Afanasyev's Russian treasured tales are about what. Treasured Russian fairy tales

"Russians cherished tales"A.N. Afanasyev were published in Geneva more than a hundred years ago. They appeared without the name of the publisher, sine anno. On title page, under the title, it was only indicated: “Balaam. Typical art of the monastic brethren. Year of obscurantism." And on the counter-title there was a note: “Printed exclusively for archaeologists and bibliophiles in a small number of copies.”

Extremely rare already in the last century, Afanasyev’s book has become almost a phantom these days. Judging by the works of Soviet folklorists, in special departments largest libraries Only two or three copies of “Treasured Tales” have survived from Leningrad and Moscow. The manuscript of Afanasyev’s book is in the Leningrad Institute of Russian Literature of the USSR Academy of Sciences (“Russian folk tales not for publication,” Archive, No. R-1, inventory 1, No. 112). The only copy of "Fairy Tales" that belonged to the Parisian National Library, disappeared before the First World War. The book is not listed in the catalogs of the British Museum library.

By reprinting Afanasyev’s “Treasured Tales,” we hope to introduce Western and Russian readers to a little-known facet of the Russian imagination - “raunchy”, obscene fairy tales, in which, as the folklorist puts it, “genuine folk speech flows with a living spring, sparkling with all the brilliant and witty sides of the common people.” .

Obscene? Afanasyev did not consider them that way. “They just can’t understand,” he said, “what’s in these folk stories a million times more moral than in sermons full of school rhetoric.”

“Russian Treasured Tales” is organically connected with Afanasyev’s collection of fairy tales, which has become a classic. Tales of immodest content, like fairy tales famous collection, were delivered to Afanasyev by the same collectors and investors: V.I. Dal, P.I. Yakushkin, Voronezh local historian N.I. Vtorov. In both collections we find the same themes, motifs, plots, with the only difference being that the satirical arrows of “Treasured Tales” are more poisonous, and the language is in some places quite rude. There is even a case when the first, quite “decent” half of the story is placed in a classic collection, while the other, less modest, is in “Treasured Tales”. It's about about the story “A Man, a Bear, a Fox and a Horsefly.”

There is no need to dwell in detail on why Afanasyev, when publishing “Folk Russian Fairy Tales” (issues 1–8, 1855–1863), was forced to refuse to include that part, which a decade later would be published under the title “Folk Russian Fairy Tales Not for Printing” (the epithet “cherished” appears only in the title of the second and last edition of “Fairy Tales”). Soviet scientist V.P. Anikin explains this refusal this way: “It was impossible to publish anti-popov and anti-lord tales in Russia.” Is it possible to publish - in an uncut and uncleaned form - “Treasured Tales” in Afanasyev’s homeland today? We do not find an answer to this from V.P. Anikin.

The question remains open of how immodest fairy tales got abroad. Mark Azadovsky suggests that in the summer of 1860, during his trip to Western Europe, Afanasiev handed them over to Herzen or another emigrant. It is possible that the publisher of Kolokol contributed to the release of Fairy Tales. Subsequent searches, perhaps, will help illuminate the history of the publication of “Russian Treasured Tales” - a book that stumbled over the obstacles of not only tsarist, but also Soviet censorship.

The publication of our cherished fairy tales... is almost a unique phenomenon of its kind. It could easily be that this is precisely why our publication will give rise to all sorts of complaints and outcries not only against the daring publisher, but also against the people who created such tales in which the people's imagination in vivid pictures and without any hesitation in expressions deployed all its strength and all its wealth your humor. Leaving aside all possible complaints against us, we must say that any outcry against the people would be not only injustice, but also an expression of complete ignorance, which for the most part, by the way, is one of the inalienable properties of a screaming pruderie. Our cherished fairy tales are a one-of-a-kind phenomenon, as we said, especially because we do not know of another publication in which genuine folk speech would flow in such a living way in a fairy-tale form, sparkling with all the brilliant and witty sides of the common people.

The literatures of other nations present many similar treasured stories and have long been ahead of us in this regard. If not in the form of fairy tales, then in the form of songs, conversations, short stories, farces, sottises, moralites, dictons, etc., other peoples have a huge number of works in which the popular mind, just as little embarrassed by expressions and pictures, marked it with humor, hooked me with satire and sharply exposed different aspects of life to ridicule. Who doubts that playful Boccaccio's stories are not drawn from popular life, that countless French novellas and faceties of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries are not from the same source as satirical works Spaniards, Spottliede and Schmahschriften Germans, this mass of lampoons and various flying leaflets in all languages, which appeared on various private and public life, - Not folk works? In Russian literature, however, there is still a whole department folk expressions unprintable, not for printing. In the literatures of other nations, such barriers to popular speech have not existed for a long time.

