetic explanation only through comparison with rituals. For example, the fairy tale says that a girl buries the bones of a cow in the garden and waters them with water (Aph. 100). There really was such a custom or ritual. For some reason, animal bones were not eaten or destroyed, but buried (Propp 1934). If we could show what motives go back to such rituals, then the origin of these motives would, to a certain extent, already be explained. It is necessary to systematically study this connection between fairy tales and rituals.

Such a comparison may turn out to be much more difficult than it seems at first glance. A fairy tale is not a chronicle. Between a fairy tale and a ritual there are various forms of relations, various forms of connection, and these forms should be briefly considered.

7. Direct correspondence between fairy tale and ritual.

The simplest case is the complete collapse of ritual and custom with a fairy tale. This case is rare. So, in a fairy tale they bury bones, and in historical reality this is also how they did it. Or: the fairy tale says that the royal children are locked in a dungeon, kept in the dark, food is served to them so that no one can see it, and in historical reality this is also how it was done. Finding these parallels is extremely important for the folklorist. These correspondences need to be developed, and then it may often turn out that a given motif goes back to one or another rite or custom, and its genesis can be explained.

8. Rethinking the ritual with a fairy tale

But, as already indicated, such a direct correspondence between a fairy tale and a ritual does not occur so often. More often there is another relationship, another phenomenon, a phenomenon that can be called a rethinking of the ritual. Reinterpretation here will be understood as the replacement by a fairy tale of one element (or several elements) of a ritual that has become unnecessary or incomprehensible due to historical changes with another, more understandable one. Thus, rethinking is usually associated with deformation, with a change in form. Most often, the motivation changes, but other components of the ritual may also change. So, for example, the fairy tale tells that the hero sews himself into the skin of a cow or horse in order to get out of the pit or get into the thirtieth kingdom. He is then picked up by a bird and carries the skin along with the hero to that mountain or beyond the sea where the hero cannot otherwise get. How can we explain the origin of this motif? There is a well-known custom of sewing dead people into the skin. Does this motive go back to this custom or not? A systematic study of this custom and the fairy tale motif shows their undoubted connection: the coincidence is complete, not only in external forms, but also in internal content, in the meaning of this motif in the course of action and in the meaning of this ritual in the historical past (see below, Chap. VI, § 3), with one exception, however: in a fairy tale he sews himself alive into the skin, in the ritual they sew up a dead man. This discrepancy is a very simple case of rethinking: in custom, sewing into a skin ensured that the deceased would enter the kingdom of the dead, but in a fairy tale it ensures that he would enter the thirtieth kingdom.

The term “rethinking” is convenient in the sense that it indicates the process of change that has taken place; the fact of rethinking proves that some changes have occurred in the life of the people, and these changes entail a change in motive. These changes must in any individual case be shown and explained.

We have given a very simple and clear case of rethinking. In many cases the original base is so obscured that it is not always possible to find it.

9. Conversion rite.

We should consider a special case of rethinking to be the preservation of all forms of ritual while giving it an opposite meaning or meaning, a reverse interpretation, in a fairy tale. We will call such cases conversion. Let us explain our observation with examples. There was a custom of killing old people. But the fairy tale tells how the old man was supposed to be killed, but he is not killed. The one who spared the old man, if this custom existed, would have been ridiculed, and perhaps scolded or even punished. In a fairy tale, the one who spared the old man is a hero who acted wisely. There was a custom to sacrifice a girl to the river, on which fertility depended. This was done at the beginning of sowing and was supposed to promote plant growth. But in the fairy tale, the hero appears and frees the girl from the monster to whom she was brought to be devoured. In fact, in the era of the ritual, such a “liberator” would have been torn to pieces as the greatest wicked person, endangering the well-being of the people, endangering the harvest. These facts show that the plot sometimes arises from a negative attitude towards the once former historical reality. Such a plot (or motive) could not yet arise as a fairy tale, when there was a way of life that required the sacrifice of girls. But with the fall of this way of life, the custom that was once revered as sacred, the custom in which the hero was the victim girl, who sometimes even voluntarily went to her death, became unnecessary and disgusting, and the hero of the fairy tale is already the wicked one who prevented this sacrifice. This is a fundamentally very important establishment. It shows that the plot does not arise through evolutionary direct reflection of reality, but through the denial of this reality. The plot corresponds to reality in contrast. This confirms the words of V.I. Lenin, who contrasted the concept of evolutionary development with the concept of development as a unity of opposites. “Only the second gives the key to the “self-movement” of all things; only it gives the key to “leaps”, to the “break of gradualism”, to the “transformation into the opposite”, to the “destruction of the old and the emergence of the new”” (Lenin collection, vol. XII , p. 324).

All these considerations and preliminary observations force us to put forward one more premise: the fairy tale must be compared with rituals and customs in order to determine which motives go back to certain rituals and in what relation they are to them.

One difficulty arises here. The fact is that ritual, having arisen as a means of fighting nature, later, when rational ways of fighting nature and influencing it are found, still does not die out, but is also rethought. Thus, it may turn out that the folklorist, having reduced the motive to the ritual, will find that the motive goes back to a reinterpreted ritual, and will be faced with the need to explain the ritual as well. There may be cases where the original basis of the ritual is so obscure that this ritual requires special study. But this is no longer the job of the folklorist, but of the ethnographer. A folklorist has the right, having established a connection between a fairy tale and a ritual, in other cases to refuse to study the ritual as well - this would take him too far.

There is another difficulty. Both ritual life and folklore are composed of literally thousands of different details. Is it necessary to look for economic reasons for every detail? Engels says in this regard: “... the low economic development of the prehistoric period has, as an addition, and sometimes as a condition and even as a cause, false ideas about nature. And although economic need was and over time increasingly became the mainspring of progress in the knowledge of nature, it would still be pedantry if anyone tried to find economic reasons for all this primitive nonsense" (Marx, Engels XXXVII, 419). These words are clear enough. In this regard, it is also necessary to add the following: if we bring the same motive to the level of a tribal society, to the level of a slave system such as ancient Egypt, antiquity, etc. (and such comparisons have to be made very often), and we establish the evolution of the motive , then we do not consider it necessary to especially emphasize every time that the motive has changed not due to evolution from within, but due to the fact that it finds itself in a new historical situation. We will try to avoid the danger not only of pedantry, but also of schematism.

But let's return to the ritual. As a rule, if a connection is established between a ritual and a fairy tale, then the ritual serves as an explanation of the corresponding motif in the fairy tale. With a narrowly schematic approach, this should always be the case. In fact, sometimes it's just the opposite. It happens that, although a fairy tale goes back to a ritual, the ritual is completely unclear, and the fairy tale has preserved the past so completely, faithfully and well that a ritual or other phenomenon of the past only receives its real illumination through a fairy tale. In other words, there may be cases when a fairy tale from the phenomenon being explained, upon closer study, turns out to be an explanatory phenomenon; it can be a source for studying the ritual. “Folklore tales of the diverse Siberian population served us as perhaps the most important source for the reconstruction of ancient totemic beliefs,” says D.K. Zelenin (Zelenin 1936, 232). Ethnographers often refer to the fairy tale, but do not always know it. This is especially true for Fraser. The grand edifice of his Golden Bough rests on premises drawn from a fairy tale, and a misunderstood and insufficiently studied fairy tale at that. An accurate study of the tale will make it possible to make a number of amendments to this work and even shake its foundations.

10. Fairy tale and myth.

But if we consider ritual as one of the manifestations of religion, then we cannot ignore another manifestation of it, namely, myth. There is a huge literature on the relationship of fairy tales to myth, which we will completely ignore here. Our goals are not directly polemical. In most cases, the distinction is made purely formally. When we begin our research, we do not yet know what the relationship of a fairy tale to myth is - here, for now, there is a requirement to investigate this issue, to involve myth as one of the possible sources of a fairy tale.

The variety of available interpretations and understandings of the concept of myth forces us to define this concept precisely. Myth here will be understood as a story about deities or divine beings in whose reality people believe. The point here is about faith not as a psychological factor, but as a historical one. The stories about Hercules are very close to our fairy tale. But Hercules was a deity to whom cult was given. Our hero, who sets out, like Hercules, for the golden apples, is the hero of a work of art. Myth and fairy tale differ not in their form, but in their social function (Tronsky 1934).

The social function of myth is also not always the same and depends on the degree of culture of the people. The myths of peoples who have not reached statehood in their development are one phenomenon, the myths of ancient cultural states known to us through the literature of these peoples are a different phenomenon. A myth cannot be formally distinguished from a fairy tale. A fairy tale and a myth (especially the myths of pre-class peoples) can sometimes coincide so completely with each other that in ethnography and folkloristics such myths are often called fairy tales. There was even a certain fashion for “primitive tales,” and there are a lot of such collections, both scientific and popular. Meanwhile, if you examine not only the texts, but also the social function of these texts, then most of them will have to be considered not fairy tales, but myths. Modern bourgeois folkloristics completely ignores the enormous significance inherent in these myths. They are collected, but are hardly studied by folklorists. Thus, in the index of Bolte and Polivka, “primitive tales” occupy a very modest place. Such myths are not “variants”, but products of earlier stages of economic development, which have not yet lost touch with their production base. What is reinterpreted in modern European fairy tales is often contained here in its original form. Thus, these myths often provide the key to understanding a fairy tale.

True, there are researchers who feel this meaning and even talk about it, but things have not gone beyond declarations. The fundamental significance of these myths is not understood, and it is not understood precisely because researchers take a formal rather than a historical point of view. These myths as a historical phenomenon are ignored, but special cases of inverse dependence, the dependence of the folklore of “wild” peoples on “cultural” ones, have been noticed and studied. Only in very recent times has the idea of the social significance of myth begun to be expressed in bourgeois science; a close connection has begun to be established between the word, myths, and sacred stories of a tribe, on the one hand, and its ritual actions, moral actions, social organization, and even practical actions, on the other. sides. However, there is usually no talk of extending this position to European fairy tales; this idea is too bold.

Unfortunately, however, the recording of such myths is in most cases less than satisfactory. Only texts are given, and nothing else. Often the publisher does not even say whether he knew the language, whether he wrote it down directly or through a translator. Even in the records of such a major researcher as Boas, there are texts that are undoubtedly paraphrases, but nowhere is this stated. But for us, the smallest details are important, in particular, shades, often even the tone of the story is important... The situation is even worse when the natives tell their myths in English. This is how Kroeber sometimes wrote it down. His collection "Gros Ventre Myths and Tales" contains 50 texts, of which 48 texts were told in English, which we learn in the middle of the book from a footnote as a very minor and unimportant circumstance (Kroeber I; III pt).

We said above that myth has social meaning; but this meaning is not the same everywhere. The difference between ancient myths and Polynesian ones is obvious to everyone. But even within pre-class peoples, this meaning and its degree are also not the same; they cannot be thrown into the same pot. In this regard, we can talk about the differences in the myths of individual countries and peoples depending on the degree of their culture.

The most valuable and important for us turned out to be not European or Asian materials, as one might think from their territorial proximity, but American materials, partly Oceanian and African. The Asian peoples as a whole are already at a higher level of culture than the peoples of America and Oceania were at the moment when Europeans found them and began collecting ethnographic and folklore materials; secondly, Asia is the most ancient cultural continent, a cauldron in which streams of peoples moved, mixed and displaced each other. In the space of this continent we have all stages of culture from the almost primitive Ainu to the Chinese who reached the highest cultural peaks, and now the socialist culture of the USSR. Therefore, in Asian materials we have a mixture that makes research extremely difficult. The Yakuts, for example, tell the tale of Ilya Muromets along with their probably primordial Yakut myths. Vogul folklore mentions horses that the Voguls do not know (Chernetsov). These examples show how easy it is to make a mistake here, to mistake what has come and is alien for the original. And since it is important for us to study the phenomenon not in itself, not the texts, but it is important to study the connection of the myth with the soil on which it arose, here lies the greatest danger for the folklorist. He may take, for example, a phenomenon that came from India as a primitive hunting phenomenon, since it is found among these hunters.

This applies to a lesser extent to Africa. Here, however, there are also peoples at a very low level of development, like the Bushmen, and pastoral peoples, like the Zulus, and agricultural peoples, peoples who already know blacksmithing. But still, mutual cultural influences are less strong here than in Asia. Unfortunately, African material is sometimes recorded no better than American material. The Americans themselves still live in close proximity to the Indians, while Africa is studied by newcomers, colonialists and missionaries - the French, English, Dutch, Germans, who even less bother to learn the language, and if they study, it is not for the purpose of recording folklore. One of the largest researchers of Africa, Frobenius, does not know African languages, which does not prevent him from publishing African materials en masse, without specifying how he obtained them, which, of course, forces him to treat them very critically.

True, America is not at all free from outside influences, but nevertheless, it was American materials that provided what materials on other continents sometimes do not provide.

Such is the significance of the myths of primitive peoples for the study of fairy tales, and such are the difficulties encountered in their study.

A completely different phenomenon is represented by the myths of Greco-Roman antiquity, Babylon, Egypt, partly India, and China. We know the myths of these peoples not directly from their creators, who were the lower classes, but we know them through the refraction of writing. We know them through the poems of Homer, through the tragedies of Sophocles, through Virgil, Ovid, etc. Wilamowitz is trying to deny Greek literature any connection with the people (Wilamowitz-Moellendorf). Greek literature is supposedly as unsuitable for the study of folk stories as the Nibelungs of Hebbel, Geibel or Wagner are for the study of the real Nibelungs. This point of view, which denies the nationality of ancient myth, paves the way for reactionary theories and attitudes. We will recognize the genuine nationality behind these myths, but we must remember that we do not have them in their pure form, and that they cannot be equated with records of folklore materials from the lips of the people. The situation is approximately the same with the myths of Egypt. We also don't know them first hand. The ideas of the Egyptians are known to us through tombstone inscriptions, through the Book of the Dead, etc. We mostly know only the official religion, cultivated by the priests for political purposes and approved by the court or nobility. But the lower classes could have different ideas, other, so to speak, plots than the official cult, and we know very little about these popular ideas. Nevertheless, the myths of the cultural peoples of antiquity must be included in the scope of research. But while the myths of pre-class peoples represent direct sources, here we have indirect sources. They undoubtedly reflect popular ideas, but are not always them in the literal sense of the word. It may turn out that the Russian fairy tale provides more archaic material than the Greek myth.

