How many tales are there in Afanasyev’s collection of Russian folk tales. Russian folk tales A

A fairy tale is an amazing creation of the people; it elevates a person, entertains him, gives him faith in his own strength and in miracles. We become acquainted with this genre of literature, perhaps the most popular and beloved, in childhood, therefore, in the minds of many people, fairy tales are associated with something simple, even primitive, understandable even to a small child. However, this is a deep misconception. Folk tales are not as simple as they might seem at first glance. This is a multifaceted, deep layer of folk art that carries the wisdom of generations, enclosed in a laconic and unusually figurative form.

The Russian fairy tale is a special genre of folklore; it has not only an entertaining plot and magical characters, but also an amazing poetry of language that opens up to the reader the world of human feelings and relationships; it affirms kindness and justice, and also introduces Russian culture, wise folk experience, and the native language.

Fairy tales belong to folk art, they do not have an author, but we know the names of fairy tale researchers who carefully collected and wrote them down. One of the most famous and outstanding collectors of fairy tales was the ethnographer, historian and literary critic A. N. Afanasyev. In 1855–1864 he compiled the most complete collection of fairy tales - “Russian Folk Tales”, which included about 600 texts recorded in different parts of Russia. This book has become an example of fairy-tale literature and a source of inspiration for many Russian writers and poets.

The heterogeneity of fairy tales, the wide range of themes and plots, the variety of motives, characters and methods of resolving conflicts make the task of defining a fairy tale by genre very difficult. However, there is a common feature inherent in all fairy tales - a combination of fiction and truth.

Today, there is a generally accepted classification of fairy tales, in which several groups are distinguished: fairy tales, fairy tales about animals, social and everyday (or novelistic) and boring fairy tales. A. N. Afanasyev also singled out the so-called “cherished” fairy tales, known for their erotic content and profanity.

In our collection we included fairy tales about animals and fairy tales - as the most common, vibrant and beloved folk tales.

In fairy tales about animals, fish, animals, birds and even insects act; they talk to each other, quarrel, make peace and get married. However, there are almost no miracles in these fairy tales; their heroes are very real inhabitants of the forests.

Man has long been a part of nature, constantly fighting with it, he at the same time sought protection from it, which is reflected in folklore. By depicting animals, people gave these characters human traits, while at the same time preserving their real habits and “way of life.” Subsequently, a fable, parable meaning was introduced into many tales about animals.

There are relatively few tales about animals: they occupy a tenth of the fairy tale epic. Main characters: fox, wolf, bear, hare, goat, horse, raven, rooster. The most common characters in fairy tales about animals are the fox and the wolf, who have constant characteristics: the fox is cunning and treacherous, and the wolf is angry, greedy and stupid. For other animal characters, the characteristics are not so sharply defined, they vary from fairy tale to fairy tale.

The animal epic reflected human life with all its passions, as well as a realistic depiction of human life, in particular, peasant life. Most fairy tales about animals are distinguished by a simple plot and brevity, but at the same time the plots themselves are unusually diverse. Tales about animals necessarily contain a moral, which, as a rule, is not stated directly, but follows from the content.

The main part of Russian folklore consists of fairy tales - a unique type of adventure oral literature. In these tales we encounter the most incredible inventions, with the spiritualization of objects and phenomena of the surrounding world. These features are characteristic of fairy tales of all peoples of the world. Their heroes perform amazing feats, kill monsters, obtain living and dead water, free from captivity and save innocents from death; they are endowed with miraculous qualities: they turn into animals, walk along the bottom of the sea, fly through the air. They emerge victorious from all dangers and trials and always achieve what they set out to do. Fantastic, unique heroes of fairy tales are well known to everyone since childhood: Baba Yaga, Koschey, the Serpent Gorynych, the Frog Princess... And who among us does not sometimes dream of having a flying carpet, a self-assembled tablecloth, or a magic ring that can do everything? wishes!

In a Russian fairy tale, the image of a positive hero is central; the entire interest of the narrative is focused on his fate. He embodies the popular ideal of beauty, moral strength, kindness, and popular ideas about justice. Numerous dangers, miracles, unexpected trials await the hero, and he is often threatened with death. But everything ends well - this is the main principle of a fairy tale, which reflects popular ideas about good and evil, and the heroes became the embodiment of fighters for age-old folk ideals.

The fantastic, magical form of Russian fairy tales reflects descriptions of national life, psychology and folk customs, which gives fairy tales additional cultural value. And the abundance of apt comparisons, epithets, figurative expressions, songs and rhythmic repetitions makes the reader, forgetting about everything, plunge headlong into magical reality.