...So, accusing the Russian people of crude cynicism would be equivalent to accusing all other peoples of the same thing, in other words, it naturally comes down to zero. The erotic content of cherished Russian fairy tales, without saying anything for or against the morality of the Russian people, simply points only to that side of life that most gives free rein to humor, satire and irony. Our fairy tales are transmitted in the unartificial form as they came from the lips of the people and were recorded from the words of the storytellers. This is their peculiarity: nothing has been touched in them, there are no embellishments or additions. We will not dwell on the fact that in different parts of wider Rus' the same fairy tale is told differently. Of course, there are many such options, and most of they, no doubt, pass from mouth to mouth, without being yet either overheard or written down by collectors. The options we present are taken from among the most famous or most characteristic for some reason.

Note... that the part of fairy tales where characters animals, perfectly depicts all the ingenuity and all the power of observation of our commoner. Far from cities, working in the fields, forests, and rivers, everywhere he deeply understands the nature he loves, faithfully spies and subtly studies the life around him. The vividly captured aspects of this silent, but eloquent life for him, are themselves transferred to his brothers - and full of life and light humor the story is ready. The section of fairy tales about the so-called “foal breed” by the people, of which we have so far presented only a small part, clearly illuminates both the attitude of our peasant to his spiritual shepherds and his correct understanding of them.

Our treasured tales are curious in addition to many aspects and in in the following respect. They provide an important scientist, a thoughtful researcher of the Russian people with a vast field for comparing the content of some of them with stories of almost the same content by foreign writers, with the works of other peoples. How did Boccaccio’s stories (see, for example, the fairy tale “The Merchant’s Wife and Clerk”), satires and farces of the French of the 16th century penetrate into the Russian backwaters, how did the Western short story degenerate into a Russian fairy tale, what is their social side, where and, perhaps, even from whose side are traces of influence, what kind of doubts and conclusions from the evidence of such an identity, etc., etc.

Book author:

9 Pages

2-3 Hours to read

34 thousand Total words

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“Russian Treasured Tales” by A.N. Afanasyev was published in Geneva more than a hundred years ago. They appeared without the name of the publisher, sine anno. On the title page, under the title, it was only stated: “Balaam. Typical art of the monastic brethren. Year of obscurantism." And on the counter-title there was a note: “Printed exclusively for archaeologists and bibliophiles in a small number of copies.”

Extremely rare already in the last century, Afanasyev’s book has become almost a phantom these days. Judging by the works of Soviet folklorists, only two or three copies of “Treasured Tales” have been preserved in the special departments of the largest libraries in Leningrad and Moscow. The manuscript of Afanasyev’s book is in the Leningrad Institute of Russian Literature of the USSR Academy of Sciences (“Russian folk tales not for publication,” Archive, No. R-1, inventory 1, No. 112). The only copy of “Fairy Tales” that belonged to the Paris National Library disappeared before the First World War. The book is not listed in the catalogs of the British Museum library.

By reprinting Afanasyev’s “Treasured Tales,” we hope to introduce Western and Russian readers to a little-known facet of the Russian imagination - “raunchy”, obscene fairy tales, in which, as the folklorist puts it, “genuine folk speech flows with a living spring, sparkling with all the brilliant and witty sides of the common people.” .

“The Treasured Tale” about a toothy bosom and a pike head
from Afanasyev's collection

Bibliothèque nationale de France

In the 1850s, folklore collector Alexander Afanasyev traveled through the Moscow and Voronezh provinces and recorded fairy tales, songs, proverbs and parables local residents. However, he managed to publish little: like French fabliaux, German Schwanks and Polish facets, Russian fairy tales contained erotic and anti-clerical plots, and therefore Afanasyev’s collections were censored.

From the prohibited texts, Afanasyev compiled a collection called “Russian Folk Tales Not for Printing” and secretly smuggled it to Europe. In 1872, many of the texts included in it were published in Geneva, without the name of the compiler, under the title “Russian treasured tales.” The word “treasured” means “protected”, “secret”, “secret”, “holy kept”, and after the publication of “Russian cherished proverbs and sayings” collected by Vladimir Dahl and Pyotr Efremov, and Afanasyev’s “Treasured Tales”, it began to be used in as a definition of a corpus of obscene, erotic folklore texts.

In Russia, Afanasyev’s collection was published only in 1991. Arzamas publishes one of the texts included in it.