So, we distinguish between the myths of pre-class formations, which can be considered as a direct source, and the myths transmitted to us by the ruling classes of ancient cultural states, which can serve as indirect evidence of the presence of one or another idea among the corresponding peoples.

Hence the premise that the fairy tale must be compared both with the myths of primitive pre-class peoples and with the myths of the cultural states of antiquity.

This is the last clarification introduced into the concept of the “historical past”, which is used for comparisons and for the study of fairy tales. It is easy to notice that in this past we are not interested in individual events, that is, what is usually understood by “history” and what the so-called “historical school” understood by it.

11. Fairy tale and primitive thinking.

From all that has been said, it is clear that we are looking for the foundations of fairy-tale images and plots in the reality of the past. However, in the fairy tale there are images and situations that clearly do not go back to any immediate reality. Such images include, for example, a winged serpent or a winged horse, a hut on chicken legs, Koschey, etc.

It would be a grave mistake if we take a position of pure empiricism and consider a fairy tale as a kind of chronicle. This mistake is made when, for example, they look for real winged serpents in prehistory and claim that the fairy tale has preserved the memory of them. There were never any winged kites or huts on chicken legs. And yet they too are historical, but they are not historical in themselves, but their emergence is historical, and this is what must be explained.

The dependence of ritual and myth on economic interests is clear. If, for example, they dance to make it rain, then it is clear that this is dictated by the desire to influence nature. Dont clear. here is something else: why they dance for these purposes (and sometimes with live snakes (Warburg), and not do something else. We could understand more quickly if water was poured for these purposes (as is also often done). This would be an example of the use of simile magic, and nothing more. This example shows that the action is caused by economic interests not directly, but in the refraction of a certain thinking, ultimately conditioned by the same thing that determines the action itself. Both myth and ritual are the product of some thinking. It is sometimes very difficult to explain and define these forms of thinking. However, the folklorist needs not only to take it into account, but also to understand what ideas underlie certain motives. Primitive thinking does not know abstractions. It is manifested in actions, in forms of social organization, in folklore , in language. There are cases when a fairy-tale motif is inexplicable by any of the above premises. So, for example, some motifs are based on a different understanding of space, time and set than the one to which we are accustomed.. Hence the conclusion that the forms of the primitive thinking should also be involved to explain the genesis of the fairy tale. This is only indicated here - nothing more. This is another prerequisite for the work. The complexity of this issue is very great. There is no need to enter into a discussion of existing views on primitive thinking. For us, thinking is also, first of all, a historically definable category. This frees us from having to "interpret" myths or rituals or fairy tales. It is not a matter of interpretation, but of reduction to historical reasons. Myth undoubtedly has its own semantics. But there is no absolute, once-for-all semantics. Semantics can only be historical semantics. In this situation, we face a great danger. It is easy to mistake mental reality for everyday reality and vice versa. So, for example, if Baba Yaga threatens to eat the hero, this does not mean that here we certainly have a remnant of cannibalism. The image of the cannibal yaga could have arisen in another way, as a reflection of some mental (and in this sense also historical) rather than real everyday images.

12. Genetics and history.

This work is a genetic study. Genetic research is necessarily and essentially always historical, but it is still not the same as historical research. Genetics sets itself the task of studying the origin of phenomena, history - the study of their development. Genetics precedes history; it paves the way for history. But still, we are not dealing with frozen phenomena, but with processes, that is, with some movement. We take every phenomenon to which a fairy tale is raised and consider it as a process. When, for example, a connection is established between certain motifs of a fairy tale and ideas about death, we take “death” not as an abstract concept, but as a process of ideas about death, outlined in its development. Therefore, the reader can easily get the impression that history or prehistory of individual motifs is being written here. Despite sometimes more or less detailed development of the process, this is still not history. It also happens that the phenomenon to which a fairy tale is raised is very clear in itself, but it is not possible to develop it into a process. These are some very early forms of social life, surprisingly well preserved by the tale (for example, the initiation rite). Their history requires special historical and ethnographic research, and a folklorist cannot always dare to undertake such research. Here, much depends on the insufficient development of these phenomena in ethnography. Therefore, historical development is not always equally deep and wide. Often one has to confine oneself to stating the fact of connection - and nothing more. Some unevenness in historical development is also caused by the unequal share of fairy-tale motifs. The more important, “classical” motifs of the tale are developed in more detail, while others, less important, are shorter and more schematic.

13. Method and material

The principles outlined here seem to be quite simple. In fact, their implementation presents significant difficulties. The difficulty lies primarily in mastering the material. The mistakes researchers often make are that they limit their material to one subject or one culture or other artificially created boundaries. For us these boundaries do not exist. Usener, for example, made this mistake when studying the plot or myth of the Flood only within the confines of ancient material. This does not mean that such issues cannot be addressed within some framework or limits. But one cannot generalize conclusions, as Usener does, one cannot study such questions genetically, only within the framework of one nationality. Folklore is an international phenomenon. But if this is so, then the folklorist finds himself in a very disadvantageous position in comparison with specialists: Indologists, classicists, Egyptologists, etc. They are the complete masters of these areas, while the folklorist only looks into them as a guest or wanderer, so that, having noticed something -What, move on. It is impossible to know essentially all this material. Nevertheless, it is absolutely necessary to expand the scope of folklore research. Here you must take on the risk of errors, annoying misunderstandings, inaccuracies, etc. All this is dangerous, but less dangerous than methodologically incorrect foundations with impeccable mastery of private material. Such expansion is necessary even for the purposes of special studies: they must be returned to in the light of comparative data. There is so much preliminary work on individual cultures, on individual nationalities, that the moment has come when this material must be actually used, even if mastering the material in its entire breadth has turned out to be impossible.

So, from the very beginning I take the point of view that it is possible to begin research even if the material has not been completely exhausted, and this is also one of the prerequisites for this work. I take this point of view not out of sad necessity, but I find that it is possible in principle, and here I disagree with most researchers. The basis for taking this point of view is the observation of the repetition and regularity of folklore material. Here we study repeated elements of a fairy tale, and for us it is not important whether we take into account all 200 or 300 or 5000 variants and versions of each element, each particle of material to be studied. The same applies to rituals, myths, etc. “If we wanted to wait until the material is ready in its pure form for the law,” says Engels, “this would mean suspending intellectual research until then, and only then This alone we would never have received the law" (Marx, Engels 20; 555). All material is divided into material that is subject to explanation - this is, for us, first of all a fairy tale - and into material that contributes to explanation. Everything else is control material. The law becomes clear gradually, and it is not necessarily explained on this rather than on other material. Therefore, a folklorist may not take into account the entire ocean of material, and if the law is true, then it will be true on any material, and not just on the one that is included.

The principle that is put forward here is the opposite of the principle that usually underlies folklore research. Here, usually, first of all, one strives for an exhaustive completeness of the material. But in fact, we see that where the material within the reach is really exhausted, the questions are still solved incorrectly, because the task was formulated incorrectly. Here a different point of view is put forward: first of all, the problem must be correctly posed, and then the right method will lead to the right solution.

14. Fairy tale and post-fairy tale formations.

From all that has been said, it is clear that I consider rituals, myths, forms of primitive thinking and some social institutions to be pre-fairy tale formations, and I think it is possible to explain a fairy tale through them.

But folklore is not limited to fairy tales. There is also a heroic epic related to it in plots and motifs, there is a wide area of all kinds of tales, legends, etc. There is the Mahabharata, there is the Odyssey and Iliad, the Edda, epics, the Nibelungs, etc. All these formations are left, as a rule, aside. They themselves can be explained by a fairy tale, and often go back to it. It happens, however, that something else happens, it happens that the epic has conveyed to our days details and features that a fairy tale does not provide, that no other material provides. So, for example, in “Nibelungen” Siegfried, having killed the serpent, bathes in its blood and acquires invulnerability. This detail is important when studying the serpent; it explains something in his image, but it is not present in the fairy tale. In such cases, in the absence of other material, heroic epic may also be used.

15. Prospects.

The premises from which we proceed are now clear. The main task is also clear. The question is: what prospects does such a comparison open to us? Suppose we found that in a fairy tale children are put in a dungeon, and in historical reality this was also done. Or we found a girl keeping the bones of a dead cow, and in reality this was also done. Can we conclude that in such cases the motif entered the tale from historical reality? It is certainly possible. But wouldn’t that result in a picture of extraordinary mosaic? We do not know this, this question must be investigated. There is still an opinion that the fairy tale absorbed some elements of primitive social and cultural life. We will see that it consists of them. As a result, we will get a picture of the sources of the tale.

The solution to this question will advance us in understanding the fairy tale, but it does not solve another, also unresolved question: why was this told? How did the fairy tale develop as a narrative genre? This question arises naturally when we pose our problem. Therefore, along with the question of where individual motifs came from as components of the plot, we will have to answer the question: where does storytelling come from, where does the fairy tale itself come from?

We will try to answer this question in the last chapter, but the answer to it encounters one difficulty. Only fairy tales are studied here. The act of telling fairy tales is inseparable from the act of telling tales of other genres, such as animal tales. Therefore, until other genres are historically studied, only a preliminary, hypothetical answer with a greater or lesser degree of probability and convincingness can be given to this question.

Essentially, such work can never be considered finished, and this work rather introduces the study of the genesis of the fairy tale, rather than claiming to be its final solution.

The work can be compared to an exploration expedition into as yet unknown lands. We mark deposits, draw schematic maps, but detailed development of each of the deposits should be a matter of the future. The next stage may be the detailed development of individual motifs and plots, but without isolation from the whole. At this stage of our science, it is more important to study the connection between phenomena than to develop in detail each such phenomenon separately.

Finally, one more reservation regarding the material: The study is based on a Russian fairy tale, with special consideration given to the northern fairy tale. It has already been indicated above that the fairy tale is international, and its motives are also largely international. Russian folklore is distinguished by its great diversity, richness, exceptional artistry and good preservation. Therefore, it is completely natural that a Soviet researcher should primarily focus on our native folklore, and not on foreign folklore. The work takes into account all the main types of fairy tales. These types are represented in the world repertoire by both Russian and foreign material. For comparative work, it makes no difference which samples of a given type are taken. Where there is a lack of Russian material, we also attract foreign material. But we would like to emphasize that this work is not a study of a Russian fairy tale (such a task can be posed as a special task after resolving general issues of genetics and requires special research); This work is a work on comparative historical folklore based on Russian material as source material.

Historical roots of fairy tales

Introduction

Under fairy tales Propp V.Ya. understands those fairy tales whose structure he studied in “Morphology of Fairy Tales.”

Fairy tale and image

Fairy tale and myth

Myth and fairy tale differ not in form, but in their social function.

From the very first words of the tale - “In a certain kingdom, in a certain state”... the listener is immediately seized by a special mood, a mood of epic calm.

Isolation of the royal children in a fairy tale

The girl's conclusion:

· Prohibition of cutting hair

· A girl's imprisonment is usually followed by her marriage

· The motif of imprisonment of girls and women was widely used in novelistic literature

Trouble and opposition

Out of adversity and opposition a plot is created. Any trouble is the main application form. The course of action requires that the hero somehow learn about this misfortune.

Types of Yaga

The entire course of development of the tale, and especially the beginning, shows that Yaga has some kind of connection with the kingdom of the dead.

propp fairy tale magic cult

The forest is Yagi's permanent accessory. Moreover, even in those fairy tales where there is no Yaga (“Kosoruchka”), the hero or heroine certainly ends up in the forest.

A hut on chicken legs

The hut in women's fairy tales has some features. The girl, before going to Yaga, goes to see her aunt, who warns her about what she will see in the hut and how to behave.

To get into the hut, the hero must know the word. There are materials that show that he must know the name ("Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves").

The forest is the initial indispensable condition of the ritual, and subsequently the transition to another world. The fairy tale is the last link of this development.

“Give me something to drink and feed”

A constant, typical feature of Yaga: “she feeds and treats the hero.” The hero refuses to speak until he is fed. Food has a special meaning here.

"Mistress of the Forest"

The peculiarity of Yaga’s image is her sharp feminine physiology. She is always a husbandless old woman.

"Yaga Problems"

“Exile and children taken into the forest”

If children were taken away, it was always done by the father or brother. The mother could not, because... the very place where the ritual was performed was forbidden to women.

In fairy tales, taking children into the forest is always a hostile act, although in the future things turn out very well for the exile or the one taken away.

"Stolen Children"

"Severed Finger"

This is a type of self-harm. In a fairy tale, the hero, often in a hut, loses his finger, namely the little finger of his left hand. Losing a finger often occurs in the following situations:

· In Yaga and similar creatures. The finger is cut off to find out if the boy is fat enough.

· The dashing one-eyed man. Here the running hero sticks his finger to some object.

· In the house of robbers. The victim's finger is cut off because of the ring.

"Signs of Death"

"Yaga Furnace"

"Magic Gift"

"Travesty"

Under the way of life that replaced it and turned the sacred and terrible into a half-heroic, half-comic grotesque.

Big house and small hut

Brothers range from 2 to 12, but there are also 25 and 30.

Set table

The hero sees here a different presentation of food than what he is used to.

Robbers

These are brothers. Robbery is the prerogative of the newly initiated, namely the young hero.

Distribution of duties.

This brotherhood has its own very primitive organization. It has an elder who is chosen.

Sister

Birth of a child

· Treatment of children varies

Beauty in the coffin

Everything that was done in the men's house was a secret for the women. Temporary death is a characteristic feature of the rite of passage.

I. Magic Helper

1. Assistants

By putting a magical remedy into the hands of the hero, the fairy tale reaches its peak. From this moment on, the end is already in sight. There is a huge difference between the hero who leaves the house and wanders “wherever his eyes look,” and the hero who leaves the yaga. The hero now firmly moves towards his goal and knows that he will achieve it. He is even inclined to boast a little. For his assistant, his desires are “only service, not service.” In the future, the hero plays a purely passive role. His assistant does everything for him or he acts with the help of a magical means. The assistant takes him to distant lands, kidnaps the princess, solves her problems, beats the snake or the enemy army, and saves him from pursuit. However, he is still a hero. The assistant is an expression of his strength and ability.