All peoples of the world have fairy tales. We found it interesting to compare fairy tales that are found in world folklore, to trace their national features, differences and similarities, and compositional features. Based on the work of famous fairy tale researchers and our own observations, we included in this book comments on some fairy tales with so-called “wandering” plots.

What you see here is not just a collection of fairy tales, but a real chest with gems of folk wisdom, the colors and brilliance of which you can admire endlessly. Over the centuries, these imperishable jewels have taught us to love good and hate evil, inspire us with the heroism and resilience of heroes and can serve as real consolation and entertainment in any life situation.

Birds of Sirina. Popular illustration

Once upon a time there was a man; he had a cat, but it was so mischievous that it was a disaster! The guy is tired of him. So the man thought and thought, took the cat, put it in a bag, tied it up and carried it into the forest. He brought it and threw it in the forest: let it disappear! The cat walked and walked and came across a hut in which the forester lived; he climbed into the attic and lies down for himself, and if he wants to eat, he will go through the forest to catch birds and mice, eat his fill and go back to the attic, and he won’t have enough grief!

One day a cat went for a walk, and a fox met him, saw the cat and was surprised:

“I’ve been living in the forest for so many years, but I’ve never seen such an animal.”

She bowed to the cat and asked:

“Tell me, good fellow, who are you, how did you come here - and what should I call you by name?”

And the cat threw up his fur and said:

“I was sent to you from the Siberian forests as a mayor, and my name is Kotofey Ivanovich.”

“Oh, Kotofey Ivanovich,” says the fox, “I didn’t know about you, I didn’t know; Well, let's go visit me.

The cat went to the fox; She brought him to her hole and began to treat him to various game, and she herself asked:

- What, Kotofey Ivanovich, are you married or single?

“Single,” says the cat.

- And I, fox, - maiden, marry me.

The cat agreed, and they began to feast and have fun.

The next day the fox went to get supplies so that she and her young husband could have something to live with; and the cat stayed at home.

“Russian Treasured Tales” by A.N. Afanasyev was published in Geneva more than a hundred years ago. They appeared without the name of the publisher, sine anno. On the title page, under the title, it was only stated: “Balaam. Typical art of the monastic brethren. Year of obscurantism." And on the counter-title there was a note: “Printed exclusively for archaeologists and bibliophiles in a small number of copies.”

Extremely rare already in the last century, Afanasyev’s book has become almost a phantom these days. Judging by the works of Soviet folklorists, only two or three copies of “Treasured Tales” have been preserved in the special departments of the largest libraries in Leningrad and Moscow. The manuscript of Afanasyev’s book is in the Leningrad Institute of Russian Literature of the USSR Academy of Sciences (“Russian folk tales not for publication,” Archive, No. R-1, inventory 1, No. 112). The only copy of “Fairy Tales” that belonged to the Paris National Library disappeared before the First World War. The book is not listed in the catalogs of the British Museum library.

By reprinting Afanasyev’s “Treasured Tales,” we hope to introduce Western and Russian readers to a little-known facet of the Russian imagination - “raunchy”, obscene fairy tales, in which, as the folklorist puts it, “genuine folk speech flows with a living spring, sparkling with all the brilliant and witty sides of the common people.” .

Obscene? Afanasyev did not consider them that way. “They just can’t understand,” he said, “that in these folk stories there is a million times more morality than in sermons full of school rhetoric.”

“Russian Treasured Tales” is organically connected with Afanasyev’s collection of fairy tales, which has become a classic. Fairy tales of immodest content, like the tales of the famous collection, were delivered to Afanasyev by the same collectors and contributors: V.I. Dal, P.I. Yakushkin, Voronezh local historian N.I. Vtorov. In both collections we find the same themes, motifs, plots, with the only difference being that the satirical arrows of “Treasured Tales” are more poisonous, and the language is in some places quite rude. There is even a case when the first, quite “decent” half of the story is placed in a classic collection, while the other, less modest, is in “Treasured Tales”. We are talking about the story “A Man, a Bear, a Fox and a Horsefly.”

There is no need to dwell in detail on why Afanasyev, when publishing “Folk Russian Fairy Tales” (issues 1–8, 1855–1863), was forced to refuse to include that part, which a decade later would be published under the title “Folk Russian Fairy Tales Not for Printing” (the epithet “cherished” appears only in the title of the second and last edition of “Fairy Tales”). Soviet scientist V.P. Anikin explains this refusal this way: “It was impossible to publish anti-popov and anti-lord tales in Russia.” Is it possible to publish - in an uncut and uncleaned form - “Treasured Tales” in Afanasyev’s homeland today? We do not find an answer to this from V.P. Anikin.

