‘Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov’, edited by Robert Chandler – review

For the English-speaking world, the book that more than any other defines the magic — or fairy — tale is Children’s and Household Tales by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, first published in Germany in 1812, and translated (or adapted: it was seriously toned down) into English by Edgar Taylor in 1823. For the Grimms, as for other Romantic writers, these traditional tales were the repository of an authentic, national culture, under dual threat from industrialisation and invasion by Napoleon’s France.

Educated Russian interest in folk traditions followed a similar trajectory: the first great Russian folklorist, Aleksandr Afanasyev, assembled his vast collection in the middle years of the 19th century. But if the Russian high culture of the time was closely connected to the rest of Europe, its folk traditions were not. St Petersburg, with its French-speaking salons and its Prussian-style bureaucracy, may have been built as a ‘window on the West’, but much of the rest of the country was (and is) at least as open to Asia as to Europe.