The list of assistants available in the repertoire of Russian fairy tales is quite large. Only the most typical ones can be considered here. Consideration of an assistant is inseparable from consideration of magical objects. They act exactly the same. So, the flying carpet, and the eagle, and the horse, and the wolf deliver the hero to another kingdom. Therefore, magical assistants and magical objects are combined into one chapter. All assistants represent one group of characters. We will first consider the individual helpers as they are given in the fairy tale. Along the way, some materials may be used to explain this assistant. Each helper individually, however, does not explain the entire category of helpers. After considering each helper separately, we will consider the entire category and only then will we get a general judgment about the helpers. But this judgment cannot yet be final. We must study all the functions of the assistant, and only then will the picture be complete. We have separated these functions into separate chapters. Thus, delivering the hero to another kingdom, solving the princess’s problems, and fighting the snake are studied separately. The issue is complex and broad and cannot be resolved immediately. Its resolution will be revealed gradually.

2. Transformed Hero

To what has been said, we must also add that in a fairy tale, an assistant can be considered as a personified ability of the hero. In the forest, the hero receives either an animal or the ability to turn into an animal. So, if in one case the hero gets on a horse and rides, and in another case we read: “Ivan, the merchant’s son, had just put the ring on his hand, when he immediately turned around as a horse and ran to the courtyard of Helen the Beautiful” (Aph. 209), then for the course of action these cases play the same role. We are just registering this fact. But he already gives us some explanation why Ivan, despite all his passivity, is still a hero. We have studied the tale enough to establish that the hero who is transformed into an animal is older than the hero who receives the animal. The hero and his assistant are functionally one person. The animal hero has transformed into a hero plus animal.

Among the hero's assistants is an eagle or another bird.

The function of a bird is always only one - it transports the hero to another kingdom. This crossing will occupy us in a special chapter. For now, we will limit ourselves to studying the eagle as such. In the fairy tale about “The Sea King and Vasilisa the Wise” (219), the hero wants to kill the eagle, but it asks to feed him. “You’d better take me with you and feed me for three years” (Aph. 219). “Don’t be sorry to feed me, and feed me for nine months, and I will pay you everything. Give me six cows or six oxen every day for food; although it will be difficult for you, I will pay you everything” (K. 6). The eagle turns out to be extremely demanding and gluttonous, but the hero patiently brings him everything he demands. “The man obeyed, took the eagle into his hut, began to feed it with meat: he would slaughter a sheep, then a calf. The man did not live alone in the house; the family was large - they began to grumble at him that he lived entirely on the eagle” (220).

We see that the eagle is feeding here. Here we have before us a completely historical phenomenon. Among the Siberian peoples, eagles were fed, and fed for a special purpose. “He should be fed until death,” says D.K. Zelenin, “and then buried.” “You should never complain in these cases about the costs associated with feeding the eagle: he will pay a hundredfold. It happened, they say, in the old days that eagles came to people's homes for the winter. In such cases, it happened that the owner fed half of his livestock to the eagle. In the spring, when flying away, the eagle thanked the owners with bows, and in such cases the owners quickly and unusually got rich" (Zelenin 1936, 183).

Here the owner does the same thing that the hero of the fairy tale does: he feeds all the livestock to the eagle. However, the case reported by Zelenin is late. We know that the eagle was not just released, but killed. According to Sternberg, this killing meant the sending away of the eagle. The Ainu killed an eagle and before killing it they addressed the eagle with the following prayer: “O precious deity, oh you divine bird, please heed my words. You do not belong to this world, for your home is where the creator and his golden eagles are... When you will come to him (to your father), say: I lived for a long time among the Ainu, who, like father and mother, raised me,” etc. (Sternberg 1936, 119) This feeding and killing of the eagle is intended to appease the spirit - the owner of the eagles, later - the creator. The meaning of the prayer: “I was kept well, help the people who did this.” The act of killing is an act of sending away.

What do we see in the fairy tale? In the fairy tale, the hero, however, does not kill the eagle. After holding him for three years, he only wants to kill him. “The hunter took a knife and sharpened it on a block. “I’ll go,” he says, “I’ll kill the eagle; He’s not getting healthy, he’s only eating bread for nothing!” (Af. 221). But still he feeds him for another year or two, and then releases him into the wild. The eagle takes him with him to the thirtieth kingdom. They fly away together. The moment of flying away in a fairy tale corresponds to sending away through death in a ritual. In the ritual, the eagle is fed and then sent to its fathers. In the fairy tale, this was reflected as a release to freedom. The eagle flies not to the father of the eagles, but to his “elder sister” and tells her the following: “And you would forever mourn for me and shed burning tears, if only a benefactor had not been found for me - this hunter; he treated me for three years and fed, through him I see the light of God" (Aph. 221), that is, he acts exactly as the Ainu demands this from his eagle in his prayer. The reward really doesn't keep you waiting. "Thank you, man! Here’s gold and silver and a semi-precious stone, take as much as you want!” The man doesn’t take anything, he just asks for a copper casket with copper keys” (220).

This case is interesting because it contains elements of the decomposition of the ritual. He shows that the fairy tale reflects its later stage, as we see in other cases. Feeding the eagle is shown as something that is a burden to the hero, as something unnecessary and meaningless. “The eagle ate so much that it ate all the cattle; the king had neither a sheep nor a cow... The king occupied the cattle everywhere and fed the eagle for a whole year” (219). Or: the merchant “took the eagle bird and carried it home. He immediately killed the bull and poured a full tub of honey: for a long time, he thinks, there will be enough food for the eagle; and the eagle ate and drank everything at once” (224). Thus, the uselessness and incomprehensibility are expressed quite clearly here. The subsequent enrichment is a miracle.

By comparing the feeding of an eagle in a fairy tale and in the cult reality of Siberia, we should explain this reality as well. But we have already pointed out above the feeding of totem animals. Feeding an eagle is a special case of it.

All this gives us the right to the following conclusion: the motive of feeding the eagle was created on the basis of a once existing custom. Historically, feeding is a preparation for the killing of a sacrificial animal, that is, for sending it to its owner in order to arouse the favor of this owner. In the fairy tale, killing is re-interpreted into mercy, into freedom and flying away, and the owner’s favor is translated into the transfer of an object to the hero that gives him power and wealth.

These conclusions were obtained mainly from Siberian materials. Siberian materials on the cult of the eagle are also interesting in other ways: they show the relationship between the owners of the eagle and the assistant eagle. There is a very close connection between the bird and the shaman. In the Gilyak language, the eagle has the same name as the shaman, namely “Cham”. Among the Tunguska shamans of Transbaikalia, the bald eagle is the guardian and patron of the shaman. His image (made of iron) is placed on the shaman’s crown, on the bows between the horns. The Teleuts call the eagle “the bird master of the sky” - it is an indispensable companion and assistant to the shaman. “It is he who, during rituals, accompanies him on his journeys to heaven and the underworld, protecting him from misfortunes along the way, and also assigns sacrificial animals to various deities.” The shaman's vestments feature parts of an eagle: bones, feathers, claws. Finally, the shaman's caftan, according to the views of the Siberian peoples, is an image of a bird. According to this, among the Tungus, Yenisei Ostyaks and many others, the caftan is cut out like a bird and trimmed with a long fringe, symbolizing the wings and feathers of this bird (Sternberg 1936, 121). These materials additionally characterize the coexistence between the hero and his assistant.

4. Winged horse

We now move on to the hero’s other assistant, namely the horse. There is hardly any need to prove that the horse enters human culture and human consciousness later than the animals of the forest. Human communication with forest animals is lost in the historical distance; the domestication of the horse can be traced. With the appearance of the horse, it is necessary to trace one more circumstance. The horse did not appear to replace forest animals, but in completely new economic functions. We can say that a horse appeared to replace a deer, perhaps a dog, but it cannot be said that a horse appeared to replace a bird or a bear, that it took upon itself their economic role, their economic functions.

How was this transition reflected in folklore? We again see that a new form of economy does not immediately create forms of thinking equivalent to it. There is a period when these new forms come into conflict with the old thinking. The new form of economy introduces new images. These new images create a new religion - but not immediately. The name of a horse as a bird occurs in the language, i.e., the transfer of an old word to a new image. The same thing happens in folklore: a horse takes on the image of a bird. This creates the image of a winged horse. “We know now,” says N. Ya. Marr, “that “horse” also meant “bird” in prehistoric times, but “bird” is semantically connected with “sky”, and replace “horse” on earth in human life and material in the setting of pre-history, of course, a bird could not" (Marr 1934, 125; 1922, 133).

The replacement of the bird by the horse appears to be an Asian-European phenomenon. Egypt received the horse late; in America the horse was unknown until the arrival of Europeans (Hermes). But even there the same process can be traced, but it can be traced not on a bird, but on a bear. In the American myth, the owner bear takes the boy underground and invites him to choose a bear, that is, an assistant. The boy chooses a black one for himself. "The master bear began to growl, and suddenly snorted and sprang upon the black bear. He got under it, threw it up, and instead of the bear there stood a magnificent black horse" (Dorsey 1904, 139). This incident clearly shows how a new animal takes over the religious functions of an old one. The horse replaces the bear in the role of a helper, acquired “underground” from the owner of the bears. But this horse still contains features of bear origin. She has a bear skin on her neck, just like our Sivka has bird wings on his sides. In short, assimilation of one animal with another occurs.

It is curious that the appearance of a horse in America creates exactly the same rituals and folklore motifs as in Europe. Anuchin also pointed out this when studying Scythian burials, similar to American ones. If the deceased had a favorite horse, Dorsey establishes, relatives would kill this horse at the grave, thinking that it would carry him to the land of spirits, or they would cut off a few horse hairs and put them in the grave. The hair gave the same power over the horse that it gives in a fairy tale. These cases show the pattern of the appearance of identical ritual and folklore motifs depending on the phenomena of economic and social life. These same cases explain the wingedness of the horse.

5. Feeding the horse

The horse took on not only the attributes (wings), but also the functions of a bird. Like a totem animal, like a fairy-tale eagle, he, no longer being a totem animal, is fed. However, this feeding took on other forms; it was significantly weakened in comparison with the grandiose feeding of the eagle, which eats all the king’s livestock. Feeding a horse gives it magical power, but outwardly assimilates with reality: “Give the mini three dawns to feed on the race” (Aph. 160) - a weak echo of the same request from the eagle and, as we saw above, grateful animals - “feed me for three years” . He fed Beloyarova millet up to three times, and only they saw how it sat down - they didn’t see where it went” (Sk. 112).

Feeding a horse is a special case of feeding wonderful or magical animals. Thus, grateful animals are fed, an eagle, a horse, and, finally, even a snake is fed by an evil princess or sister. The totemic origin of this motif has already been indicated. Feeding a horse shows that it is not just a matter of feeding the animal. Feeding gives the horse magical powers. After feeding “on twelve dews” or “white millet”, he turns from a “lousy foal” into that fiery and strong handsome man that a hero needs. This also gives the horse magical powers. “Ivan began to lead his horse every morning and every evening to the green meadows to pasture, and that’s how the 12 dawns of the morning and the 12 dawns of the evening passed - his horse became so strong, strong and beautiful that you couldn’t imagine it, you couldn’t imagine it, except in a fairy tale. , and so reasonable that only Ivan can think in his mind, and she already knows” (af. 185). These magical qualities caused by feeding are expressed even more sharply in another case: “You feed me oats these days, then I will hide you under my hoof” (See 341). This transformation is artistically expressed by means of contrast: before feeding he is a lousy foal, after feeding he is a stately horse. The image of a mangy foal is a purely fairy-tale formation; a fairy tale loves contrasts: in the same way, it is Ivan the Fool who turns out to be a hero, and Chernavka - a princess. We will look in vain for ritual analogies to the motif that it is a weak or overfed animal that is subjected to feeding of a cult nature.

6. Grave horse

Several studies have been devoted to the horse in the field of religious ideas (Anuchin; Negelein 1901a; 19016; 1903; Stengel; Malten 1914; Radermacher 1916; Howey; Khudyakov 1933). These studies on different materials quite uniformly lead to the fact that in religion the horse was once a funeral animal. We need to establish whether the fairytale horse (which is not attracted by researchers) comes from here, or whether it was created in some completely different way.

The historical consideration here is quite difficult. The predecessors of the horse are other animals. We will search in vain for material in ancient times. The main material is the material of cultural peoples.

We have already seen above that the horse is given to the hero by his deceased father from beyond the grave. There the giving father was the center of attention; here our attention will be drawn to the horse. What is the historical basis for this motif? It is known that horses were buried along with soldiers. “They killed horses and slaves with the intention that these creatures, buried with the deceased, would serve him in the grave as they served during life,” says Fustel de Coulanges. This exactly corresponds to the fabulous “serve him as you served me” (Aph. 179). But what is the service of a horse to the deceased? A horse is a riding animal. Therefore, Negelein is absolutely right when he says: “That the custom of giving the hero a horse with him at death is a consequence of his function as a carrier, bearer or guide to the better, is taught by the analogy with the dog, which is so inevitable for the Eskimo” (Negelein 1901a, 373). The Eskimos give a dog to the grave, the Greeks a horse. But there is one contradiction here: in the fairy tale, the deceased father and his horse do not leave the grave, but remain with the horse right there. Interestingly, the same was true of the beliefs of the Greeks. Wundt is simply mistaken when he says: “The soul of a warrior killed on the battlefield is carried away, according to the beliefs of the Greeks, Romans and Germans, on a swift horse to the Kingdom of Souls” (Wundt 111). It is possible that in some cases this is true, but, as a rule, this is not true for antiquity.