The question remains open of how immodest fairy tales got abroad. Mark Azadovsky suggests that in the summer of 1860, during his trip to Western Europe, Afanasyev gave them to Herzen or another emigrant. It is possible that the publisher of Kolokol contributed to the release of Fairy Tales. Subsequent searches, perhaps, will help illuminate the history of the publication of “Russian Treasured Tales” - a book that stumbled over the obstacles of not only tsarist, but also Soviet censorship.

The publication of our cherished fairy tales... is almost a unique phenomenon of its kind. It could easily be that this is precisely why our publication will give rise to all sorts of complaints and outcries not only against the daring publisher, but also against the people who created such tales in which the people's imagination in vivid pictures and without any hesitation in expressions deployed all its strength and all its wealth your humor. Leaving aside all possible complaints against us, we must say that any outcry against the people would be not only injustice, but also an expression of complete ignorance, which for the most part, by the way, is one of the inalienable properties of a screaming pruderie. Our cherished fairy tales are a one-of-a-kind phenomenon, as we said, especially because we do not know of another publication in which genuine folk speech would flow in such a living way in a fairy-tale form, sparkling with all the brilliant and witty sides of the common people.

The literatures of other nations present many similar treasured stories and have long been ahead of us in this regard. If not in the form of fairy tales, then in the form of songs, conversations, short stories, farces, sottises, moralites, dictons, etc., other peoples have a huge number of works in which the popular mind, just as little embarrassed by expressions and pictures, marked it with humor, hooked me with satire and sharply exposed different aspects of life to ridicule. Who doubts that the playful stories of Boccaccio are not drawn from popular life, that the countless French short stories and faceties of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries are not from the same source as the satirical works of the Spaniards, the Spottliede and Schmahschriften of the Germans, this mass of lampoons and various flying leaflets in all languages, which appeared about all kinds of events in private and public life - not folk works? In Russian literature, however, there is still a whole section of unprintable folk expressions, not for publication. In the literatures of other nations, such barriers to popular speech have not existed for a long time.

...So, accusing the Russian people of crude cynicism would be equivalent to accusing all other peoples of the same thing, in other words, it naturally comes down to zero. The erotic content of cherished Russian fairy tales, without saying anything for or against the morality of the Russian people, simply points only to that side of life that most gives free rein to humor, satire and irony. Our fairy tales are transmitted in the unartificial form as they came from the lips of the people and were recorded from the words of the storytellers. This is their peculiarity: nothing has been touched in them, there are no embellishments or additions. We will not dwell on the fact that in different parts of wider Rus' the same fairy tale is told differently. There are, of course, many such options, and most of them, no doubt, pass from mouth to mouth, without having yet been overheard or written down by collectors. The options we present are taken from among the most famous or most characteristic for some reason.

Let us note... that that part of the fairy tales, where the characters are animals, perfectly depicts all the ingenuity and all the power of observation of our commoner. Far from cities, working in the fields, forests, and rivers, everywhere he deeply understands the nature he loves, faithfully spies and subtly studies the life around him. The vividly captured aspects of this silent, but eloquent life for him, are themselves transferred to his brothers - and a story full of life and light humor is ready. The section of fairy tales about the so-called “foal breed” by the people, of which we have so far presented only a small part, clearly illuminates both the attitude of our peasant to his spiritual shepherds and his correct understanding of them.

Our treasured tales are curious in addition to many aspects in the following respect. They provide an important scientist, a thoughtful researcher of the Russian people with a vast field for comparing the content of some of them with stories of almost the same content by foreign writers, with the works of other peoples. How did Boccaccio’s stories (see, for example, the fairy tale “The Merchant’s Wife and Clerk”), satires and farces of the French of the 16th century penetrate into the Russian backwaters, how did the Western short story degenerate into a Russian fairy tale, what is their social side, where and, perhaps, even from whose side are traces of influence, what kind of doubts and conclusions from the evidence of such an identity, etc., etc.

Publisher: Rech, 2017

Series: Gift of Speech

ISBN: 978-5-9268-2471-8

Pages: 320 (Offset)

The book was made to order from Labyrinth, so it is sold only there!

