Russian Fairy Tales: A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore

were at first printed on sheets or strips of this substance, whence the term lubochnuiya came to be given to all such productions of the cheap press, even after paper had taken the place of bark. [1] The stories which have thus been preserved have no small interest of their own, but they cannot be considered as fair illustrations of Russian folk-lore, for their compilers in many cases took them from any sources to which they had access, whether eastern or western, merely adapting what they borrowed to Russian forms of thought and speech. Through some such process, for instance, seem to have passed the very popular Russian stories of Eruslan Lazarevich and of Bova Korolevich. They have often been quoted as “creations of the Slavonic mind,” but there seems to be no reason for doubting that they are merely Russian adaptations, the first of the adventures of the Persian Rustem, the second of those of the Italian Buovo di Antona, our Sir Bevis of Hampton. The editors of these “chap-book skazkas” belonged to the pre-scientific period, and had a purely commercial object in view. Their stories were intended simply to sell. A German version of seventeen of these “chap-book tales,” to which was prefixed an introduction by Jacob Grimm, was published some forty years ago, [2] and has been translated into English. [3] Somewhat later, also, appeared a German version of twelve more of these tales. [4] Of late years several articles have appeared in some of the German periodicals, [5] giving accounts or translations of some of the Russian Popular Tales. But no thorough investigation of them appeared in print, out of Russia, until the publication last year of the erudite work on “Zoological Mythology” by Professor Angelo de Gubernatis. In it he has given a summary of the greater part of the stories contained in the collections of Afanasief and Erlenvein, and so fully has he described the part played in them by the members of the animal world that I have omitted, in the present volume, the chapter I had prepared on the Russian “Beast-Epos.” Another chapter which I have, at least for a time, suppressed, is that in which I had attempted to say something about the origin and the meaning of the Russian folk-tales. The subject is so extensive that it requires for its proper treatment more space than a single chapter could grant;…