Initially, as we have seen, the deceased did not go anywhere. With the development of spatial concepts, a long journey and a long flight began to be attributed to him. Then, when, with the transition to settled agriculture, the circle of interests is concentrated on the earth, when attachment to one’s land appears, when the cult of ancestors appears, the dead are no longer thought of as having passed away, but as living here in the house, by the hearth, under the threshold, or in the ground, in the grave . The horse remained as an attribute of the deceased in general, although, in fact, it lost its meaning. For example, as Rohde points out, funerary reliefs were found in Boeotia in which the deceased, sitting on or leading a horse, accepts offerings (Rohde 2413). Negelein points out that in general there is a horse on Greek and even later Christian gravestones. “He is an indispensable attribute of heros, that is, at a later time, of a deceased man in general” (Negelein 1901a, 378). Rohde very carefully suggests that the horse here is “a symbol of the deceased entering the world of spirits.”

Malten is more accurate, believing that the dead man in the Hellenic faith appears both in the form of a horse and sitting astride a horse, possessing it. Neither one nor the other says anything about moving on a horse. A comparative study of the material shows that the dead animal has turned into a dead man plus an animal, and this explains the duality that Rohde did not notice, but Malten sees, the dead man is a horse, but he is also the owner of the horse. There is also a contradiction in the fairy tale, but a contradiction of a different nature: the father does not fly on a horse, but the son does. Flight on a horse is an older, pre-agricultural phenomenon; it developed from flight in the form of a bird or on a bird. The father living with the horse in the grave is a later phenomenon, added later; it reflects the cult of ancestors and the grave of an ancestor: the father no longer flies on a horse.

It may also be mentioned here that in some details the tale shows more archaic features than the Greek religion. In a fairy tale, a horse is given by a dead man; in Greek mythology, the donor of a horse is always the gods. So, Athena gives Bellerophon a bridle, with which he tames Pegasus. The father in a fairy tale sometimes does the same thing: he either tells the spell formula, or gives a hair of a horse or its bridle (Aph. 182, 184, 170).

We can limit ourselves to these instructions for now. They show the historicity of the motif of the horse staying with the dead man in the grave, they answer the question posed at the beginning. The horse is represented not only in religions, but also in fairy tales as a funeral animal.

7. Rejected and exchanged horse

In the motif we examined, the horse truly appeared before us as a funeral animal, and the fairy tale confirms the conclusions reached by researchers of the horse in religion. This observation is supported by consideration of the rejected or false horse motive. A horse offered by a living father is no good, while a horse given from beyond the grave is a heroic animal. “Whichever horse hits the rump, he will fall off his feet; out of 500 horses, he did not choose a single horse for himself, and he tells his father that “I, father, did not choose a single horse from you; Now I’ll go into an open field, into green meadows - won’t I choose the horses in the herds?”

The horse that Ivan rides before his departure, an ordinary horse, is not suitable. The yaga also tells him this. That's why the yaga's hero changes his horse very often. “She told him to leave his horse with her and ride on her two-winged horse to her elder sister” (Aph. 171). The second sister exchanged this horse for a four-winged one, and the third sister exchanged it for a six-winged one.

That's why my father's ordinary horse is not suitable. He is an earthly creature, he does not have wings. At the entrance to another world, the hero receives a different horse.

8. Horse in the basement

But what kind of horse is good then? Yaga points out this absolutely precisely: “How come your father doesn’t have a good horse? - There is a good horse, locked behind three doors, and he breaks through the third doors with his hoof” (Af. 175). The horse in his father's stable is no good. Only the horse that is taken from the crypt is suitable. True, the fairy tale never says that this is a crypt. For a fairy tale, this is just a basement or cellar, sometimes even a “state cellar.” But the details leave no doubt that this cellar is a grave. “Go to the cysto field, there are twelve oak trees on it, under these oak trees there is a stone slab. Lift up this slab, and your great-grandfather’s horse will jump out” (Sk. 112). “Under that stone, a basement opened, in the basement there are three heroic horses, and military harness hangs on the walls” (Aph. 137). “The old woman answers: “Come with me.” She led him to the mountain, indicated the place: “Dig up this earth.” Ivan Tsarevich dug... went underground” (Af. 156). “On this mountain there stood an oak tree twenty inches thick, and under this oak tree there was a crypt. In this crypt, behind the doors, stood two stallions” (Head. 143). These are all too obvious signs of a grave. And the hill, and the stone, and the slab, and even the tree indicate that this basement is simply a crypt.

When Ivan goes into this basement, the horse sometimes neighs joyfully towards him. Ivan breaks the doors, the horse breaks the chains. We saw above that the magical remedy was passed down through the female line. The initiate received not some remedy, but a totemic sign of his wife’s clan. There is none of that here anymore. The horse is passed down through the male line. The hero receives a certain horse “not your grandfather, but your great-grandfather.” The joyful neighing of the horse shows that the real, entitled owner of the horse has appeared, his heir has appeared.

Analysis of this motif confirms the conclusion about the sepulchral nature of the fairy-tale horse and complements the picture of the horse’s connection with the ancestors of its owner.

9. Horse suit

In light of these materials, the color of the horse is not indifferent to us. True, the fairy tale names all existing suits. He is gray, and brown, and brown, and red, etc. Such diversity reflects reality, but is partly due to the fact that the image of a horse in a fairy tale is often tripled, and all three horses have a different color. If, however, you look a little closer at this diversity, you will notice the predominance of two colors: gray and red. He is white, even silver, “every hair is a speck of silver” (Af. 138), that is, dazzling white, “blue-white” (See 298). Of the three horses - black, gray and white - the last, that is, the strongest and most beautiful, is white (Yavorsky 312); black, red, gray - Af. 184). On the other hand, of the three horses (gray, black, red - 139), the red horse is often named last. On Russian icons depicting snake fighting, the horse is almost always either completely white or fiery red. In these cases, the color red clearly represents the color of flame, which corresponds to the fiery nature of the horse.

White color is the color of otherworldly beings, as Negelein showed quite clearly in a special work on the meaning of white (Negelein 1901d, 79 ff). White is the color of creatures that have lost their corporeality. That's why ghosts appear white. The horse is like this, and it is no coincidence that he is sometimes called invisible: “In a certain kingdom, in a certain state, there are green meadows, and there is an invisible mare, and she has 12 foals” (See 184). “And he gave the Invisible King an invisible horse” (181). In one case he is called "white-lipped" (298). The formula, “every hair is a piece of silver,” also indicates its white color, indicates the dazzlingness of this color. Hence such expressions as “you can’t even see it, let alone ride it” (Khud. 36).

Wherever the horse plays a cult role, it is always white. “Among the Buryats, the owner of the kingdom of Ule, Nagad-Sagan-Zorin, is depicted as the owner of a white horse with a white hoof” (Zelenin 1936, 218). In the Yakut myth, the serpent mockingly invites the hero to sit “on the posthumous horse.” He mounts “a pure white horse... which has silver wings from the middle of its back, like a bird” (Khudyakov 1890, 142). “A completely white horse” is generally found among the Yakuts (137). The Greeks sacrificed only white horses (Stengel 212). In the Apocalypse, death sits astride a “pale horse” (Malten 1914, 188). In German folk ideas, death is riding on a skinny white nag (211). It is not for nothing that Horace calls death “pale death” (“pallida mors”). Such examples show that suit is not a random, not indifferent phenomenon, and if during statistical calculations it turned out that a gray or white horse does not take first place in frequency of occurrence, then this would not prove anything: the presence of a white, blue horse in a fairy tale and the presence in ideas associated with the afterlife, it forces him to see in this form the most archaic form of the horse, and to recognize the other colors as realistic deformations, especially since this form of the horse fits with the image of the horse as a whole and its connection with the afterlife world.

10. Fiery nature of the horse

Observation of the color shows that the horse is sometimes represented as red, and in the icons depicting George on a horse fighting a snake - red. There is no need to repeat here the details regarding the fiery nature of the horse: sparks fly from the nostrils, fire and smoke pours from the ears, etc. d. We need to explain this phenomenon.

Why and how does the image of a horse merge with the idea of fire? Are there materials that can show how this connection occurred?

We know that the main function of the horse is mediation between the two kingdoms. He takes the hero to the thirtieth kingdom. In beliefs, he often takes the deceased to the land of the dead.

Fire was exactly the same mediator. In the myths of America, Africa, Oceania and Siberia, the hero goes to heaven without any help from animals, only with the help of fire. Let's give a few examples. Among the Yakuts: “Then he dug a hole seven fathoms deep; lit a fire here, burning down seven large trees. He flew up to the top place like a white young hawk” (Khudyakov 1890, 97). So, to ascend to heaven, the hero lights a big fire and ascends to heaven. The most interesting thing is that he turns into a bird. This shows that the old zoomorphic images have not yet been forgotten, that here the old tradition of turning into an animal met with a new factor

The fire factor. But isn’t fire primary here? “People... much later began to see the burning of corpses as a means of going to heaven,”

Says D.K. Zelenin (Zelenin 1936, 257). The hero of a Micronesian myth is trying to get to heaven to join his father. He tries to take off, but he fails. “But he did not abandon his intention, lit a large fire and, with the help of smoke, rose a second time to the sky, where he finally reached the arms of his father” (Frobenius 18986, 116). However, there is no need to dwell on this phenomenon for a long time. Both the burning of corpses and the burning of victims are based on it. So, along with animals, fire was once represented as a mediator between two worlds. When the horse appears, the role of fire is transferred to the horse. An example of this is not only a fairy tale. An example of this is religion. Here, as a historical step to the tale, two phenomena can be pointed out: the combination of the cult of fire with the cult of the horse, of which India provides a classic example, and the role that fire and the horse play in shamanism. The classic country where horses have long been found and from where they probably spread throughout the world was India. Indeed, in the Vedic religion we see the most complete development of the horse-fire in the person of the god Agni. This is how Oldenberg describes the ceremony of lighting the sacred horse: “The senior priest orders one of the subordinate priests: “Bring the horse.” The horse stands near the place where the friction of the fire should take place, so that he looks at the process of friction... There is no doubt that the horse is nothing other than the embodiment of Agni" (Oldenberg 77). Here the horse looks at friction, but in the Vedic hymns it is extracted from flint: “Agni, which was produced as a newborn by the friction of two sticks” (Rigveda). Agni not only in many details, but also in essence, in its main function, coincides with the horse. He is the god-mediator (“messenger”) between the two worlds, taking the dead to heaven in fire. The religion of the Vedas is a very late phenomenon. "Rigveda" is a priestly and theological work, which, however, undoubtedly indirectly reflects popular ideas.

Here it would be useful to point out that the fairytale horse, just like the Vedic fire horse Agni, is made from flint and steel. But the Rig Veda retained the ancient form of flint - two sticks, the fairy tale replaces it with flint of a new formation - flint and steel.

The coincidence between the Vedic Agni and the Russian fairy-tale horse is so complete that comparing them could be the subject of a special work. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, in his work on the cult of fire in the Vedic era, collected several hundred epithets of the fire god Agni (Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky 1887). And although the study of epithets, divorced from the object to which they are attached, can lead to false conclusions, still such epithets as “having a light back”, “with a flaming mouth”, “with a flaming head”, “whose sign is smoke", "with golden hair", "with golden teeth", "with a golden beard", etc., when applied to the fire-horse god, are too close to a fairy tale to be accidental. They are based on the same ideas as the fairy tale.

We will not develop this connection here; that would take us too far. It is enough for us to point out that the fiery horse, the mediator between the two worlds, is present in the religion of the pastoral people who created statehood. The study of Agni makes it possible to explain the nature of the horse. It came out of the fusion of ideas about a horse and fire as intermediaries between two worlds. Of the three principles of the horse - bird, horse and fire - fire is the most recent element, bird is the most ancient.

It has already been said that this role of a mediator between two worlds can be played not only by a deity (this is already a sign of late culture, which is the culture of the Vedic religion), but also by a shaman. The shaman also acts with the help of fire. Sternberg describes the ritual that he himself saw. “If the patient’s demon stubbornly does not want to leave, then the shaman calls upon a special spirit, which turns into a fireball and climbs into the shaman’s belly, and from there into all the most remote parts of his body, so that during the session the shaman releases fire from his mouth, nose, from any part of the body" (Sternberg 1936, 46). This incident shows that releasing fire from the mouth, eyes, ears, etc. is not at all something unique to fairy tales.

The same idea, according to Nansen, is found among the Eskimos. “The sign of shamans is that they breathe fire” (Nansen 252). However, this is usually only done by a black shaman. Nansen compares him with the fire-breathing devil of the Middle Ages and believes that the idea of a fire-breathing shaman developed under European influence, whereas the opposite is true. The fire-breathing devil is the last reflection of the idea of a fire-breathing mediator between the kingdom of the living and the dead. The Yoruba tribe in Africa has the same idea. The hero of the myth, Shango, receives a powerful magical remedy from his father. He eats it. People gather for council. Everyone takes turns speaking. When the hero’s turn comes, “fire began to shoot from his mouth. Everyone was horrified. Then Shango realized that he, like a god, was not subordinate to anyone, stamped his foot and ascended” (Frobenius 18986, 235). Here we have a prototype of the later fiery ascensions, right up to the fiery chariot of the prophet Elijah (Holland). But the horse reveals a connection with shamanism not only from this side, not only as a fire-breathing creature. The shaman often has a horse as an assistant or generally has a connection with it.

Popov describes the ritual of the Yakuts this way (Popov 130). “The shaman enters and, with the help of his assistant, puts on a costume. He is given a bunch of white horse hair, part of which he throws into the fire - this serves as a treat and attracts spirits who are very fond of the smoke of burnt hair.” It should be added that the shaman sits on a white mare's skin. However, what kind of strange taste do spirits have, that they “love the smell of burnt hair,” and why does this “serve as a treat and attract the shaman’s helping spirits?” The fairy tale shows quite clearly that burning hair is a magical means of attracting a spirit, and whether he likes or dislikes this smell, he will be forced to appear. It is enough to “burn” three hairs to summon a horse. This is what the shaman does.

In this case, it is not horses that appear to him, but spirits, about whose appearance nothing is said. But we know that among the shaman’s assistants there are also horses. “In Buryat legends, some deceased shamans are considered to be the owners of a white, piebald or black horse, on which they rode during their lifetime and on which they now visit the environs of their ulus” (Zelenin 1936, 299). The Minusinsk shaman addresses Ongon, called “the patroness of the Teleuts,” with the words: “On a blue-gray horse you came here at noon from the mountains of Kuznetsk.” In the Yakut myth, the devil acts like this: “Then the devil turned his tambourine over, sat on it, hit it three times with his stick, and this tambourine turned into a mare with three legs. Having sat on it, he rode straight to the east” (Khudyakov 1890, 142 ).

