I want to read a Russian fairy tale. Historical roots of fairy tales

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.

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.

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.

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 motive or one 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.

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.

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 Oceanic 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 we have to confine ourselves 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 it has turned out to be impossible to master the material in its entire breadth.

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 are studying repeated elements of a fairy tale, and for us it is not important whether we have taken 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.

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 plot and plot by motive, 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 provide 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.
Author

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 - this 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. Importance 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. Highlighting 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 motive or one 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 not 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 “build” 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 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, 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 separating them is methodologically incorrect.
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

8. Rethinking the ritual with a fairy tale

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 about this: “... 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 knowledge 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 starting the 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.

We examined the fairy tale in the sequence of its component parts.

These components of the composition are the same for different subjects. They consistently flow from one another and form a certain whole. We have reviewed the sources for each such motive. But we have not yet compared these sources in their relation to each other. In other words, we know the sources of individual motives, but we do not yet know the source of their sequence.

ity in the course of the action, we do not know the source of the tale as a whole. A quick retrospective look at the sources reviewed shows that many of the fairy tale motifs go back to various social institutions, among which the rite of passage occupies a special place. Further, we see that ideas about the afterlife and travel to another world play a big role. These two cycles quantitatively provide the maximum number of motifs. In addition, some motives have a different origin.

If we list the results obtained, arranging them by sources or historical correspondences, we will get the following picture. The following motives go back to the initiation complex: taking or expelling children into the forest or abducting them by the forest spirit, hut, selling, beating heroes with yaga, cutting off a finger, showing the remaining imaginary signs of death, baking yaga, cutting and reviving, swallowing and spewing, obtaining a magical remedy or a magical assistant, travesty, a forest teacher and cunning science. The subsequent period before marriage and the moment of return are reflected in the motifs of a large house, a laid table in it, hunters, robbers, a sister, a beauty in a coffin, a beauty in a wonderful garden and palace (Psyche), in the motifs of the unwashed woman, a husband at his wife’s wedding, a wife at the wedding of her husband, the forbidden closet and some others.

These correspondences allow us to assert that the cycle of initiation is the most ancient basis of the fairy tale. All these motifs, taken as a whole, can be combined into countless different fairy tales.

Another cycle, a circle that shows correspondence with a fairy tale, is the cycle of ideas about death; This includes: the abduction of girls by snakes, types of miraculous birth, such as the return of the deceased, setting off on a journey with iron shoes, etc., the forest as an entrance to another kingdom, the smell of a hero, sprinkling of hut doors, a treat at the yaga, the figure of a ferryman-guide, a long journey on an eagle, horse, boat, etc., a fight with the guardian of the entrance, seeking to eat the stranger, weighing on scales, arrival in another kingdom and all its accessories.

The addition of these two cycles gives almost all (but still not all) of the main components of the tale. It is impossible to draw an exact boundary between these two cycles. We know that the entire initiation rite was experienced as a sojourn in the land of death, and, on the contrary, the deceased experienced everything that the initiate experienced: received an assistant, met a absorber, etc.

If you imagine everything that happened to the initiate and tell it sequentially, you will get the composition on which the fairy tale is built. If we tell sequentially everything that was believed to happen to the deceased, then

you will get the same core again, but with the addition of those elements that are not enough for the line of these rituals. Both of these cycles together provide almost all the basic constructive elements of a fairy tale.

What did we find? We found that the compositional unity of a fairy tale lies not in some peculiarities of the human psyche, not especially in artistic creativity, it lies in the historical reality of the past. What they tell now was once done, depicted, and what was not done was imagined. Of these two cycles, the first (rite) dies out earlier than the second. The ritual is no longer performed, ideas about death live longer, develop, and change without any connection with this ritual. The disappearance of the ritual is associated with the disappearance of hunting as the only or main source of existence.

Based on everything that has been said here, we must imagine the further formation of the plot in such a way that this core, once created, absorbs some new particulars or complications from a new, later reality. On the other hand, new life creates new genres (novelistic fairy tales), which grow on a different soil than the composition and plots of a fairy tale. In other words, development proceeds through layering, through replacement, rethinking, etc., on the other hand, through new formations.