Pike head

Once upon a time there lived a man and a woman, and they had a daughter, a young girl. She went to harrow the garden; harrowed and harrowed, and they just called her into the hut to eat pancakes. She went, and left the horse completely with the harrow in the garden:
- Let him stand while I toss and turn.
Only their neighbor had a son - a stupid guy. He had long wanted to hook this girl, but he couldn’t figure out how. He saw a horse with a harrow, climbed over the fence, unharnessed the horse and led it into his garden. Although he left the harrow
in the old place, but stuck the shafts through the fence towards him and harnessed the horse again. The girl came and marveled:
- What would it be like - a harrow on one side of the fence, and a horse on the other?
And let's beat your nag with a whip and say:
- What the hell got you! She knew how to get in, know how to get out: well, well, take it out!
And the guy stands, looks and chuckles.
“If you want,” he says, “I’ll help, just give me...
The girl was a thief:
“Perhaps,” she says, and she had in mind an old pike head,
she was lying in the garden with her mouth open. She lifted that head, stuck it in her sleeve
and says:
“I won’t come to you, and you shouldn’t come here either, so that no one will see, but let’s better go through this gap.” Hurry up and put the gag in, and I’ll instruct you.
The guy jerked the gag and pushed it through the tyn, and the girl took the pike's head, opened it and sat it on the bald head. He pulled and he scratched his *** until it bled. He grabbed the gag with his hands and ran home, sat in the corner and kept quiet.
“Oh, her mother,” she thinks to herself, “how painfully her ***** bites!” If only *** healed, otherwise I’ll never ask any girl!
Now the time has come: they decided to marry this guy, matched him with a neighbor’s girl and married him. They live a day, and another, and a third, they live for a week, another
and the third. The guy is afraid to touch his wife. Now we need to go to my mother-in-law, let's go. The dear young woman says to her husband:
- Listen, dear Danilushka! Why did you get married and what are you doing with me?
don't you have? If you can’t, what was the point of wasting someone else’s life for nothing?
And Danilo told her:
- No, now you won’t deceive me! Your ***** bites. My gag has been hurting for a long time since then, and it was difficult to heal.
“You’re lying,” she says, “I was joking with you at that time, but now
don't be afraid. Go ahead and try it on the road, you’ll love it yourself.
Then the hunt took him, he turned up her hem and said:
“Wait, Varyukha, let me tie your legs, if it starts to bite, I can jump out and leave.”
He untied the reins and twisted her bare thighs. He had a decent instrument, how he pressed Varyukha, how she screamed with good obscenities,
and the horse was young, got scared and started mooing (the sleigh was here and there), threw the guy out, and Varyukha, with bare thighs, rushed to her mother-in-law’s yard. The mother-in-law looks out the window, sees: it’s her son-in-law’s horse, and she thought, right, it was he who brought beef for the holiday; I went to meet her because it was her daughter.
“Oh, mother,” he shouts, “untie him quickly, no one has seen Pokedov.”
The old woman untied her and asked her what and how.
-Where is your husband?
- Yes, his horse fell out!
So they entered the hut, looked out the window - Danilka was walking, approached the boys who were playing at grandmothers, stopped and looked at them. His mother-in-law sent his eldest daughter for him.
She comes:
- Hello, Danila Ivanovich!
- Great.
- Go to the hut, you’re the only one missing!
- And you have Varvara?
- We have.
“Has her bleeding stopped?”
She spat and left him. His mother-in-law sent his daughter-in-law for him, and this one pleased him.
“Come on, let’s go, Danilushka, the blood has long since subsided.”
She brought him to the hut, and his mother-in-law met him and said:
- Welcome, dear son-in-law!
- And you have Varvara?
- We have.
“Has her bleeding stopped?”
- I stopped a long time ago.
So he pulled out his gag, showed it to his mother-in-law and said:
- Look, mother, this was all sewn in her!
- Well, well, sit down, it's time for lunch.
They sat down and began to drink and eat. When they served scrambled eggs, the fool wanted them all
to eat it alone, so he came up with the idea, and deftly pulled out the gag and hit
over his bald head with a spoon and said:
- That was all that was wrong in Varyukha! - and began to stir the scrambled eggs with his spoon.
There’s nothing to do here, everyone climbed out of the table, and he ate the scrambled eggs alone
and began to thank his mother-in-law for the bread and the salt. 

RUSSIAN TREATED TALES

Collected by A.N. Afanasyev

“What a shame? Stealing is a shame, but saying nothing, anything is possible.”

("Strange Names").