11. Horse and stars

Here we need to point out one more feature of the horse’s appearance. He has “frequent stars on his sides and a clear moon on his forehead.” It is easy to imagine that the horse, as a mediator between heaven and earth, could be endowed with signs of heaven. In the Rig Veda, the sky is compared to a horse decorated with pearls: “Like a dark horse decorated with pearls, the pitar decorated the sky with stars” (Rig Veda XI, 8, 11). At this point, Ludwig notices that the horse is taken here as a symbol of the sky. With this we can compare that Agni is sometimes also identified with the Moon (Riveda II, 2, 2). “As if you were a messenger from heaven, you illuminate human births all night.”

However, it is very possible that the horse, like the night sky, is a secondary formation from the day horse, from the horse of the sun. If there is something strained and artificial in the image of the moon horse (and it is rare), then the chariot of the sun god Helios, the chariot of Indra or the solar boat of the god Ra are full of triumph and beauty. However, they did not end up in the fairy tale. They died with faith. Only faint echoes can be found in images of a purely accessory nature, such as, for example, the mare on which Baba Yaga “flies around the world every day” (Af. 159) or the three horsemen in the fairy tale about Vasilisa. The sun was reflected in the fairy tale not in its dynamics. The sun was reflected in the fairy tale as a kingdom and as a palace, which will be discussed further. In this regard, it is interesting to note that the image of breathing fire in Egyptian religion is attributed specifically to the sun, and that the fairytale horse may also reflect the sun from this side. “O you - (Ra, the sun god, or simply the sun), existing in your egg, shining from your circle, you rise on your horizon and shine like gold above the sky ... you shoot streams of fire from your mouth" (Book of the Dead, XVII ).

12. Horse and water

Another feature of the horse is its connection with water. He also shares this connection with water with his European and Asian counterparts - with the Indian Agni and the Greek Pegasus. True, this seahorse is somewhat unusual in the fairy tale, it is found relatively less often and is not always the hero’s assistant. He appears at night and spoils the hayfield, eats and tramples the hay, and the brothers go to watch for him. “At midnight the weather rose, the sea began to stir, and a wonderful mare emerged from the depths of the sea, ran up to the first haystack and began to devour the hay” (Aph. 105). But the helper horse is sometimes related to water. The old man he meets says to the hero: “Your father has thirty horses - all as one; go home, order the grooms to give them something to drink from the blue sea; whichever horse moves forward will wander into the water up to its neck, and as soon as it starts drinking, they will begin to drink in the blue sea the waves rise, sway from shore to shore - take it!” (157).

Compared to the chthonic and sepulchral nature of the horse, its aquatic nature is a secondary and later phenomenon. Malten proved this for Greece, Oldenberg for India. Like the fairytale horse, the Greek Pegasus has something to do with water. With a blow of his hoof, he opens a new key on Helikon - the key of Hippocrene. Here the original chthonic nature of the horse is clear. Bellerophon catches him with a bridle given to him by Athena as he drinks from the Peirene spring at Acrocorinth. This connection with water is revealed even more sharply by the divine horses of Poseidon, the sea god. He sometimes gives them to those who turn to him with pious prayer. He gave such a team, for example, to Pelops, who, with the help of these horses, wins his bride from Oenomaus, having overtaken him in the lists. The horse with a golden double-sided mane emerging from the sea is also observed by the Argonauts.

According to Malten's research, Poseidon was not always a sea god - he was once the god of land. He is originally a chthonic god, “giving grace to grow in seed and source” (Malten 1914, 179). Even then he was connected with the horse. “Only through the inhabitants of the coasts, or rather, thanks to colonization across the sea, did the ruler of fresh waters become the ruler of sea waters” (179). With his transformation into a sea god, his horses became sea horses (179, 181, 185). And indeed:

the image of a horse emerging from the water cannot be primary; it had to be created historically, and this process has been traced for Greece. Something similar happened in India. The divine horse Agni is said to be apam napat - child of the waters. Oldenberg suggests that apam napat was once a special water creature that merged with Agni. He, "having a sea-water robe" (Rigveda, V, 65, 2). “From the waters, you, pure, arise” (II, 1), “The waters in the lakes contribute to Him” (III, 1, 3), etc.

13. Some other helpers

The horse and the eagle are not the hero’s only helpers. Here there can be no question of giving a complete nomenclature and system of fairy-tale helpers; we will consider only the most significant, important images of them. Having considered the eagle and the horse as the most typical examples of animal helpers, we will briefly touch on some anthropomorphic helpers.

A special category of assistants consists of all kinds of extraordinary artists. Often these are brothers, each of whom has one skill. Sometimes these are the heroes they meet, completely extraordinary in their appearance and qualities. Their number is very large. According to the Bolte and Polivka index, about forty names of such artists can be identified.

The most striking figure of these assistants is Moroz-Treskun, or Student. He is depicted in different ways, sometimes not depicted at all. In one fairy tale, this is an old man with a bandaged head. "Why is your head tied?" - “My hair is tied; as soon as I let it down, it will become frosty” (Hud. 33). He appears to be the same among the brothers (Grimm 71). He has his hat on one ear. When the hero reprimands him for this, he says: “If I put my hat on straight, there will be a terrible frost, and the birds will fall dead to the ground.”

Russian fairy tales also know another, more vivid image. “Next comes the old old man, old, snotty, snot hanging from the roof, frozen, hanging from his nose” (See 183). The function of this “Frost the Cracker” is always the same: the princess has a hot bath for the heroes to kill them. This is where Student helps. “He quickly jumped into the bathhouse, blew into a corner, spat into another - the whole bathhouse had cooled down, and there was snow in the corners” (Af. 137).

The character of this figure is quite clear. This is the master of the weather, the master of winter and frost. Similar figures are found, for example, in the myths of the northern Indians. "Many years ago it was very cold on earth. At the upper end of the river there was a large glacier, from which came an icy cold. All the animals went to kill the man who made the cold, but they all froze. (The coyote tries this, but freezes, then the fox sets off.) The fox ran on, and with every step she took, fire came out from under her feet. She entered the house (where Frost lived) and stamped her foot once (repeated 4 times). When she stamped four times, all the ice melted and it became warm again" (Boas 1895, 5).

In this case, the owner of frost and cold is hostile to man. But he submits to the hero, who has already entered another world. It is very interesting that in one Russian fairy tale (See 183) the Old Man, just like grateful animals, asks: “Ivan Kobylin’s son, feed me some bread, I will be useful to you in bad times.” The eagle makes exactly the same request as we saw above. It can be assumed that this reflects the idea that the master of the elements can be subjugated and forced to serve oneself. The hero forces them to serve himself. True, usually they are simply met by chance and taken with them. But this accident obviously covered other forms of subduing the master, one of which could be a propitiatory or other sacrifice, expressed here with the words “feed me.”

Another figure of the same order is the figure of the son. “Walking along the road, I came to a river three miles wide; a man stands on the bank, sweeping the river with his mouth, catching fish with his mustache, cooking and eating on his tongue” (Af. 141). If we try to draw the figure of this son, we will involuntarily come to the image of a dam and a top through which water flows. In other words, if Frost-Cracker is a personified force of nature, then here we have a personified weapon. We are just celebrating this incident for now. The connection of tools with assistants and magic items is developed below. The storyteller sometimes places the son-in-law not on the shore, but in the water itself. He is the owner of the river and fish, a deity who bestows an abundance of fish and successful fishing. Actually, he doesn’t play any role in the fairy tale. He is an episodic figure. Sometimes he serves as an assistant, transporting the hero across the water to another kingdom. The hero crosses the water along his mustache: “And along his mustache, as if across a bridge, people walk on foot, horsemen gallop, carts ride” (142). It must be mentioned, however, that even here the fishy nature of this creature can be clarified from comparisons. In other cases, the hero crosses the river on the back of a huge fish. Such beings are also found at the level of faith, for example in North America. In an Indian legend, brothers want to test the strength of one of them. They go to the river. “In the evening they sat down and began to tease their brother and pull his hair. But he didn’t care about that, he lay down and put on his beaver hat. Then the river began to rise, and his brothers and sisters had to run from the water to the mountain, while he remained calmly by the fire. Although everything around was covered with water, he remained dry by his fire" (Boas 1895, 23).

It is interesting that in this case, just like in Russian and German fairy tales, the movement of the hat causes the elements. This hat belongs to the category of magical items, which will be discussed below. In this case, however, we see only the elements, we do not see the fishing. In another Indian legend we read: “Children, do you know where Azan dammed the river?” - “No, where?” - “There and there.” They went there and found Azan, who had dammed the river. the river and have almost bailed out the water to catch the fish." They destroy him (Unkel 286). Here the creature damming the river is again associated with fish. This creature does not always appear anthropomorphic. In another Indian story, a huge elk stands over a river with its legs spread and kills (swallows) anyone who comes down the river (Boas 1895, 2).

The son-in-law's brother is usually Gorynya (or Vertogor or Gorynych). “And Gorynya the hero walks and pushes mountains with her foot” (Af. 83). This is the spirit of the mountains. “They walked and walked and reached the hero, Gorynych. Gorynych rocks the mountain on his little finger” (3B 45). “You see, I am assigned to move mountains” (Aph. 93). According to Sternberg, the Gilyaks call members of the clan of the owner of the sea "tol nivukh", i.e. "sea man", and the owner of the mountains - "nal nivukh" - "mountain man". Such a “thorough man,” or one of the “masters of the mountains,” is our fabulous Gorynych. His role is uncertain. Sometimes he saves the hero from drowning (93), sometimes he plays the role of a false hero, an older brother who betrays the younger. But even in those cases when he plays the role of a false hero, he is subordinate to the hero. A fairy-tale hero is a powerful shaman, to whom the masters of the weather, rivers and fish, mountains and forests obey. Like all such skilled assistants, Vertogor was met by chance. But the motive of his submission comes through in Afanasyev’s tale No. 93. “He drives up to Vertogor; he began to ask him, and he answered: “I would be glad to receive you, Ivan Tsarevich, but I myself have a little time to live.” You see, I am assigned to move mountains; how I cope with these last ones is where my death is." Subsequently, the hero gets a brush, which, when thrown, turns into mountains, and this gives Vertogor new food. Here the motif inherent in flight and pursuit (a comb and a brush usually save one from pursuit directly) is used differently and moved. This movement here is very interesting and shows that the life of the owner of the element must be supported by man. Without this support he dies. So the son-in-law asks:

"Feed me". For this support, these masters provide assistance to the person after his death, and to the shaman during his lifetime.

Antiquity also has its Vertogors, but as defeated gods. They fight among the giants against Zeus, turning up mountains and placing them on top of each other to storm the sky.

The third brother or hero is usually named Dubynya, or Vertodub. "He sees a man tearing out oak trees by their roots: 'Hello, Dubynya! Why are you doing this? - “I’m tearing out oak trees.” - “If you are my called brother, come with me”” (Hud. 33). This Dubynya then beats the enemy army. In one fairy tale (Aph. 142) he is called not Dubynya, but Duginya - “Duginya the hero, he can bend any tree into an arc.” One might think that there is a false etymology here, but in Greek myth we have precisely the “bender of pine trees.” Such a “bender of pine trees,” the robber Sinis, who ties people to pine trees and tears them apart, is met and punished by Theseus.

Obviously, if usynya is a “man of the rivers”, Gorynya is a “man of the mountains”, then Dubynya is a “man of the forest”. In this he is similar to the yaga, just as the helper Studenets or Moroz-Treskun is similar to the giver Morozka. Dubynya sometimes even acts not as a helper, but as a donor. The hero meets a man carrying firewood into the forest. “Why are you carrying firewood into the forest?” - “Yes, this is not ordinary firewood.” - “And which ones?” - “Yes, like this: if you scatter them, then suddenly a whole army will appear” (Af. 144).

Thus, out of a huge number of all kinds of artists, four types can be identified as masters of the elements. This is Moroz-Treskun, Usynya, Gorynya and Dubynya. They obey the hero due to the cult or other actions he performs, but this moment in the fairy tale is preserved only in rudiments and is replaced by a chance meeting with these helpers.

We can turn to another group of artists who have nothing in common with the masters of the elements. These include the archer, the walker, the blacksmith, the vigilant, the sensitive, the helmsman, the swimmer, etc.

A comparison of the materials shows that they represent personified abilities to penetrate far, upward and deep. We will meet them again when studying their functions in connection with the difficult tasks of the princess.

14. Development of ideas about the assistant

With all the diversity, the helpers in the fairy tale form a certain group united by functional unity.

Everything that has been said here about individual types of assistants has only a particular meaning. We must raise the question of helpers in general, as a general phenomenon of the fairy-tale canon. We have already met with the transfer of an assistant to the hero. The yaga often gives the hero an assistant. The historical roots of yaga have been clarified. It is associated with initiation. The initiation rite included the transfer of magical or magical power over animals to the young man. However, historical parallels to individual types of helper did not lead us to a rite of passage. They led us to shamanism, to the cult of ancestors, to afterlife ideas. When the rite died, the figure of the helper did not die with it, but in connection with economic and social development began to evolve, reaching the guardian angels and saints of the Christian church. One of the links in this development is the fairy tale.

In the history of assistants, one can basically outline three stages or three links. The first link is the acquisition of an assistant during the initiation rite, the second is the acquisition of an assistant by the shaman, the third is the acquisition of an assistant in the afterlife by a dead person. These three links do not follow each other mechanically. These are indicative milestones indicating the direction of development. Let us first consider the question of assistants within the rite of passage.

This question has been very little developed in ethnography, although it concerns the very essence of initiation. Schurz, who specifically dealt with the issue of initiation, does not pay any attention to this side of the matter. Webster says much more about this. “The fundamental doctrine was the belief in a personal guardian spirit into whom, by various rites of a phallic nature, members of society were supposed to be transformed” (Webster 125).

