Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov

467 Pages·2013·1.67 MB·English

by  Robert Chandler

Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov
Translated by ROBERT CHANDLER
and ELIZABETH CHANDLER
with SIBELAN FORRESTER, ANNA GUNIN
and OLGA MEERSON
Introduced by
ROBERT CHANDLER
with an Appendix by
SIBELAN FORRESTER
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Introduction
RUSSIAN MAGIC TALES FROM PUSHKIN TO PLATONOV
PART ONE
Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837)
A Tale about a Priest and his Servant Balda
A Tale about a Fisherman and a Fish
PART TWO
THE FIRST FOLKTALE COLLECTIONS
Aleksandr Afanasyev (1826–71)
The Crane and the Heron
The Little Brown Cow
Vasilisa the Fair
Marya Morevna
The Little White Duck
The Frog Princess
Pig Skin
The Tsarevna in an Underground Tsardom
The Tsarevna who would not Laugh
Misery
The Wise Girl
Ivan Khudyakov (1842–76)
The Brother (tr. Sibelan Forrester)
The Stepdaughter and the Stepmother’s Daughter (tr. Sibelan Forrester)
PART THREE
EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY COLLECTIONS
From the Journal Zhivaya starina (‘The Living Past’ 1890–1908)
The Tsar Maiden
Ivan Mareson
Ivan Bilibin (1876–1942)
Ivan Tsarevich, the Grey Wolf and the Firebird
Nikolay Onchukov (1872–1942)
The Black Magician Tsar
Bronze Brow
Olga Ozarovskaya (1874–1931)
The Luck of a Tsarevna
Dmitry Zelenin (1878–1954)
By the Pike’s Command
PART FOUR
Nadezhda Teffi (Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, 1872–1952)
When the Crayfish Whistled: a Christmas Horror
A Little Fairy Tale
Baba Yaga (1932 picture book)
The Dog
Baba Yaga (1947 article)
PART FIVE
Pavel Bazhov (1879–1950)
The Mistress of the Copper Mountain (tr. Anna Gunin)
The Stone Flower (tr. Anna Gunin)
The Mountain Master (tr. Anna Gunin)
Golden Hair (tr. Anna Gunin)
PART SIX
FOLKTALE COLLECTIONS FROM THE SOVIET PERIOD
Erna Pomerantseva (1899–1980)
The Cat with the Golden Tail
Irina Karnaukhova (1901–59)
Mishka the Bear and Myshka the Mouse
Jack Frost
Snake-Man
The Herder of Hares
A Cock and Bull Story
A Marvellous Wonder
Fyodor Tumilevich (1910–79)
The Snake and the Fisherman
A. V. Bardin (1888–1962)
The Everlasting Piece
Dmitry Balashov (1927–2000)
How a Man Pinched a Girl’s Breast
PART SEVEN
Andrey Platonov (1899–1951)
Finist the Bright Falcon
Ivan the Giftless and Yelena the Wise
The Magic Ring
Ivan the Wonder
No-Arms
Wool over the Eyes
(All stories in this section translated by Robert and Elizabeth
Chandler and Olga Meerson) Appendix: Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch
of the East by Sibelan Forrester
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
PENGUIN CLASSICS
RUSSIAN MAGIC TALES FROM PUSHKIN TO PLATONOV
ROBERT CHANDLER has translated Sappho and Guillaume Apollinaire for
Everyman’s Poetry. His translations from Russian include Aleksandr
Pushkin’s Dubrovsky and The Captain’s Daughter, Nikolay Leskov’s Lady
Macbeth of Mtsensk and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate and The Road.
With his wife Elizabeth and other colleagues he has co-translated
numerous works by Andrey Platonov; Soul won the 2004 American
Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages award
for best translation from a Slavonic language, as did his translation of
The Railway by the contemporary Uzbek novelist Hamid Ismailov. His
Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida is published in Penguin
Classics.
ELIZABETH CHANDLER is a co-translator, with her husband, of Pushkin’s The
Captain’s Daughter and of several titles by Andrey Platonov and Vasily
Grossman.
PROFESSOR SIBELAN FORRESTER teaches at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania.
Her broad range of interests include Russian folklore, the poetry of
Marina Tsvetaeva and Russian Women’s Writing. She has translated
many books – both poetry and prose – from Croatian, Russian and
Serbian. Wayne State University Press will soon be publishing her
translation of Vladimir Propp’s The Russian Folktale.
ANNA GUNIN has translated I am a Chechen! by German Sadulaev and The
Sky Wept Fire by Mikail Eldin. She is now translating a complete edition
of Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales for Penguin Classics.
PROFESSOR OLGA MEERSON teaches at Georgetown University and is the
author of books about Dostoevsky, Platonov and Russian poetry. She is a
co-translator, with Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, of Andrey Platonov’s
Soul and The Foundation Pit.
Introduction
The hero has one clear, linear task. At the end of it lies his reward, usually a princess.
While accomplishing the task, he encounters various helpers, whose gifts or services
are all palpably material. Helpers and obstacles appear from nowhere and disappear
without a trace; a dark void opens up on either side of the narrow path of the plot.
Whatever is on that path, however, is lit up in brilliant primary colours: metallic reds,
golds, blues. Throughout his travails the hero expresses no astonishment, curiosity,
longing, or fear, and apparently does not experience pain. He never reassesses his goal
or his reward.
Caryl Emerson, The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature
Off he went towards the blue sea.
(The blue sea was blacker than black.)
He called out to the golden fish …
Aleksandr Pushkin, from ‘A Tale about a Fisherman and a Fish’
I used to be Snow White, but I drifted …
Mae West
The magic tale – also often called the ‘wonder tale’ or ‘fairy tale’ – is
remarkably adaptable. Transformation is its central theme, and the tales
themselves seem capable of almost infinite transformation. In one
Russian version of the Cinderella story the heroine is helped by a doll; in
another Russian version she is helped by a cow; and in a written version
from seventh-century China she is helped by a fish. In different versions
of ‘Beauty and the Beast’, the heroine marries a serpent, a white bear, a
falcon and – in an English version recorded in the 1890s – ‘a great, foul,
small-tooth dog’. And what is essentially the same tale can find a home
for itself in a Walt Disney film, in a Russian peasant hut, within the
sophisticated framework of The Arabian Nights, or in the nurseries of
well-brought-up Victorian children.
This adaptability, however, has obscured our understanding of these
tales. What have become by far the best-known versions are those