A luxurious collection of Russian folk tales was published by the Rech publishing house. Just a holiday for the soul! A collection of fairy tales with illustrations by Tatyana Mavrina!

Tatyana Alekseevna Mavrina is called “the most Russian of all artists.” Mavrina is the only Soviet artist awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Prize for his contribution to the illustration of children's literature.

Her works are easily recognizable. Opening a book, any book illustrated by Tatyana Mavrina, you immediately find yourself in a fairy tale. She creates her own fairy-tale world from bright colors and colors. Here good fellows gallop on mighty horses, there is a hut on chicken legs in the deep forest, and beauties live in high towers.

The book includes 23 full-page illustrations.

Not enough - it will be(

There is no such thing as too much beauty)

Tatyana Mavrina also drew an intricate initial letter for each fairy tale.

The book is in a convenient format. Embossed cover. The spine is fabric. The book was printed in Latvia.

The book contains a large number of fairy tales. It is impossible to list all the tales included in this collection. The contents of the book alone span three pages. There are 70 fairy tales in total.

These tales are truly folk tales, because they were collected by Alexander Nikolaevich Afanasyev, an outstanding Russian scientist, cultural historian, ethnographer and folklorist. Many of us grew up reading these fairy tales.

Moreover, for this edition, Rech selected the most interesting and not the most famous fairy tales.

Fairy tales are not suitable for very young children. There is no Turnip or Kolobok here) The tales are intended for older children. For primary school age.

The font is unusual, the letters are slightly elongated. Comfortable for reading.

The book will become one of the pearls of your home library.

Just like Mavrina’s Fairytale ABC!

RUSSIAN TREATED TALES

Collected by A.N. Afanasyev

“What a shame? Stealing is a shame, but saying nothing, anything is possible.”

("Strange Names").

A few words about this book

Preface by A.N. Afanasyev to the 2nd edition

Shy lady Merchant's wife and clerk

Like a dog

Marriage is a fool

Sowing X...EV

Wonderful pipe

Miracle ointment

Magic ring

Men and master

Good father

Bride without a head

timid bride

Nikola Dunlyansky

Husband on balls

A man at a woman's work

Family conversations

Strange names

The soldier will decide

The soldier himself sleeps, and the fuck works

The soldier and the devil

Runaway Soldier

Soldier, man and woman

Soldier and Ukrainian girl

Soldier and Little Russian

The man and the devil

Soldier and pop

Hunter and goblin

Sly woman

Bet

Bishop's response

Laughter and grief

Dobry pop

Pop neighs like a stallion

The priest's family and the farmhand

Pop and farmhand

Pop, priest, priest and farm laborer

Pop and man

Piglet

Cow trial

Male funeral

Greedy pop

The tale of how a priest gave birth to a calf

Spiritual father

Pop and Gypsy

Bring on the heat

The Blind Man's Wife

Pop and trap

Senile verse

Jokes

Bad - not bad

The groom's first meeting with the bride

Two groom brothers

Clever housewife

Woman's tricks

Chatty wife

Mother-in-law and son-in-law are a fool

Pike head

Man, bear, fox and horsefly

Cat and fox

Fox and Hare

Louse and flea

Bear and woman

Sparrow and mare

Dog and woodpecker

Hot gag

P...and ass

Enraged lady

Notes

A FEW WORDS ABOUT THIS BOOK

“Russian Treasured Tales” by A.N. Afanasyev was published in Geneva more than a hundred years ago. They appeared without the name of the publisher, sine anno. On the title page, under the title, it was only stated: “Valaam. By the typical art of the monastic brethren. The year of obscurantism.” And on the counter-title there was a note: “Printed exclusively for archaeologists and bibliophiles in a small number of copies.”

Extremely rare already in the last century, Afanasyev’s book has become almost a phantom these days. Judging by the works of Soviet folklorists, only two or three copies of “Treasured Tales” have been preserved in special departments of the largest libraries in Leningrad and Moscow. The manuscript of Afanasyev's book is in the Leningrad Institute of Russian Literature of the USSR Academy of Sciences ("Russian folk tales not for publication, Archive, No. R-1, inventory 1, No. 112). The only copy of "Fairy Tales", which belonged to the Paris National Library, disappeared before the First World War war The book is not listed in the catalogs of the British Museum library.

By republishing Afanasyev’s “Treasured Tales,” we hope to acquaint Western and Russian readers with a little-known facet of the Russian imagination - “raunchy”, obscene fairy tales, in which, as the folklorist puts it, “genuine folk speech flows with a living spring, sparkling with all the brilliant and witty sides of the common people.” .