So, during the initiation rite, the young man turned into his assistant. Even if we only knew this, we would already have the right to raise the question of the connection between the fairytale assistant and the institution of initiation. This would explain to us both its acquisition in the kingdom of death (for the initiate was assumed to be dead), and the connection of this assistant with the world of the ancestors. This connection was pointed out above, especially in the study of the horse and grateful animals. This also explains the assistant’s connection with the world of ancestors. The helping spirit of some North American tribes is called Manitou. This Manitou is inherited. “When a young man prepares to meet a helping spirit, he expects to meet not just one, but the helper of his clan” (151). Thus, there is a pre-established connection between the initiate and his assistant. In a fairy tale, the hero first of all is looking for a horse, and not just any horse, but his father’s horse, and this horse has been waiting for its master for a long time. In all these cases, Webster calls the assistant indifferently guardian spirit. But we know that this helper is of an animal nature. Part of this ritual was dancing, during which they put on the skins of various animals - bulls, bears, swans, wolves, etc. Their heads served as masks (183). This symbolized the transformation into an animal. On the other hand, this ability was transmitted by ancestors, elders - performers of the initiation rite (61). The initiates summoned an assistant through songs and dances (151). The fairy tale has not preserved any songs or dances. She replaced them with a spell formula. Where a multi-level structure of secret brotherhoods developed, the transition from the lowest to the highest level was allowed only to those who had such an assistant. Access to these societies depends on the acquisition by each boy at the time of puberty of a personal guardian spirit (Manitou or individual totem), the same as that of the secret union into which he seeks to join" (152). Among the Kwakiutl tribe, these helpers and associated with them the privileges acquired by each noble family are transmitted to the direct descendants in the male line or through the marriage of the daughter of such a male descendant to the son-in-law, and through him to his grandchildren (150). All these instructions are very important. They, among other things, explain the test of the hero, who, before entering into marriage, must prove that he has an assistant. On this, as we will see below, the motive of “difficult tasks” is based. They also connect the acquisition of an assistant and marriage, which will be discussed in the analysis of the princess.

But Webster, where this information was taken from, says nothing about the meaning and significance of acquiring an assistant. We can here refer to the legend given by Boas. “A man once went to the mountains to hunt mountain goats. Then he met a black bear, who took him into his home.

He taught him the art of salmon fishing and boat building. Two years later he returned to his homeland. When he came, all the people were afraid of him, because he looked like a bear... he could not speak and did not want to eat anything boiled. Then they rubbed him with magic herbs and he became a man again... From now on, when he was in need, he always went to his friend, the bear, and he always helped him. In winter, he caught fresh salmon for him when no one else could catch it. This man built a house and painted a bear on it. His sister wove a bear into a blanket with which they dance. Therefore, the descendants of the sister have the sign of the bear" (Boas 1895, 293). In this story, it is clear that the bear spent two years in the house, and that upon his return the hero loses his speech, and that he wants to eat only raw food. This incident is important because , that it shows the results of a bear's stay in the house, and thereby reveals the purpose and meaning of the corresponding ritual: the hero returns as a great hunter who has power over animals. This incident also shows why animal helpers are so diverse. The point is not at all (as is believed some ethnographers) in order to master a strong animal. This bear teaches how to build boats and fish - an activity that is not at all characteristic of bears. This function could be performed by any other animal. An animal is important not for its physical strength, but for its connection, belonging to the animal kingdom in general .

This is the most ancient form, the most ancient source of the motif of the magical assistant. We can only guess about what happened before initiation appeared; there are no materials that can reveal this ancestral form.

There are not yet those various functions that are characteristic of an assistant, in particular, there is no mediation between the two worlds. There are also no anthropomorphic or invisible helpers here. In the light of these materials, we must recognize the ability to transform into one’s totem or one’s assistant as the most archaic form of power over one’s assistants. The fairy tale, as we see, has preserved it. We must recognize hunting goals as the most ancient driving motive, which gave rise to the concept of an assistant or Manitou or, in English terminology, guardian spirit.

However, the tale almost did not retain its hunting functions. There are some rudiments of them in those cases, for example, when a hero, living in the forest with an evil sister, receives a cub from a wolf, a bear and a lion; These animals in the fairy tale are called the hero’s “hunt.”

Where there is no (maybe no longer) initiation, the acquisition of an assistant occurs individually. The form of acquiring an assistant, however, strongly resembles what happens during the ritual: there is only no person performing the initiation. The young man goes alone into the forest or up the mountain, remains silent, fasts, etc. This form is found both in America and Africa. Ankerman, referring to Trill, says the following about the Fnag tribe: “The forefather of each clan (Sippe) had an animal as an “elanela.” Trill translates this word as “animal voue “a um homme,” i.e., an animal obliged to help a person "(Ankermann 139). However, the phenomenon of individual acquisition of an assistant as a whole is a later phenomenon. In these cases, not everyone acquires an assistant, but for the most part only a select few, shamans, who are considered the owners of powerful spirits, animal helpers. How secret alliances gradually close into a caste, Webster showed. But shamans for the most part still do not form a caste. “Every Indian,” says Geberlin, has a helping spirit, whom he finds in his youth or later, sometimes several - especially for hunting, fishing, crafts , wars, etc. Helpers against diseases are the spirits of shamans. Most of these spirits are in the form of animals" (Haeberlin).

This brings us to a consideration of the shaman's assistants. What is missing in the image of an assistant obtained during initiation - mediation between two worlds, etc. - is given to us by the shaman's assistant. This is a later stage. “The supernatural power of the shaman,” says Sternberg, “rests not in himself, but in those helping spirits who are at his disposal. It is they who drive out diseases, they lead the shaman to the most remote places, inaccessible to ordinary mortals, in order to find and help the soul of the patient, they help bring the soul of the deceased to the afterlife and they inspire answers to all requests presented to the shaman. Without these spirits, the shaman is powerless. A shaman who has lost his spirits ceases to be a shaman, sometimes even dies" (Sternberg 1936, 141). The ways in which a shaman acquires assistants vary.

Kroeber, who has studied Indian religion in California, says: "The most common way of acquiring shamanic power in California is through dreaming. A spirit, be it the spirit of an animal or place, the sun or other object of nature, a deceased relative or a completely disembodied spirit, visits the future shaman in his dreams, and the connection established between them is the source and basis of his strength. The spirit becomes his guardian spirit or "personal", from whom he receives songs and rites or knowledge of spells, which gives him the power to cause or recall illness and to do and endure what others cannot" (Kroeber 1907, IV, 325).

In California, the Shastu tribe believes that the earth is full of certain “potencies, pains” that live mainly in the human form in rocks, lakes, rapids, the sun, moon, etc., or they are animals that send illness, death and all kinds of evil. They are also assistants to shamans (Preuss 1911, 235). Acquiring assistants occurs differently than Kroeber describes. Here the assistant “shoots” the shaman, who then experiences sudden pain (einen zucken den Schmerz). Let us remember that in the fairy tale the horse kicks the hero, which gives him strength.

There is so much material on the shaman's assistant that there is no need to go into this material in detail. Let us dwell only on some cases, especially those close to the fairy tale and explaining it. Of particular interest to us are the materials on the Altaians reported by Anokhin. “The help of aru kormos is necessary when communicating with the spirits of the sky and the underworld, the path to which is blocked by obstacles. These obstacles are described in detail in rituals. The shaman defeats all obstacles exclusively with the help of aru kbrmos. During the journey, they are a living force and protect the shaman from dangers, fight with evil spirits encountered on the way. Aru kormos invisibly clothe the shaman: they sit on his shoulder, on his head, on his arms, on his legs, in various directions they encircle his body and in invocations they are called armor or a hoop for this Some shamans have more of them, others have less. At the head of all the spirits that make up the shaman’s armor is always a personal blood spirit-patron, from whom the shaman traces his succession" (Anokhin 29). Here the assistant has already lost his animal nature. He became invisible. The name of the spirit “armor” is very characteristic. The real element of a fairytale assistant is air. Such, for example, is Shmat-Razum and other invisible assistants of the hero. "Shmat-Razum! are you here?" - “Here, don’t be afraid, I won’t leave you behind” (Aph. 212). This “Invisible” is a mediator between the two worlds. He transports the hero through the air to another world. But along with invisible helpers, the Altaians also have zoomorphic creatures. One of these creatures is Suila. He has horse eyes and sees all around him at a distance that can be covered in 30 days. Some shamans imagine Suila in the form of a golden eagle bird with horse eyes (Anokhin 13). This change does not occur immediately; the transition is made by hybrid creatures.

It can be observed that the hunting function of the assistants gradually fades into the background, being replaced by the healing function and the function of mediation between the two worlds. Animals used for transportation (hence the horse) begin to acquire particular importance, and means of transportation, especially the boat, are assimilated with them. So, in the fairy tale, the craftsmen find themselves already in the boat, making up the crew of the ship. The Argonauts, who are very similar to our Simeons, are also sailing in the boat. This trip to another world, both in antiquity and in our fairy tale, has already completely replaced the hunting basis. The shaman and his assistants gradually become no longer hunters, but healers, hunters of souls. In Babylonian myth, Nergal, going to the underworld, takes with him seven helpers given to him by his father. Their names are lightning, fever, heat, etc. The tablets are poorly preserved, but the absence of hunting, sending to another kingdom, personification of the elements, and the connection with shamanism-healing are clear. Nergal later marries Erishkigal, the queen of the underworld. Obviously, seven assistants help him with this. Thus this latest stage is closest to a fairy tale (Jeremias 22).

This brings us to consider the posthumous assistant. Initially, when a sharp distinction had not yet been made between life and death, naturally, there could not be a specific figure of a posthumous assistant. But since the entire complex of initiation is closely connected with the idea of death, its elements passed into the cult of the dead, creating posthumous assistants, the last branch of which can be considered the idea of angels, that is, semi-zoomorphic (winged) creatures carrying the soul to heaven. This phenomenon is later, it flourishes in the state cult of the dead, which we have in its most developed form in ancient Egypt. From the works of Turaev, Wiedemann, Brasted and others, we know that this kind of posthumous assistants also existed in Egypt. In the tombs, plates were found depicting geniuses, as Turaev puts it, “helping the deceased behind the grave.”

A special consideration of this Egyptological issue cannot be included in our tasks. Our task is to point out the connection here.

We have outlined the main stages in the development of the assistant. The most ancient form turned out to be the idea of transformation into an animal during initiation. Subsequently, it is acquired individually, and even later - only by the shaman. With its acquisition by the shaman, it acquires new functions - the functions of mediation between two worlds, and the hunting nature of the assistant begins to recede into the background. The figure of the assistant also begins to change. The animal begins to yield to the spirit, and among the animals animals associated with human movement begin to appear: the eagle merges with the horse. But if the diagram sketched here is correct, then the fairy tale reflected all stages of its development: the fairy tale knows both transformations, and assistants - animals, birds, and spirits, and a group of artisans, whose connection with hunting tools is still clear among the Altaians; and a horse, etc. The question of how this figure gets into a fairy tale is a general question about how religious ideas get into a fairy tale in general. We will talk about this in the last chapter.

II. Magic item

15. Item and assistant

Considering a magical assistant facilitates and prepares the consideration of a magical item. There is a very close relationship between them.

It is easy to see that these items represent only a special case of an assistant. Helpers, living beings and magical objects, fundamentally function in exactly the same way. So, the horse carries the hero to distant lands, but the same is achieved with the help of a flying carpet or self-propelled boots. The horse beats the army, but the club itself beats the enemies and even takes them prisoner, etc. Of course, there are specific helpers and specific objects that cannot be interchangeable. But these individual cases do not violate the principle of their morphological relationship. The number of magical objects in the fairy tale is so large that a descriptive examination of them will not lead to any results. There seems to be no such object that could not appear as a magical object. There are various items of clothing (hat, shirt, boots, belt) and jewelry (ring, hairpins), tools and weapons (sword, club, stick, bow, gun, whip, stick, cane), all kinds of bags, sacks, wallets, vessels (barrels), animal body parts (hair, feathers, teeth, head, heart, eggs), musical instruments (whistles, horns, harp, violin), various household items (flint, flint, towels, brushes, carpets, balls, mirrors, books, maps), drinks (water, potion), fruits and berries. No matter how much we classify and list them, this list does not provide the key to understanding them.

It will not be better if we approach objects from the perspective of their functions. The same functions are attributed to different objects and vice versa. Thus, the fellows who carry out the hero’s orders can appear from a horn (Af. 186), from a bag (187), from a barrel (197), from a box (189), from under a cane if it is hit on the ground (193), from a magic book (212), from a ring (156, 190, 191). We will study these functions specifically. Thus, the function of transferring the hero to the thirtieth kingdom will be the subject of a special chapter.

Therefore, we will classify magical objects differently: we will consider them not by groups of objects as such, and not by functions, but by the commonality of their origin, since the materials allow us to do this.

16. Claws, hair, skins, teeth

Magic objects are not only morphologically related to magical assistants. They are of the same origin as the latter. Thus, many magical objects represent parts of the body of an animal: skins, hairs, teeth, etc. We know that upon initiation young men received power over animals and that the outward expression of this was that they were given a part of this animal. From now on, the young man carried it with him in a bag, or he ate it, or, finally, these parts were rubbed into a person. Thus, ointments must also be included in this category: they are also of animal origin, as can be easily seen in the fairy tale.