Thus, the motive of the royal children imprisoned comes from the custom of isolating kings, priests, magicians and their children. This is layering. The motif of a deceased father or a grateful dead man giving the hero a horse functionally corresponds to the yaga giving a horse. Here, under the influence of the cult of ancestors, i.e. a later phenomenon, we have a rethinking and deformation of the figure of the donor while preserving the function of donation. Consequently, the question of motives not related to those cycles discussed above must be resolved in each case separately. This applies, for example, to the motive of marriage and the accession of the hero. In the image of the princess, on the one hand, we recognize an independent woman, the holder of the clan and totemic magic. She is the "Tsar Maiden". Further, she can be compared with the celestial wife of the shaman. She can also be compared with the widow or daughter of a king who is killed and eliminated by the heir.

The entire range of motives associated with difficult tasks seems very difficult to analyze. It cannot be proven with certainty that the fairy tale here preserved the custom of testing the magical power of the heir. However, based on a number of indirect indicators, this can be stated with some degree of probability.

In what follows, this law of conservation of composition with replacement

The characters remain unshakable, and the further development of the tale follows this line. Everyday life, a changed life - this is where the material for replacement comes from. So, it turns out that behind a beggar woman you can recognize Baba Yaga, behind a two-story house with a balcony - a man’s house, etc.

This conclusion does not correspond to current ideas about the fairy tale. It is usually believed that certain elements of prehistoricity are interspersed into a fairy tale, and that the whole story is a product of “free” artistic creativity. We see that a fairy tale consists of elements that go back to phenomena and ideas that took place in pre-class society.

2. Fairy tale as a genre.

We have identified the sources of individual motives. We found out that the connection, their sequence, is also not a random phenomenon. But this does not yet explain the fact of the emergence of a fairy tale as such.

What is the oldest stage of storytelling? We already know from the previous one that during initiation the younger ones were told something. But what exactly?

The coincidence of the composition of myths and fairy tales with the sequence of events that took place during the initiation makes us think that they were telling the same thing that happened to the young man, but they were telling it not about him, but about an ancestor, the founder of the clan and customs, who, having been miraculously born Having visited the kingdom of bears, wolves, etc., he brought from there fire, magical dances (the same ones that are taught to young men), etc. At first these events were not so much told as they were depicted conventionally dramatically. They also served as objects of fine arts. It is impossible to understand the carvings and ornaments of many peoples without knowing their legends and “fairy tales”. The meaning of the events that took place over him was revealed to the initiate here. The stories likened him to the one they were talking about. The stories were part of the cult and were prohibited. These prohibitions serve as a second consideration in favor of the position that they were telling something that was directly related to the ritual.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of collections of stories of the so-called primitive peoples consist only of texts. We know nothing about the setting in which the stories were told, the circumstances surrounding the stories, etc. However, there are exceptions. In some cases, collectors not only provide texts, but also provide some details about how these stories exist.

A very complete account of how such tales are treated is given by Dorsey in the introduction to his collection Traditions of the Skidi-Pawnee (Dorsey 1904). He talks about the many ceremonies and dances, including

including the ceremonial transfer of sacred bundles (tbundles, bags, or bundles). These are a kind of amulets. They are kept in the house and represent its shrine. All well-being, luck in hunting, etc. depend on them. Their contents are different: they contain feathers, grains, tobacco leaves, etc. In short, we recognize in them the prototype of our “magical gifts.” “Each such ceremony and each dance was accompanied not only by its own ritual, but by a story about its origin” (X), says Dorsey. By the story about the origin of these amulets we should understand, as the collection shows, stories about how, for example, the first owner of this bundle went into the forest, met a buffalo there, was taken by him to the kingdom of buffaloes, received this amulet there, was taught to dance and returned, taught the people all this and became a leader. Such stories “were usually the personal property of the holder or owner of the knot or dance and, as a rule, were told immediately after the performance of the ritual or during the transfer of ownership of the knot or ceremony to its next owner” (XII) Thus, the story is part of the ritual, rite, it is attached to him and to the person who takes possession of the amulet. A story is a kind of verbal amulet, a means of magical influence on the world around us. “Thus, each of these stories was esoteric... That is why it is with the greatest difficulty that anything resembling an etiological story (origin-myth) can be obtained as a whole” (XIV).

There are two aspects to this testimony that are important. Firstly, as already indicated, stories exist along with the ritual and form an integral part of it. Secondly, we are here at the origins of a phenomenon that can be traced back to our days, namely the ban on storytelling. They prohibited and observed the ban not because of etiquette, but because of the magical functions inherent in the story and the act of telling. "By telling them, he (the narrator) gives away some part of his life, bringing it closer to the end. Thus, a middle-aged man once exclaimed: “I can’t tell you everything I know, because I’m not going to die yet.” Or, as the old priest put it: “I know that my days are numbered. My life is already useless. There is no reason why I should not tell everything I know" (XV).

