OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM, CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE IMPERIAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY OF RUSSIA, AUTHOR OF “THE SONGS OF THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE,” “KRILOF AND HIS FABLES,” ETC. NEW YORK: HURST & CO., Publishers , 122 Nassau Street . To the Memory of ALEXANDER AFANASIEF I Dedicate this Book, TO HIM SO DEEPLY INDEBTED....

The stories contained in the following pages are taken from the collections published by Afanasief, Khudyakof, Erlenvein, and Chudinsky. The South-Russian collections of Kulish and Rudchenko I have been able to use but little, there being no complete dictionary available of the dialect, or rather the language, in which they are written. Of these works that of Afanasief is by far the most important, extending to nearly 3,000 pages, and containing 332 distinct stories—of many of which several vari

There are but few among those inhabitants of Fairy-land of whom “Popular Tales” tell, who are better known to the outer world than Cinderella—the despised and flouted younger sister, who long sits unnoticed beside the hearth, then furtively visits the glittering halls of the great and gay, and at last is transferred from her obscure nook to the place of honor justly due to her tardily acknowledged merits. Somewhat like the fortunes of Cinderella have been those of the popular tale itself. Long d

The present chapter is devoted to specimens of those skazkas which most Russian critics assert to be distinctly mythical. The stories of this class are so numerous, that the task of selection has been by no means easy. But I have done my best to choose such examples as are most characteristic of that species of the “mythical” folk-tale which prevails in Russia, and to avoid, as far as possible, the repetition of narratives which have already been made familiar to the English reader by translatio

Somewhat resembling the picture usually drawn of the supernatural Witch in the Skazkas, is that which some of them offer of a personification of evil called Likho. [224] The following story, belonging to the familiar Polyphemus-cycle, will serve to convey an idea of this baleful being, who in it takes a female form. Once upon a time there was a smith. “Well now,” says he, “I’ve never set eyes on any harm. They say there’s evil ( likho ) [225] in the world. I’ll go and seek me out evil.” So he we

Most of the magical “properties” of the “skazka-drama,” closely resemble those which have already been rendered familiar to us by well-known folk-tales. Of such as these—of “caps of darkness,” of “seven-leagued boots,” of “magic cudgels,” of “Fortunatus’s purses,” and the like [296] —it is unnecessary, for the present, to say more than that they are of as common occurrence in Slavonic as in other stories. But there are some among them which materially differ from their counterparts in more weste

The Russian peasants have very confused ideas about the local habitation of the disembodied spirit, after its former tenement has been laid in the grave. They seem, from the language of their funeral songs, sometimes to regard the departed spirit as residing in the coffin which holds the body from which it has been severed, sometimes to imagine that it hovers around the building which used to be its home, or flies abroad on the wings of the winds. In the food and money and other necessaries of e

As besides the songs or pyesni there are current among the people a number of stikhi or poems on sacred subjects, so together with the skazki there have been retained in the popular memory a multitude of legendui , or legends relating to persons or incidents mentioned in the Bible or in ecclesiastical history. Many of them have been extracted from the various apocryphal books which in olden times had so wide a circulation, and many also from the lives of the Saints; some of them may be traced to