More often, however, part of the animal is given into the hands and serves as a means of power over the animal. This happens even when purchasing an assistant individually. The Arapaho Indians go to the top of the mountain for this. “After two or three, maximum seven days, a patron spirit appears to a man, usually a small animal in human form, which, however, when running away, takes on an animal form” (Preuss 1911, 249). The skin of such an animal is then worn. From these and similar cases we conclude that the oldest form of magical objects is parts of animals. The meaning of such a gift in the fairy tale is preserved with complete clarity: hairs from the horse’s tail give power over the horse. The same applies to birds: “And then the main bird gets up, gives him a feather from his head: “Here, keep this hair, hide it: no matter what misfortune happens, just take this hair out, change it from hand to hand, - we will tell you We will help you with everything" (3B 129). The hero receives a pike bone, at a critical moment the pike hides it in its nest or swallows it, the hero turns into it (J. Art. 265; option: he receives a crow bone, a lion's claw, fish scales, etc.). Finist Clear Falcon also gives the girl a feather from his wing: “Wave it to the right side, “in a moment everything your heart desires will appear before you” (Af. 235). The formula “everything your heart desires,” of course, is a late replacement for others , more ancient and more precise desires. These desires were centered around the animal itself, around the animal - the prey. In American myths this comes through quite clearly. "He saw a man sitting on a high bank. His legs dangled over the abyss. He had two round ratchets. He sang and beat the rattles on the ground. Then the buffaloes appeared in crowds on each side of it, fell to the shore and were killed" (Kroeber 1907, I, 75). It is known that rattles were usually made in the shape of an animal, most often a bird. Thus, here we find the phenomenon that It is not at all necessary to have a strong animal in order to have power over animals. In principle, a raven can provide a good hunt for buffalo. Many peoples have such a belief, including peoples who do not know the initiation rite. Such a belief is found among the Vogul hunters. D. K Zelenin says: “The Vogul belief says: if you have the face of a fox, sable or ermine with you, then everything will work out” (Zelenin 1929, 56).

If our observation is correct, if there is not necessarily a connection between the animal helper (subject of help) and the animal being hunted (object of help), then any animal and any object can serve as a helper. Then the discrepancy between the helper and its function, the non-attachment of the function to individual animals or objects that create the impression of fantasy is not just a technique of poetic creativity, but is also historically justified in primitive thinking. Describing the healing bags that play a role in initiation, Frazer says: “This bag is made of the skin of an animal (otter, cat, snake, bear, raccoon, wolf, owl, ermine) and has a shape vaguely reminiscent of the shape of the corresponding animal. One of these bags every member of society has; he keeps in it absurdly shaped objects that are his amulets or "charms"" (Fraser 652) These talismans and amulets, basically associated with animals, are the prototype of our "magic gifts", among which special The class is represented by all kinds of bags, purses, purses, boxes, etc. From these bags and caskets helper spirits appear. This brings us to the objects (not just of animal origin) from which spirits emerge. But before moving on to these objects, it is necessary to consider those objects for which their origin from tools can be shown.

17. Items-tools

Everything that has been said so far shows one significant feature in the thinking of primitive man. The main role in hunting is supposedly not played by weapons: not arrows, nets, snares, traps. The main thing is magical power, the ability to attract an animal. If an animal was killed, it was not because the shooter was dexterous or the arrow was good; this happened because the hunter knew a spell that brought the animal under his arrow, because he had magical power over it in the form of a bag of hairs, etc. The function of the weapon is being tested as something secondary. Engels says: “...various false ideas about nature, about the essence of man himself, about spirits, magical forces, etc., for the most part have an economic basis only in a negative sense; the low economic development of the prehistoric period has as a complement, and sometimes in as a condition and even as a cause of false ideas about nature" (Marx, Engels XXVII, 419). We have a special case of such a misconception about nature here. As tools are improved, the following phenomenon can be observed: the magical power, first attributed to the animal helper through some part of it, is now transferred to the object. A person notices his own effort to a lesser extent and the work of the tool to a greater extent. This results in the concept that a weapon works not because of the effort applied (the more perfect the weapon, the less effort), but because of its inherent magical properties. You get the idea of a tool working without a person, for a person. The weapon is now deified. The deified weapon, along with magical hair, etc., is the second, later, substratum in the history of magical objects. The functions of the instrument are the reason for its deification. Very naively, but at the same time absolutely correctly, this is stated in the 16th-century Northern Russian manuscript “The Garden of Salvation,” dedicated to the conversion of Lapps to Christianity. “If he sometimes kills an animal with a stone, he reveres the stone, and if he hits something he catches with a club, he worships the club” (Kharuzin 1890, 137). This purely hunting belief “continues even in primitive agriculture: some Indians “pray to their sticks with which they dig roots” (Sternberg 1936, 268). The idea that a tool operates not due to the labor applied, but solely due to its inherent special abilities, as indicated, leads to the idea of tools operating without a person. Such tools are found in hunting myths and have come down to us in fairy tales. In the myth of the Taulipang Indians, the hero only thrusts his knife into a bush - and the knife itself begins to cut down trees. He hits the tree with an ax - the ax itself begins to chop it (Koch-Grilnberg 125). An arrow shot at random into the air strikes birds, etc. (92).

In the fairy tale, the ax itself cuts down a ship (Aph. 212) or chops wood (165), and the buckets themselves bring water. It is interesting that the ancient connection with the animal has not yet been lost here. This is done at the behest of the pike. But this connection is not necessary in a fairy tale. The club itself beats the enemies and takes them prisoner, with the help of a broom and a stick “you can defeat any force you like” (185), etc. Here the connection has already been lost.

18. Items that summon spirits

The materials presented will bring us closer to understanding the objects with which we can summon spirits. Such objects can be either animal (horse hair), or a weapon (a club) and a number of other objects (a ring).

The above cases show how objects, things, and especially tools were once understood. Strength lives in them. But power is an abstract concept. There are no means to express the concept of force either in language or in thinking. Nevertheless, the process of abstraction still occurs, but this abstracted concept is incorporated, or, more precisely, represented as a living being. This can be seen from the hairs that call the horse. Strength is inherent in the whole animal and all its parts. In the hairs there is the same power as in the whole animal, that is, in the hair there is a horse, just as there is a bridle, just as there is a whole animal in the bones. Representation of power invisible. being is a further step towards the creation of the concept of force, that is, to the loss of the image and its replacement by the concept. This creates the concept of rings and other objects from which a spirit can be summoned. Here we see a higher level than the worship of an instrument. The force is detached from the object and re-attached to any object that does not outwardly show any signs of this force. This is the "magic item".

However, we have so far talked about such objects as if they were not the property of a fairy tale, but the property of practice. Did such objects really exist in everyday practice? Such objects really existed and were used, and we consider this phenomenon to be sufficiently well-known not to dwell on it. These are the so-called fetishes, amulets, talismans, etc. In comparative ethnography, this question is still waiting for its researcher. The forms and method of using these objects sometimes exactly coincide with the picture given by the fairy tale. Let us at least point out a tribe that knows “rings that have the property of putting the wearer in contact with certain spirits” (Frobenius 18986, 326). Thus, here too the fairy tale contains echoes of the past.

19. Flint

Among the objects that can summon an assistant, a special place is occupied by flint, which mainly summons a horse. In a fairy tale, this is usually flint and wood, sometimes combined with hairs. The hairs must be set on fire to summon the horse. That flint is almost consistently (but not exclusively) associated with the horse is explained by its fiery nature.

In flint, the magical powers inherent in things manifest themselves especially clearly, especially strongly. Flint and steel apparently replaced more ancient forms of flint, when fire was produced by friction. We have already seen how Agni is evoked by rubbing two sticks. Therefore, flint in general is a magical object that serves to summon spirits, and not just a horse. So, in a Belarusian fairy tale, the hero in a forest hut finds a tobacco pouch, in which there is no tobacco, but there is a flint and a flint. “Let me try to smoke! This will be good for a traveler. He hit the flap with his mouse and 12 fellows jump out. “What do you want from us?” “(Dobrovolsky 557) In a German fairy tale (Grimm, 116) you need to light a pipe in order to summon the spirit. This explains to us Aladdin’s lamp, and it may also be that the magic ring sometimes needs to be rubbed for a helping spirit to appear.

20. Stick

The stick, twig or cane goes back to completely different ideas. The objects discussed so far come either from animals or from tools. The wand was created as a result of human communication with the earth and plants. The fairy tale did not preserve only one circumstance: a twig is cut from a living tree, and then it can turn out to be magical, transferring the wonderful properties of fertility, abundance and life to the one with whom it comes into contact. According to Manngardt, people, animals, plants at different times of the year hit or lash with a green branch (resp. stick) in order to become healthy and strong (Manngardt). They cite a lot of such cases, and they clearly show that here the vital force of the plant is transferred to the one struck. The same is attributed to roots and herbs. In the fairy tale “Feigned Illness” (Aph. 207), the murdered prince is revived by a root, a gift from an old man. “They took the root, found the grave of Ivan Tsarevich, dug it up, took it out, wiped it with that root and turned over it three times - Ivan Tsarevich stood up.” The power of the root is transferred to the person. In another fairy tale, a snake revives another by attaching a green leaf to it (206, var.) (more on this in the chapter on the snake). From this it is clear why the “little whip” revives the dead (Onch. 3).

21. Items that give eternal abundance

To all that has been said, it must be added that not everyone, not every object of every kind, can be magical, but only those obtained in a certain way. When there was a rite of passage, this was an object received from the elders. In a fairy tale, this is an object given by a dead father, a yaga, a grateful buried dead, animal hosts, etc. In short, an object taken “from there” is magical. “From there” - this at an earlier stage means “from the forest” in the broad sense of the word, and later - an object brought from another world, and according to fairy tales - from the thirtieth kingdom. Not all water revives the dead. But the water brought by the bird from the thirtieth kingdom revives the dead man. From this it can be seen that there is a group of objects whose magical power is based on the fact that they were brought from the kingdom of the dead. This includes water that restores life or sight, apples that give youth, tablecloths that give eternal nutrition and abundance, etc. We are just registering this fact. It can be explained only when the thirtieth kingdom and its properties are considered (see Chapter VIII).

22. Living and dead, weak and weak water...

Among these items, living and dead water and its variety - strong and weak water - deserve special attention. Living and dead water are not opposite to each other. They complement each other. “He sprinkled Ivan Tsarevich with dead water - his body grew together, sprinkled him with living water - Ivan Tsarevich stood up” (Af. 168). This is the canonical formula for using this water.

Two questions arise here: first, where does this water come from? and second - why does this water double? Why can’t you just sprinkle the dead man with living water, as is, however, done in some rare cases?

To answer this question, we will look at some materials regarding the belief in the afterlife of the Greeks. The ancient ideas that the ancient Greeks associated with the belief in the afterlife were, apparently, often combined with the idea of two types of water in the underground kingdom, which is clearly indicated, for example, by southern Italian tablets. Thus, the Petelian golden tablet (Inscriptiones Graecae 158; Dieterich 1893, 86), placed in the coffin of the deceased, tells the soul of the deceased that in the house of Hades she will see two different sources: one on the left, the other on the right. The first one has a white cypress tree growing, but this is not the source she should approach. The signs tell the soul to turn to the right, to where refreshing water flows from the pond of Mnemosyne, near which its guards stand. The soul must turn to them and say: “I am exhausted from thirst! Give me something to drink!”

Let's take a closer look at this text. He also speaks of two waters. One of them is not guarded and does not represent any benefit for the dead man; the other, on the contrary, is guarded very carefully, and before this water is given, the dead man is questioned. What kind of water is this? In the text she is not named either alive or dead. But it is a blessing for the deceased, water for the dead, or, in other words, “dead” water. It can be assumed that this water calms the deceased, that is, it gives him final death or the right to stay in the region of Hades.

But what then is the other water, standing to the left and not guarded by anyone, used for? This is not clear from this text. According to some parallels, it can be assumed that this is the “water of life,” water for the dead who do not enter Hades, but return from it.

Before entering Hades, it has no effect, so it is not guarded. This is clear from the Babylonian katabasis of the goddess Ishtar. As Jeremias says, “she is sent back after the gatekeeper forcibly injects her with the water of life” (Jeremias 32). If the assumptions made here are correct, then this explains why the hero is first sprayed with dead water, and then with living water. The dead water seems to finish him off, turning him into a complete dead man. This is a kind of funeral rite corresponding to the covering with earth. Only now he is a real dead person, and not a creature hovering between two worlds, who can return as a vampire. Only now, after sprinkling with dead water, will this living water act.

If the assumptions made here are correct, then they throw some light on "strong" and "weak" water. These waters stand on the right and left hand of the stranger. They are available either in the cellar of the yaga or the serpent.

Both the yaga and the snake are guardians of the entrance to another kingdom. The serpent guards the river and bridge leading to the thirtieth state. “The strong one stands on the right hand of the bridge, and the weak one on the left” (Aph. 137, var.). Before the battle, these waters are changed. The hero drinks “strong” water, kills the snake and finds himself in another kingdom.

The analogy with the above Greek material is quite complete. But still it is not absolute. To the question of what kind of water the hero drinks - living (that is, for the living) or dead (that is, for the dead), it is impossible to give an exact answer. Here the accuracy and original meaning have already been lost and erased. This question is just as impossible to answer as the question of whether the hero is a dead man or a living creature. He is a living being, invading the realm of the dead as a daring intruder and kidnapper. We have a violation of the established order here too. The hero drinks the wrong water that he, as a dead man, should have, and thereby gains strength, steals it, just as he steals rejuvenating apples and other curiosities.

Thus, I assume that “living and dead water” and “weak and strong water” are one and the same. A raven flying away with two bubbles brings exactly this water. A dead man who wants to go to another world uses only water. A living person who wants to get there also uses only one. A person who has set foot on the path of death and wants to return to life; uses both types of water.

These assumptions must remain a hypothesis until other more accurate materials are found. But in the light of these assumptions, we can argue that Ishtar, before getting to another world, drinks only “dead” water, and that there is a pass here. Returning, she drinks another. It is only necessary to add that this double water must be distinguished from the “healing and living” water that heals blindness, etc., also obtained in the next world. This water will be discussed when considering the thirtieth kingdom.

23. Dolls

So, the consideration of some magical objects again leads us to the area to which the consideration of many other elements leads: to the kingdom of the dead.

The consideration of another object that stands on the border of magical assistants and magical objects, namely dolls, leads to this same area.