We will return to prohibitions later, but for now we will consider the connection of such stories with ritual. One might argue that the phenomenon Dorsey is talking about is a particular, local phenomenon. This is apparently how Dorsey himself understands the matter; he does not provide comparative material. However, it is not. True, the connection between the story and the ritual cannot be strictly proven here. It must be shown on very large material. Here

Reference may be made to Boas's collection of Indian tales and to his study of the social organization and secret alliances of the Kwakiutl tribe. The collection contains only texts. These, from the point of view of traditional folkloristics, are “Indian versions” or “variants” of many fairy tales and motifs known in Europe. One gets the impression that these are fictional stories, and nothing more. But things change completely as soon as we begin to get acquainted not only with the texts, but with the social organization of at least one of the tribes. These texts suddenly appear in a completely new light. We see how closely they are connected with the entire structure of life of this tribe, so that neither the rituals nor the institutions of the tribe are intelligible without stories, “legends,” as Boas calls them, and vice versa: stories become understandable only from an analysis of social life, they are included in it not only as components, but in the eyes of the tribe they serve as one of the conditions of life, along with tools and amulets, and are guarded and guarded as the greatest shrine. “Myths constitute, literally speaking, the most precious treasure of the tribe. They belong to the very core of what the tribe reveres as a shrine. The most important myths are known only to the old people, who zealously guard their secret... The old guardians of this secret knowledge sit in the village, mute , like sphinxes, and decide to what extent they can, without incurring danger, entrust the knowledge of their ancestors to the younger generation and at what precise moment this transmission of secrets can be most fruitful..." (Lévy-Bruhl 262). Myths are not only components of life, they are parts of each person individually. To take away his story means to take away his life. Myth here has production and social functions, and this is not a private phenomenon, it is a law. Disclosure of a myth would deprive it of its sacred character, and at the same time of its magical or, as Lévy-Bruhl says, “mystical” power. Without myths, the tribe would be unable to maintain its existence.

Unlike a fairy tale, which in terms of the plot content is a relic, here we have a living connection with the entire reality of the people, with production, social system and beliefs. Animals met by the hero or ancestor of the initiate were depicted on pillars; the objects mentioned in these legends are worn and dressed during dances; in the dances they depict bears, owls, crows and other animals that have provided the initiate with magical power, etc.

The materials and considerations presented here answer the question of how a certain category of myth arises, but they still do not explain how our fairy tale arises.

In the first chapter we established that a fairy tale is not determined by

the system within which it exists. Now we can add some clarification to this. The plot and composition of a fairy tale are determined by the tribal system at that stage of its development, the representative of which we took as an example from the American tribes studied by Dorsey, Boas and others. We see here a direct correspondence between the base and the superstructure. The new social function of the plot, its purely artistic use, is associated with the disappearance of the system that created it. Externally, the beginning of this process, the process of the degeneration of a myth into a fairy tale, is reflected in the detachment of the plot and the act of storytelling from the ritual. The moment of this detachment from the ritual is the beginning of the history of the fairy tale, while its syncretism with the ritual represents its prehistory. This detachment could occur either naturally, as a historical necessity, or it could be artificially accelerated by the appearance of Europeans, the Christianization of Indians and the forced resettlement of entire tribes to other, worse lands, a change in lifestyle, a change in the method of production, etc. This detachment Dorsey is also already watching. Let us not forget that Europeans have ruled America for over 500 years and that here we often have only a reflection of the original situation, we already have its decomposition, fragments, more or less clear traces. "Of course, these myths about the origin of knots and dances do not always remain the exclusive property of the priests; they find their way to ordinary people, where they, being told, lose much of their original meaning. Thus, by a gradual process of corruption, they reach the point that they no meaning is assigned, and they are told as fairy tales are told" (Dorsey). Dorsey calls the process of detachment from the ritual corruption. However, a fairy tale, already devoid of religious functions, does not in itself represent something reduced in comparison with the myth from which it originated. On the contrary, freed from the bonds of religious conventions, the fairy tale breaks out into the free air of artistic creativity, driven by other social factors, and begins to live a full-blooded life.

This explains the origin of not only the plot in terms of its content, but the origin of the fairy tale as an artistic story.