Obscene? Afanasyev did not consider them that way. “They just can’t understand,” he said, “that in these folk stories there is a million times more morality than in sermons full of school rhetoric.”

“Russian Treasured Tales” is organically connected with Afanasyev’s collection of fairy tales, which has become a classic. Fairy tales of immodest content, like the tales of the famous collection, were delivered to Afanasyev by the same collectors and contributors: V.I. Dal, P.I. Yakushkin, Voronezh local historian N.I. Vtorov. In both collections we find the same themes, motifs, plots, with the only difference being that the satirical arrows of “Treasured Tales” are more poisonous, and the language is quite rude in places. There is even a case when the first, quite “decent” half of the story is placed in a classic collection, while the other, less modest, is in “Treasured Tales”. We are talking about the story "A Man, a Bear, a Fox and a Horsefly."

There is no need to dwell in detail on why Afanasyev, when publishing “Folk Russian Fairy Tales” (issues 1–8, 1855–1863), was forced to refuse to include that part, which a decade later would be published under the title “Folk Russian Fairy Tales Not for Printing.” (the epithet “cherished” appears only in the title of the second and last edition of “Fairy Tales”). Soviet scientist V.P. Anikin explains this refusal this way: “It was impossible to publish anti-popov and anti-lord tales in Russia.” Is it possible to publish - in an uncut and uncleaned form - "Treasured Tales" in Afanasyev's homeland today? We do not find an answer to this from V.P. Anikin.

The question remains open of how immodest fairy tales got abroad. Mark Azadovsky suggests that in the summer of 1860, during his trip to Western Europe, Afanasyev gave them to Herzen or another emigrant. It is possible that the publisher of Kolokol contributed to the release of Fairy Tales. Subsequent searches, perhaps, will help illuminate the history of the publication of “Russian Treasured Tales” - a book that stumbled over the obstacles of not only tsarist, but also Soviet censorship.

PREFACE BY A.N.AFANASYEV TO THE 2nd EDITION

"Honny soit, qui mal y pense"

The publication of our cherished fairy tales... is almost a unique phenomenon of its kind. It could easily be that this is precisely why our publication will give rise to all sorts of complaints and outcries not only against the daring publisher, but also against the people who created such tales in which the people's imagination in vivid pictures and without any hesitation in expressions deployed all its strength and all its wealth your humor. Leaving aside all possible complaints against us, we must say that any outcry against the people would be not only injustice, but also an expression of complete ignorance, which for the most part, by the way, is one of the inalienable properties of a flashy pruderie. Our cherished fairy tales are a one-of-a-kind phenomenon, as we said, especially because we do not know of another publication in which genuine folk speech would flow in such a living way in a fairy-tale form, sparkling with all the brilliant and witty sides of the common people.

The literatures of other nations present many similar treasured stories and have long been ahead of us in this regard. If not in the form of fairy tales, then in the form of songs, conversations, short stories, farces, sottises, moralites, dictons, etc., other peoples have a huge number of works in which the popular mind, just as little embarrassed by expressions and pictures, marked it with humor, hooked me with satire and sharply exposed different aspects of life to ridicule. Who doubts that the playful stories of Boccaccio are not drawn from popular life, that the countless French short stories and faceties of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries are not from the same source as the satirical works of the Spaniards, the Spottliede and Schmahschriften of the Germans, this mass of lampoons and various flying leaflets in all languages, which appeared about all kinds of events in private and public life - not folk works? In Russian literature, however, there is still a whole section of unprintable folk expressions, not for publication. In the literatures of other nations, such barriers to popular speech have not existed for a long time.

...So, accusing the Russian people of crude cynicism would be equivalent to accusing all other peoples of the same thing, in other words, it naturally comes down to zero. The erotic content of cherished Russian fairy tales, without saying anything for or against the morality of the Russian people, simply points only to that side of life that most gives free rein to humor, satire and irony. Our fairy tales are transmitted in the unartificial form as they came from the lips of the people and were recorded from the words of the storytellers. This is their peculiarity: nothing has been touched in them, there are no embellishments or additions. We will not dwell on the fact that in different parts of wider Rus' the same fairy tale is told differently. There are, of course, many such options, and most of them, no doubt, pass from mouth to mouth, without having yet been overheard or written down by collectors. The options we present are taken from among the most famous or most characteristic for some reason.

