Afanasyev Alexander Nikolaevich fairy tales for children. Russian folk tales A

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

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book is in the Leningrad Institute of Russian Literature of the USSR Academy of Sciences (“Russian folk tales not for publication,” Archive, No. R-1, inventory 1, No. 112).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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RUSSIAN FOLK TALES by A. N. AFANASYEV - a fundamental publication, the first in Russian. science code rus. fairy tales (including also Ukrainian and Belarusian fairy tales). First edition in 8 issues. in 1855-63, the most recent scientific. ed. 1984-85 (series "Lit. monuments"). Contains approx. 580 texts various. genre types of Eastern Slav. fairy tales recorded in more than 30 lips. Basis Sat. compiled notes from Afanasyev himself, local amateur collectors, texts from the Rus archive. geogr. society (more than a third), former printed publications, as well as the collection of V. Dahl - approx. 200 texts. Proposed by Afanasyev during the second edition. (1873) classification (fairy tales about animals, fairy tales, novelistic, satirical, anecdotes) retained the practical. meaning to this day. The question of the extent and nature of Afanasyev’s work - ed. over the texts remains open (certainly we can talk about editing the language and style of fairy tales). Sat. caused a great response in science. environment, in lit. criticism. Simultaneously it became for a long time (and to a certain extent remains to this day) the main thing. a source for introducing the general reading public in Russia and abroad to Russian. classic adv. a fairy tale. In 1870 Afanasyev published "Russian Children's Fairy Tales", book. was recognized by the censorship committee as harmful, but it took an honorable place in the circle of children's reading, having gone through more than 25 editions. This Sat. served as material for artists: it was illustrated by I. Bilibin, G. Narbut, Yu. Vasnetsov, T. Mavrina and others. Since 1873, N.R.S. has been published in the lane. on pl. European languages.
A. N. Afanasyev in 1855-1863. The collection “Russian Folk Tales” is published in eight editions. In the first edition there was no distribution of fairy tales by thematic sections
The second edition of the collection of fairy tales (posthumous) in four books (volumes) was prepared by Afanasyev himself. The tales are divided into thematic sections (tales about animals, fairy tales, short stories, everyday satirical tales, anecdotes), the notes made up the fourth volume, which also included popular folk tales.
Soon after the first edition of Russian Folk Tales, Afanasyev was going to print a lightweight illustrated collection of Russian Children's Fairy Tales for family reading. It included 61 fairy tales: 29 fairy tales about animals, 16 fairy tales and 16 everyday tales from the main collection. However, censorship put all sorts of obstacles to this endeavor and the collection was published only in 1870. The head of the censorship committee and member of the council of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, P. A. Vaqar, in a submission to the press department, stated that all departments with educational institutions should be notified that the content of 24 fairy tales in the children's collection is unacceptable and harmful: “Why only it is not depicted in them, not to mention the main basic idea of ​​almost all of these fairy tales, that is, the triumph of cunning aimed at achieving some selfish goal; in some, outrageous ideas are personified, as, for example, in the fairy tale “Truth and Falsehood” , in which it is proved that “it is difficult to live by the truth in the world, what kind of truth is it today! For the truth you will end up in Siberia...”
Negative feedback from censorship led to the fact that the next, second, edition of “Russian Children's Fairy Tales” was published only in 1886. In total, this book went through more than twenty-five editions.
The meaning of the book[edit | edit source text]

Afanasyev wrote about the educational significance of collected folk tales (even the main collection) in 1856-1858. N. A. Elagin (brother of P. V. Kireevsky): “children listen to them more willingly than all moral stories and tales.”
Illustrations from editions of the book “Russian Children's Fairy Tales” were included in the golden fund of Russian painting: the collection was illustrated by I. Ya. Bilibin, Yu. A. Vasnetsov, N. N. Karazin, K. Kuznetsov, A. Kurkin, E. E. Lissner, T. A. Mavrina, R. Narbut, E. D. Polenova, E. Rachev and others.
In his collection, Afanasyev systematized the voluminous material of Russian fairy tales of the first half of the 19th century, providing them with extensive scientific commentary. The system adopted by Afanasyev is the first attempt to classify fairy tales in general.

