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.
The tales in this wide-ranging anthology speak of a distinct culture, linked to our own via shared Indo-European origins, but with its own characters and characteristics — though some old friends (the wicked stepmother, that clever frog with the trick of mutating into a prince…) do make an appearance.
The magic tales here fall into two categories, each given roughly equal space: those transcribed, often verbatim, at traditional storytelling occasions by folklorists such as Afanasyev; and those composed in writing by ‘literary’ authors like Pushkin and Platonov, and imprinted with the individual sensibility of their creator.
The traditional folk tales are delightfully unsanitised. ‘In Pigskin’, a version of ‘Cinderella’, a beautiful girl escapes the clutches, not of two slave-driving older sisters, but of her lecherous father, who has fallen in lust with her after his wife’s death.
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