Let us note... that that part of the fairy tales, where the characters are animals, perfectly depicts all the ingenuity and all the power of observation of our commoner. Far from cities, working in the fields, forests, and rivers, everywhere he deeply understands the nature he loves, faithfully spies and subtly studies the life around him. The vividly captured aspects of this silent, but eloquent life for him, are themselves transferred to his brothers - and a story full of life and light humor is ready. The section of fairy tales about the so-called “foal breed” by the people, of which we have so far presented only a small part, brightly illuminates both the attitude of our peasant to his spiritual shepherds and his correct understanding of them.

Propp sees in folk tales a reminder of totemic initiation rituals. The fairy tale does not describe a system of rituals of any specific stage of culture, but its initiation scenario expresses the ahistorical archetypal behavior of the psyche. In fairy tales there is no exact reminder of any 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 typological correspondence between the fairy tale and the initiation rite, established by Propp in his 1946 book, was only just beginning to develop in the mid-70s in studies comparing folklore narratives and rites of “passage”.

29. Folk demonology. Bylichki.

Demonological stories are one of the types of non-fairy tale prose, including fairy tales and stories; stories about supernatural beings and phenomena. The tales expressed ideas and concepts about supernatural forces, about the intervention of creatures from lower folk demonology. Bylichki - oral stories about goblins, brownies, merman, mermaids, kikimore, bannik, barn, fire snake, living dead/devils and in general about the intervention in human life of creatures from the world of folk religion. They are characterized by the narrator’s firm confidence in the existence of such forces, but unlike former events, the performer may have doubts. Little tales reflect the everyday likes and dislikes of their narrators. The division is made according to characters: about brownies, about goblins, etc.

30. Types of collections of fairy tales. Collection of Afanasyev.

The classification of fairy tales is given based on the research of the Finnish school and in particular A. Aarne, who divided fairy tales into three types - about animals, fairy tales themselves (magic) and anecdotes. Later, jokes were replaced by social and everyday tales. Tales about animals originated in ancient times. They reflected man's attempts to comprehend the laws of the animal world based on life experience. Propp, in the preface to Afanasyev’s collection of fairy tales, divides tales about animals into 1) tales about wild ones (“The Wolf and the Ice-hole”) 2) about wild and domestic ones (“Once upon a time there was a dog”) 3) about humans and wild ones (“The Man and the Bear” ) 4) about domestic animals (“About the Whacked Goat”) 5) about birds and fish (“The Fox and the Crane”) 6) tales about other animals and plants (“Kolobok”). The most important features: animism, anthropomorphism, totemism. In the depiction of animals, there is a desire for typification: the fox is always gray, the hare is cowardly, etc. - all this is the result of anthropomorphism in the explanation of nature. The main purpose of fairy tales about animals is explanatory and educational. They may explain why domesticated animals are domesticated or why a hare changes its skin. On the other hand, fairy tales often contain moral teachings (“The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats”). There are also so-called allegorical satirical tales (“The Fox and the Black Grouse”, in which, before eating the black grouse, the fox forces him to confess). In fairy tales about animals, convention is important, not fantasy. There is no magic in them - otherwise they become magical. The most important compositional feature of SOZh is the stringing of episodes in them - all meetings and actions are repeated many times - these tales are cumulative, i.e. have a chain structure (“Kolobok”, “Teremok”). The dialogues are expressed more strongly than in a fairy tale - various songs, sayings, etc.

Search. mythol. Russian roots fairy tales. Integrity of options. Most of his corrections relate to the language and style of the tales. For the first time, folklore texts are presented in variants; some dialectal features of the performers’ speech have been preserved; an extensive commentary has been prepared; Where possible, passport information about published texts was introduced. Let us note that from the point of view of modern requirements, not everything in the collection can satisfy us: Afanasyev did not see anything reprehensible in correct stylistic editing or in the creation of consolidated texts.

The collection “Russian Folk Tales” was compiled by A. N. Afanasyev in 1855-1864. For publication, 75 texts were extracted from the archives of the Russian Geographical Society. The remaining materials are collected from various sources. Afanasyev himself recorded no more than 10 fairy tales, mainly from his homeland - the Voronezh province. The largest number of texts belongs to the collection of V. I. Dahl. The largest number of fairy tales are fairy tales: animal tales (1-299), fairy tales (300-749), legendary tales (750-849) and novelistic tales (850-999).

Afanasyev's collection has some shortcomings. He depended on his correspondents, and therefore the quality of the recordings was uneven and varied. The places of occurrence of each fairy tale are not indicated.