We repeat that this position cannot actually be proven; it can be shown using a large amount of material, but this cannot be done here. But still there is one more doubt. We are talking only about fairy tales. We found it possible to isolate them from others and study them independently. Having opened the contact, we now, at the end of the work, must close it again, because the study of other genres can make a change in our

This is a better idea of how a fairy tale came together.

We examined the rituals and myths of the so-called primitive peoples and linked them with modern fairy tales, but we did not study the tales of these peoples, we did not take into account the possibility of artistic tradition from the very beginning.

Although plots not related to fairy tales were not studied here, it seems that not only fairy tales, but also many others (for example, tales about animals) have the same origin. This can be proven by special monographs devoted to these genres, but it cannot be proven here. Studying collections of Indian fairy tales leads to the conclusion that this is entirely ritual material, that is, that a fairy tale in our sense of the word is still unknown here. This point of view will seem unconvincing to a folklorist, but ethnographers who are familiar with more than just texts are more likely to admit the possibility of such a situation. Neuhaus observed it in the former German New Guinea. They “knew only legends: they knew neither fairy tales nor fables. Stories that seem fabulous to us are for them the same legends as others” (Neuhauss 161). Lévy-Bruhl also considers this position established and cites this testimony as evidence (Lévy-Bruhl 267). This can also be confirmed by analyzing fairy tales about animals. So; for example, in North America, there is a special category of tales about "coyote". These are funny stories about the antics of a coyote. The Skidi Indians say of him: "Coyote is a magnificent fellow. He knows all things, and is simply impossible to destroy. Moreover, he is full of wild quirks and very cunning, can only be overcome with the greatest difficulties, and he is rarely completely defeated." . But these "tales" are told when some undertaking is to be undertaken, and the coyote's agility must pass to the teller. What we assert about American folklore, Bogoraz observes in Koryak-Kamchadal folklore. “Koryak-Kamchadal folklore is distinguished by its cheerful, mocking character. Many strange and funny stories are told about the raven Kukht about how he fought with mouse girls, how he set fire to his own house, etc. Kukht appears either in the form of a man or in the form of a raven . Folklore treats him completely disrespectfully. At the same time, Kukht is also the Creator Raven, who created heaven and earth. Kukht created man, got fire for him, then gave him animals for hunting "(Bogoraz-Tan 1936, 29). What Bogoraz sees as irreverence may actually be admiration for the raven's cunning, as Dorsey points out. In any case, if the raven about which such funny things are told is yours,

the rector of heaven and earth, and if stories are told before a hunt, then here too the sacred character of the story is undeniable, and thereby reinforces the idea of the sacred character not only of fairy tales. After all, initiation is far from the only rite; there were also seasonal hunting and field rites, and a whole series of other rites, and each of them could have its own originating myth. The connection of these rituals with myths and the connection of both of them with fairy tales has not yet been completely explored. To clarify this issue, it is necessary to study in detail the composition of the folklore of pre-class peoples. This would take us too far, and for our purposes it is not immediately necessary.

From all that has been said, it is clear that the “profanation” of the sacred plot begins very early (by “profanation” we mean the transformation of a sacred story into a profane one, that is, not spiritual, not esoteric, but artistic). This is the moment of birth of the fairy tale itself. But it is impossible to separate where the sacred story ends and the fairy tale begins. As D.K. Zelenin showed in his work “The Religious-Magical Function of Fairy Tales” (Zelenin 1934), prohibitions on telling and attributing magical influence on fairy tales to fairy tales persist to this day even among cultural peoples. We know the same about Vogul tales, about Mari, etc. But these are still relics, remnants. On the contrary, the Indian fairy tale is almost entirely a sacred story, a myth, but even here its separation from ritual begins, and in it the beginnings of a purely artistic story are visible, which is the modern fairy tale.

Thus, the fairy tale adopted their social and ideological culture from earlier eras. But it would be a mistake to say that the fairy tale is the only successor to religion. Religion as such has also changed and contains relics that are extremely ancient. All ideas about the afterlife and the fate of the dead, which were developed in Egypt, Greece and later in Christianity, arose much earlier. Here one cannot help but point out shamanism, which in the same way adopted many of the prehistoric eras preserved by fairy tales.