Eh, I don’t like “other people’s” second-hand books. The key word is "alien". Somehow I’m disdainful of buying books that I don’t know where they stood, lived and read. The book is alive. It absorbs the energy of the one who turns the pages...
As a child, I had a book that made me love reading. For the current younger generation, this is the book “Harry Potter” (as a rule, it is from this book that children get into reading as a process), but for me it was Afanasyev’s fairy tales with illustrations by Mavrina. But somewhere this book got lost and, unfortunately, disappeared...
I looked for a long time for an alternative, a reissue, but unfortunately I didn’t find it.
There are a lot of fairy tale books on the book market!
But, in my opinion, Afanasyev’s collection is the most accurate, the most consistent and the most correct. Fairy tales are arranged in ascending order - from simple fairy tales to more complex ones. The tales are amazing and Russian!
In search of my book, from new editions I bought:

Compiled by: Alexander Afanasyev, O. Sklyarova
Languages: Russian
Publisher: Olma Media Group
Series: Classics in illustrations
ISBN 978-5-373-05338-9; 2013

A good edition, excellent cover, paper, excellent print quality, but not the same... That’s not the same at all.. There is no integrity in the book, no fabulousness. The illustrations are all different, sometimes even out of topic. The content is very limited. There are only 45 fairy tales in the book. The book is very flawed.

Illustrator: Nina Babarkina
Editor: Natalya Morozova
Languages: Russian
Publisher: Bright City
ISBN 978-5-9663-0141-5; 2009

I knew that it was not Afanasyev. But I bought it anyway. Do you know what I didn't like? The book is very pretentious and museum-like. Inanimate. Fairy tales shouldn't be like that.

This edition is more or less close to the original.
But in terms of content - only 59.3% (slightly more than half) of the tales are from the old edition.
This collection contains only 70 fairy tales out of 118 fairy tales contained in the Soviet edition.
Everything is processed by Afanasiev. The illustrations are black and white, but this is not a minus.
Disadvantages: large format, dividing the text into two horizontal parts (some kind of nonsense, AST probably hired some kind of fan of dividing the text into two parts - several books have already been laid out using this method, including The Lord of the Rings).
And the illustrations are varied. It feels like everything that was was dumped in a heap.
Here, as an example, is a photo of the spreads (I didn’t take any photos, I took the photo from the Labyrinth):

In general, the conclusion is that I didn’t like it.

Without thinking twice (in this situation), I finally ordered a second-hand book edition of the “good old” Afanasyev with his fairy tales)

Second-hand book edition
Publisher: Fiction
State of preservation: Good
ISBN 5-280-01040-5; 1990

The publication is old, not from 90, but from 89. The book is supported.
You can’t say this, but after I leafed through this book I wanted to wash my hands...((Well, I don’t know who held this book in my hands! I can’t help it.. Probably this will pass and the book will become MINE!
And the book itself is, of course, gorgeous! And it’s as if it came from a fairy tale. I don’t understand why I have these feelings? This is probably personal and very subjective)

There are ALL 118 fairy tales in the book! They are arranged in a special way: as I said above - from simple to complex. There’s Baba Yaga, and Koschey, and “you’ll go to the right..” - in general, that’s it!) Such a self-sufficient book in content.

And these are page spreads with wonderful illustrations by T. Mavrina:

And what cool “Boring Tales” at the end!!!)))

Just a fairy tale, not a book!)

P.S.: summing up what has been said, I have a question for experts: please tell me a good alternative to the above edition from a recently published one. I'm sure I missed something. I will be very grateful!
I also really hope that some publishing house will decide and take on this book. And it will make it just as fabulous, readable and bookish. Let it not be just another soulless “fairy tale”, but let it be fairy tales)