Such a doll appears in the fairy tale “Vasilisa the Beautiful” (Aph. 104). Here the mother dies: “Dying, the merchant’s wife called her daughter to her, took out a doll from under the blanket, gave it to her and said: “I am dying and, together with my parent’s blessing, I am leaving you this doll; always keep it with you and don’t show it to anyone, and when some misfortune befalls you, give it something to eat and ask her for advice.” Azadovsky, Andreev and Sokolov, who published the Afanasyevsky collection, are inclined to consider this motif not folklore, since it has no analogies in folklore. But, firstly, these analogies exist: in the fairy tale “Gryaznavka” (See 214) there are dolls, which are addressed with the same formula as in Afanasyev: “You, dolls, eat, listen to my grief.” In a northern fairy tale: “I have four dolls in my chest, whatever you need, they will help you,” says the mother before her daughter’s death (Northern 70). Along the way, we draw attention to the fact that this doll needs to be fed. Secondly, dolls figure widely in the beliefs of a wide variety of peoples, and the analogy with a fairy tale is quite accurate.

To better understand this motive, let us give another incident from a fairy tale. In the fairy tale “Prince Danila-Spoken” (Aph. 114), the pursued girl gradually sinks into the earth (i.e., goes into the underworld) and leaves in her place four dolls, who respond to the pursuer for her with her voice. In this case, the pupa serves as a substitute for the one who has gone underground.

This is exactly the role that the doll played in the beliefs of many peoples. “It is known that the Ostyaks, Golds, Gilyaks, Orochs, Chinese, and in Europe the Mari, Chuvash and many other peoples made a “wooden blockhead” or a doll in memory of a deceased family member, which was considered a container for the soul of the deceased. This image was fed with all that that they ate themselves, and generally looked after him as if he were alive" (Zelenin 1936, 137). This belief is by no means a specific feature of Siberia or Europe. In Africa, among Eime, when a wife dies and the husband remarries, he keeps a doll in his hut, “which represents this wife in the other world. She is given all sorts of honors so that the wife in the next world does not be jealous of the wife in this world” (Meinhof 63 ). In the former Netherlands New Guinea, after death, a figure is carved with which to prophesy. Frazer describes in detail how the soul of a sick person is trapped in a doll (Frazer 1911, I, 53–54). By containing the soul of the patient, the doll could contain or represent the soul of the deceased in general. Relatives make a small doll which they take care of; a dead person is incarnated in this doll. The doll is fed at the table, put to bed, etc. (Kharuzin 1905, 234).

In Egypt, this idea was reflected in the funeral cult. Yu. P. Frantsov noted this phenomenon in his work on ancient Egyptian tales about high priests. “In ancient Egyptian magic, the use of figurines for magical purposes was widely known. With the nuance with which the use of figurines in our fairy tale is conveyed as an assistant figure, the idea became widespread in the funeral cult in the form of “ushebti” or “shauabti” assistant figures. "(Frantsov 1935, 171–172). And although the figures in question have an animal appearance, the connection here is still undeniable, since the human ancestor replaced the animal ancestor. As Wiedemann points out, the ushabti figurines had the appearance of figurines. They were placed in the grave of the deceased, they were called “answers” and were supposed to help” in the afterlife (Wiedemann 26).

All these materials show what ideas and customs this doll goes back to. She represents the deceased, she needs to be fed, and then the deceased, incarnated in this doll, will provide assistance.

24. Conclusion

The materials presented here show that magical objects have different origins in their content.

The main groups are outlined: these are objects of animal origin, plant origin, objects based on tools, objects of diverse composition, which are attributed either independent or personified forces, and, finally, objects associated with the cult of the dead.

This is just a preliminary outline. With a more detailed analysis, new groups may be found; items not considered here can be classified into the groups outlined here.

This is the picture of objects from the perspective of their composition. As a historical category as a whole, they are traced back to the same roots to which the assistant is traced, constituting only a variety of it.

The entire course of the fairy tale, the fact that magical objects were presented by the yaga (or her equivalents), the kings of beasts, found in the forest, etc., convince of the harmony and integrity of the fairy tale, of its historical value and meaningfulness.

Yaga and her gifts represent two sides of one whole, and the fairy tale has preserved this connection very fully.

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test work in cultural studies

Analysis of the book by V.Ya. Propp “Historical roots of a fairy tale” (chapters 1-2)

Performed:

Checked:

Moscow, 2010

Biography

PROPP, VLADIMIR YAKOVLEVICH(1895–1970), Russian folklorist, one of the founders of modern text theory. Born April 17 (29), 1895 in St. Petersburg. In 1914–1918 he studied Russian and German philology at Petrograd University, and subsequently taught German at universities in Leningrad. Since 1932 - teacher, since 1938 professor at Leningrad State University, successively in the departments of Romance-Germanic philology, folklore and, until 1969, Russian literature. Propp died in Leningrad on August 22, 1970.

One of Propp’s first publications (after several articles) was a small book, The Morphology of a Fairy Tale, published in Leningrad in 1928, which was met with sympathy, but in the next three decades was known only to a narrow circle of specialists. Subsequently, Propp continued his research within the walls of Leningrad State University; Thanks to the books The Historical Roots of a Fairy Tale (1946) and the Russian Heroic Epic (1955, 2nd ed. 1958), he gained a reputation as a venerable folklorist. In 1958, an English translation of Morphology of a Fairy Tale was published in the United States, followed by American reprints and translations into many other languages. Propp's early work became a world-class scientific bestseller, and in the USSR in 1969, more than forty years after the first publication and just before the death of the scientist, the second Russian edition of the Morphology of Fairy Tales appeared, which almost immediately became almost the same bibliographic rarity as the first (up to reissues of the 1990s).

The exceptional resonance caused by the publications of Morphology of the Fairy Tale in the West, and its subsequent enormous influence, were due to the new context in which this book found itself at the turn of the 1950s–1960s: the widespread dissemination of structural-semiotic (see STRUCTURALISM) methods and the appearance of an early version generative grammar. Propp, in the late 1920s, proposed a relatively small set of deep functions that define the seemingly infinite variety of narrative structures of fairy tales, as well as a formal apparatus for generating these surface structures. More than three decades later, all this, on the one hand, turned out to be consonant with the ideas of early generative grammar, and on the other, demonstrated the applicability of such methods to structures of a higher level than the sentence. It is not surprising that Propp’s work became one of the most important starting points for the formation of text theory and narrative analysis in the 1960s and attracted the attention not only of specialists in folklore, semiotics and literary criticism, such as C. Lévi-Strauss, A. Greimas (1917– 1992) or S. Bremont, but also a wide range of linguists, and somewhat later, in the 1970s, also specialists in discourse theory, artificial intelligence and cognitive science - D. Rumelhart and others (see DISCOURSE). References to Propp (sometimes as part of polemics with them) became mandatory in their works, and in the 1970s, many domestic linguists first learned about the scientist by reading foreign publications.

The world fame of the Morphology of Fairy Tales forced us to take a different look at the later and far from structuralist works of Propp, whose creative legacy, including articles, is now considered as a single whole and published with this in mind.

Bibliography

Propp V. Ya. “Historical roots of a fairy tale” - L. Leningrad State University Publishing House, 1986 - 364 p.
Propp V. Ya. “Folklore and reality” - M.: Nauka, 1989. - 233s.

Historical roots of fairy tales

The main problem in the assigned work

The book is one whole, and one topic smoothly flows into another. And each topic presented is fully revealed by the author. There are also detailed premises. The main problem posed in this work is to expand the scope of study and find the historical basis that brought the fairy tale to life and find out the sources of the fairy tale in historical reality.

In fairy tales there is no precise reminder of any particular stage of culture: here various historical cycles and cultural styles mix and collide with each other. Only patterns of behavior that could exist in many cultural cycles and at different historical moments have been preserved here.

The fairy tale is so rich and varied that it is impossible to study the entire phenomenon of the fairy tale in its entirety and among all peoples. Therefore, the material must be limited, and we will limit it to fairy tales.

Terminology

Chapter 1

"Magic Tales"- these are special fairy tales that can be called magical.

"Morphologies of fairy tales" - in this book, Propp identified the fairy tale genre quite accurately; the author divides fairy tales into type and complexity of the plot

Genesis-(Greek)origin, emergence, (be)birth.

"Historical past" - the study comes down to determining under what social system individual motives and the entire tale were created .

"Build" - the concept is very general.The study comes down to determining under what social system the individual motives and the entire fairy tale were created. Fairy tales can be compared not with the clan system, but with the institution of the clan system.

Exogamy- the prohibition of marriage relations between members of a kinship (clan, phratry) or local (for example, community) collective, which existed both in the era of the primitive communal system and at a later time. Numerous theories of the origin of exogamy are combined mainly into 3 main groups, which suggest that the transition to exogamy is due to:

1) the need to avoid harmful consequences from marriages between blood relatives (L. G. Morgan and others);

2) the desire to expand social contacts and establish relationships with other groups (E. Taylor, A. M. Zolotarev, C. Levi-Strauss);

3) the need to establish social peace in the team, since sexual relations and the conflicts accompanying them were taken outside its boundaries (S. P. Tolstov, Yu. I. Semenov).

"Rethinking»- convenient in the sense that it indicates the process of change that has taken place; the fact of rethinking proves that some changes have occurred in the life of the people, and these changes entail a change in motive. These changes must in any individual case be shown and explained.

« Prerequisites"-it is necessary to decipher the concept of the historical past, to determine what exactly from this past is necessary to explain the fairy tale.

"Motives of a fairy tale"- are explained by the fact that they reflect the institutions that once existed, but there are motives that are not directly related to any institutions, and so not everything is explained by the presence of certain institutions.

"Rite" - a set of conditional, traditional actions, devoid of immediate practical expediency, but serving as a symbol of certain social relations, a form of their visual expression and consolidation. Some religions use rituals to consolidate certain religious ideas in the minds of believers and strengthen faith in almighty forces.

"Folklore"- This is a type of collective verbal activity that is carried out orally. The main categories of folklore are collectivity, traditionality, formulaicity, variability, the presence of a performer, and syncretism. Folklore is divided into two groups - ritual and non-ritual.

"Myth"-( Greek) Myth here will be understood as a story about deities or divine beings in whose reality people believe. The point here is about faith not as a psychological factor, but as a historical one.

"Pedantry"-(from Italian pedare, to educate) is a phenomenon that occurs in various areas of life, but most often accompanies scholarship and pedagogical activity.

"Semantics"-(French and Greek. denoting) in the broad sense of the word, the analysis of the relationship between linguistic expressions and the world, real or imaginary.

"Genetics"-(Greek: coming from someone)study of the origin of phenomena.Genetics precedes history; it paves the way for history.

Chapter 2

"Absences" - a special mood, a mood of epic calm, this calm is only an artistic shell, contrasting with the internal passionate and tragic, comic-realistic dynamics.

"Frizer"-about the isolation of kings (a phenomenon of early statehood, the king or leader is credited with magical power over nature, the sky, rain, people, livestock, and the well-being of the people depends on his well-being).

"Insulation"- royal children in the fairy tale (in the fairy tale all types of prohibitions that once surrounded the royal family were preserved: the prohibition of light, sight, food, contact with the earth, communication with people).

"The Girl's Conclusion"-(this fear leads to the fact that menstruating girls are subjected to imprisonment in order to protect them from dangers, a ban on cutting hair, which was considered the seat of the soul and magical power, but the ban on cutting hair is not stated directly anywhere in the fairy tale, nevertheless, the long hair of the imprisoned princess - a frequently occurring feature that gives special attractiveness);

"Trouble and opposition" - the main form of the plot, from which a plot is created, the forms of which are varied, they cannot be considered together.

« Equipment for the hero on the road"(the movement is never outlined in detail, it is always mentioned in only two or three words, but first of all we must know where the hero ends up on his path);

Each researcher proceeds from some prerequisites that he has before he starts work.

The history of the study of the fairy tale has been outlined more than once, and we do not need to list the works. But if we ask ourselves why there are still no completely solid and universally accepted results, we will see that this often happens precisely because the authors proceed from false premises.

For us, this implies that we need to carefully check our premises before starting the study.

"Fairy tales" - Propp's first premise

In fairy tales, Propp identifies a special line of plots that underlies other fairy tales. The tale begins with damage and the desire to have something, then the hero is sent from home to meet an assistant who will help find the object of the search. What follows is a duel, a return and a chase; on the way home the hero is again tested. But later the hero again arrives in the kingdom and gets married. This scheme allows us to consider all fairy tales with the same plot; the variety of fairy tales is given by the many characters.

The first premise is that among fairy tales there is a special category of fairy tales, usually called fairy tales. These tales can be isolated from others and studied independently. The very fact of isolation may raise doubts. Isn't the principle of connection in which we must study phenomena violated here? However, in the end, all the phenomena of the world are interconnected, meanwhile, science always distinguishes the phenomena that are subject to its study from among other phenomena. It's all about where and how the border is drawn.

The emergence of a fairy tale is not connected with the production basis on which it began to be written down from the beginning of the 19th century. This leads us to the next premise, which for now is formulated in a very general form: the fairy tale must be compared with the historical reality of the past and its roots must be sought in it.This premise contains the concept of “historical past”. The concept of “historical past” leads us to the fact that the fairy tale has preserved traces of disappeared forms of social life. For example, the fairy tale contains different forms of marriage than now.

We, therefore, need to decipher the concept of the historical past, determine what exactly from this past is necessary to explain the fairy tale.

If a fairy tale is considered as a product that arose on a production basis, then it becomes clear what forms are reflected in it. But in the study of the sources of the tale there will be no advance from the object or technology. The study comes down to determining under what social system the individual motives and the entire fairy tale were created.The concept of "build" -the study comes down to determining under what social system individual motives and the entire tale were created. The premise is that the fairy tale has preserved traces of vanished forms of social life, that these remains need to be studied, and that such study will reveal the sources of many of the fairy tale's motifs.Many motifs in the tale, however, are explained by the fact that they reflect institutions that once existed, but there are motifs that are not directly related to any institutions. Therefore, this area is not enough as a material for comparison. Not everything is explained by the presence of certain institutions.

Description of work

PROPP, VLADIMIR YAKOVLEVICH (1895–1970), Russian folklorist, one of the founders of modern text theory. Born April 17 (29), 1895 in St. Petersburg. In 1914–1918 he studied Russian and German philology at Petrograd University, and subsequently taught German at universities in Leningrad. Since 1932 - teacher, since 1938 professor at Leningrad State University, successively in the departments of Romance-Germanic philology, folklore and, until 1969, Russian literature. Propp died in Leningrad on August 22, 1970.