If you collect shamanic stories about their rituals, how the shaman went to another world in search of a soul, who helped him, how he crossed, etc., and compare them with the journey or flight of a fairy-tale hero, you will get a correspondence. We have traced this for individual elements, but for the whole there will be a coincidence. This explains the unity of the composition of a myth, a story about an afterlife journey, a shaman's story, a fairy tale, and later - a poem, an epic and a heroic song. With the emergence of feudal culture, elements of folklore became the property of the ruling class, based on

This folklore creates cycles of heroic tales, such as “Tristan and Isolde”, “The Song of the Nibelungs”, etc. In other words, the movement proceeds from the bottom up, and not from the top down, as some theorists claim.

Here a historical explanation is given for a phenomenon that has always been considered difficult to explain, the phenomenon of the worldwide similarity of folklore stories. The similarity is much wider and deeper than it seems to the naked eye. Neither the theory of migration nor the theory of the unity of the human psyche put forward by the anthropological school resolves this problem. The problem is resolved by the historical study of folklore in its connection with the production of material life.

The problem, which remained so difficult, nevertheless turned out to be solvable. But every solved problem immediately raises new problems. The study of folklore can go in two directions: in the direction of studying the similarities of phenomena and in the direction of studying the differences. Folklore, and in particular fairy tales, is not only uniform, but despite its uniformity it is extremely rich and diverse. The study of this diversity, the study of individual plots, seems more difficult than the study of compositional similarity. If the resolution proposed here really turns out to be correct, then it will be possible to begin in a new way the study of individual plots, the problem of their interpretation and their history.

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Vladimir Propp is a famous scientist, researcher of Russian folk tales. He is the author of unique works on philology. Modern researchers consider him the founder of text theory.

Parents of the philologist

Vladimir Propp is a native Petersburger, he was born in April 1895. His real name is Herman Voldemar. His father was a wealthy peasant from the Volga region, a native of the Volgograd region. By education he was a philologist, a specialist in Russian and German literature. Graduated from Petrograd University.

Propp's father taught German to students at St. Petersburg higher educational institutions. When the First World War began, he took a direct part in it, working as an orderly and a brother of mercy.

Childhood and youth

After the October Revolution, the family moved temporarily to live on a farm. However, Vladimir Propp visited his parents only a few times. In 1919, his father died after a long illness. Vladimir came to the funeral, and then stayed for a while to work on the land in the farm itself. Not finding himself in peasant labor, he got a job as a school teacher in the village of Goly Karamysh, which was located 70 kilometers from the farm. Now this is the city of Krasnoarmeysk in the Saratov region. But soon Vladimir Propp returned to Leningrad.

In 1929, the Propp family was dispossessed. All property, the main owner of which at that time was his mother, Anna Fridrikhovna, was transferred as an ultimatum to the collective farm named after Stalin.

Teaching work

In 1932, Propp went to work at Leningrad University, after 5 years he became an associate professor, and in 1938 a professor. At this time he was working at the department of Romance-Germanic philology, folklore and Russian literature. From 1963 to 1964 he worked as head of the department. He also taught at the Faculty of History for about three years; his lectures were a success at the Department of Ethnography and Anthropology.

Morphology of a fairy tale

Vladimir Propp entered Russian philology as the author of a literary work. "Morphology of a Fairy Tale" was published in 1928. In it, the author examines in detail the structure of a magical work. This is perhaps the most popular study of Russian folklore in the 20th century. In his work, Propp breaks down the tale into its component parts and explores the relationship of each of them to each other. Studying folk art, he notes the presence of constant and variable quantities in fairy tales; the former include the functions inherent in the main characters, as well as the sequence in which they are implemented.

What is Vladimir Propp trying to say in his work? "Morphology of a Fairy Tale" formulates several basic principles. First, the main constituent parts are formed by permanent elements. They serve as functions for the actors. Secondly, the number of such functions in a fairy tale is strictly limited. Thirdly, they all develop in the same sequence. True, such a pattern is present only in folklore works, and modern works do not follow it. Fourthly, fairy tales are of the same type in their structure. Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp refers to variable quantities as the quantity and methods by which functions are realized. As well as the language style and attributes of the characters.

Functions of a fairy tale

Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp argues that the functions of a fairy tale ultimately constitute a single composition, the core for the entire genre. Only the details of the plots differ. As a result of enormous work, Propp identifies 31 functions. All of them are present in Russian folk tales. Most of them are located in pairs, for example, a prohibition is always opposed by its violation, a struggle is always opposed to a victory, and after persecution there is always a happy salvation.

The number of characters in Russian fairy tales is also limited. There are always no more than 7 of them. Propp includes the main character, the saboteur (his antipode), the sender, the donor, the assistant to the main character, the princess and the false hero. Taking into account all these factors, in the end we get a classic work that has a name - a Russian fairy tale. Propp insists that they are all versions of a fairy tale.

Fairy tale

In 1946, another book by Propp, “Historical Roots of a Fairy Tale,” was published by the Leningrad publishing house. In it, he dwells in detail on the hypothesis expressed by the French ethnographer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Emile Nurri. According to it, in folk tales there are often references to the performance of a sacrament to which the main character undergoes, in other words, initiation. The very structure of most Russian folk tales has the same character.

Also, analyzing the “Historical roots of a fairy tale, Propp considers the meaning of the premises, looks for references to the social institutions of the past in the works, and finds a rethinking of many rituals. The Russian folklorist notes that the main task is to establish what the rituals described in the fairy tale refer to - to a specific stage of development of society, or they are not associated with a specific historical period.

Examples of initiations

The classic example Propp gives is totemic initiations. They were completely inaccessible to women, but at the same time, in Russian fairy tales such initiation occurs with Baba Yaga, an old witch, one of the main negative characters of folklore. Thus, this character fits into the hypothesis about the ritual genesis of Russian fairy tales. Baba Yaga in this case acts as an initiating hero.

Propp concludes that fairy tales do not have a specific historical or cultural period. Styles and cycles in folk art constantly collide and mix with each other. At the same time, only classical patterns of behavior that could be present in many historical eras are preserved.

Evidence that fairy tales originate from oral traditions, which are passed down by word of mouth during initiation rites, is that the motives and functions of the characters are identical in the cultures of completely different peoples, often living thousands of kilometers from each other.

In addition, Propp cites ethnographic data as evidence. He was also directly related to this science. He demonstrates how oral traditions, passed from father to son, over time took shape into the tales we know so well. Thus, based on these ideas, he comes to the conclusion about the unity of the origin of all fairy tales among all peoples of the world. A striking example of this conclusion is Russian folk fairy tales.

Another important work for understanding the significance of Propp in Russian philology is “Russian Agrarian Holidays.” In this monograph, the author examines most Slavic holidays, customs and beliefs, coming to the conclusion that almost all of them are agricultural in nature.

Heroic epic

In 1955, Propp published a monograph entitled “Russian This is a very interesting and original study, which, however, was not republished for a long time after 1958. The work became available to a wide range of readers only in the 2000s. This is one of the author’s largest works in terms of volume Moreover, critics note not only its scientific, but also its moral significance.It was relevant at that time, and remains the same today.

"Russian heroic epic" is a comparison of the features of epics from different eras, a detailed analysis of epics. As a result, the author comes to the conclusion that the basis of such works is the struggle for the spiritual ideals of the people themselves. A distinctive feature of epic works is their saturation with patriotic spirit and educational motives.

Authors from the people put the most important thing into epic works - morality, folk epic. It is a direct reflection of the moral consciousness of the society in which it was created. Propp insists that the basis of Russian epics is not foreign, but exclusively domestic stories and legends.

Another important aspect of the epic is its poetry. Thanks to her, the works are interesting and perceived by listeners and readers with any level of education. In a broad sense, for a people, epic is an integral part of its history. The epics personify the inner experiences of the people, their desire to live freely, independently and happily.

Propp's monograph allows you to get acquainted in detail with epic works, starting from ancient times. All unclear points are explained in detail here.

Major works

In addition to the above, among the main works of Vladimir Propp, literary scholars highlight the monograph “Russian Fairy Tale,” published only in 1984, a decade and a half after the author’s death.

It is also worth noting the work “Folklore and Reality”, published in the journal “Science” in 1989 and published in 1999 in the capital’s publishing house “Labyrinth”. In addition, the publication "Problems of comedy and laughter. Ritual laughter in folklore" was published. This work provides a detailed and thorough analysis of the tale of Nesmeyan with an unexpected literary interpretation.

At the end of life

Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp (1895-1970) is an outstanding philologist, Doctor of Science, who managed to do a lot during his life and is still considered the largest and most authoritative researcher of Russian fairy tales. His works and monographs are published in universities; literary scholars take them as a basis when creating their own studies and dissertations. Vladimir Propp lived all his life in Leningrad. He died in the city on the Neva on August 22, 1970 at the age of 75. After himself, he left many students and followers who still appreciate and remember his achievements. Among them: Cherednikova, Shakhnovich and Becker.