A few words about this book

Preface by A.N. Afanasyev to the 2nd edition

Shy lady Merchant's wife and clerk

Like a dog

Marriage is a fool

Sowing X...EV

Wonderful pipe

Miracle ointment

Magic ring

Men and master

Good father

Bride without a head

timid bride

Nikola Duplyansky

Husband on balls

A man at a woman's work

Family conversations

Strange names

The soldier will decide

The soldier himself sleeps, and the fuck works

The soldier and the devil

Runaway Soldier

Soldier, man and woman

Soldier and Ukrainian girl

Soldier and Little Russian

The man and the devil

Soldier and pop

Hunter and goblin

Sly woman

Bet

Bishop's response

Laughter and grief

Dobry pop

Pop neighs like a stallion

The priest's family and the farmhand

Pop and farmhand

Pop, priest, priest and farm laborer

Pop and man

Piglet

Cow trial

Male funeral

Greedy pop

The tale of how a priest gave birth to a calf

Spiritual father

Pop and Gypsy

Bring on the heat

The Blind Man's Wife

Pop and trap

Senile verse

Jokes

Bad - not bad

The groom's first meeting with the bride

Two groom brothers

Clever housewife

Woman's tricks

Chatty wife

Mother-in-law and son-in-law are a fool

Pike head

Man, bear, fox and horsefly

Cat and fox

Fox and Hare

Louse and flea

Bear and woman

Sparrow and mare

Dog and woodpecker

Hot gag

P...and ass

Enraged lady

Notes

A FEW WORDS ABOUT THIS BOOK

“Russian Treasured Tales” by A.N. Afanasyev was published in Geneva more than a hundred years ago. They appeared without the name of the publisher, sine anno. On the title page, under the title, it was only stated: “Valaam. By the typical art of the monastic brethren. The year of obscurantism.” And on the counter-title there was a note: “Printed exclusively for archaeologists and bibliophiles in a small number of copies.”

Extremely rare already in the last century, Afanasyev’s book has become almost a phantom these days. Judging by the works of Soviet folklorists, only two or three copies of “Treasured Tales” have been preserved in special departments of the largest libraries in Leningrad and Moscow. The manuscript of Afanasyev's book is in the Leningrad Institute of Russian Literature of the USSR Academy of Sciences ("Russian folk tales not for publication, Archive, No. R-1, inventory 1, No. 112). The only copy of "Fairy Tales", which belonged to the Paris National Library, disappeared before the First World War war. The book is not listed in the catalogs of the British Museum library.

By republishing Afanasyev’s “Treasured Tales,” we hope to acquaint Western and Russian readers with a little-known facet of the Russian imagination - “raunchy”, obscene fairy tales, in which, as the folklorist puts it, “genuine folk speech flows with a living spring, sparkling with all the brilliant and witty sides of the common people.” .

Obscene? Afanasyev did not consider them that way. “They just can’t understand,” he said, “that in these folk stories there is a million times more morality than in sermons full of school rhetoric.”

“Russian Treasured Tales” is organically connected with Afanasyev’s collection of fairy tales, which has become a classic. Fairy tales of immodest content, like the tales of the famous collection, were delivered to Afanasyev by the same collectors and contributors: V.I. Dal, P.I. Yakushkin, Voronezh local historian N.I. Vtorov. In both collections we find the same themes, motifs, plots, with the only difference being that the satirical arrows of “Treasured Tales” are more poisonous, and the language is quite rude in places. There is even a case when the first, quite “decent” half of the story is placed in a classic collection, while the other, less modest, is in “Treasured Tales”. We are talking about the story "A Man, a Bear, a Fox and a Horsefly."

There is no need to dwell in detail on why Afanasyev, when publishing “Folk Russian Fairy Tales” (issues 1–8, 1855–1863), was forced to refuse to include that part, which a decade later would be published under the title “Folk Russian Fairy Tales Not for Printing.” (the epithet “cherished” appears only in the title of the second and last edition of “Fairy Tales”). Soviet scientist V.P. Anikin explains this refusal this way: “It was impossible to publish anti-popov and anti-lord tales in Russia.” Is it possible to publish - in an uncut and uncleaned form - "Treasured Tales" in Afanasyev's homeland today? We do not find an answer to this from V.P. Anikin.

"Two wifes"

Once upon a time there were two merchants, both married, and they lived together amicably and lovingly. Here is one merchant who says:

- Listen, brother! Let's do a test to see whose wife it is better than my husband loves.

- Let's; how can I try it?

- Here’s how: let’s get together and go to the Makaryevskaya fair, and the wife who starts crying the most will love her husband more.

So they got ready to set off, and their wives began to accompany them: one was crying and bursting into tears, and the other was saying goodbye and laughing herself. The merchants went to the fair, drove off about fifty miles and started talking among themselves.

“Look how your wife loves you,” says one, “how she cried goodbye; and mine began to say goodbye - and she laughed!

And the other says:

- That's it, brother! Now the wives have seen us off, let’s go back, so let’s see what our wives are doing without us.

- Fine!

They returned to the night and entered the city on foot; they went ahead to the hut of that merchant whose wife was crying loudly at goodbye; They look out the window: she is sitting with her lover and walking. The lover pours a glass of vodka, drinks it himself and brings it to her:

- Here, honey, have a drink!

She drank and said:

- You are my dear friend! Now I'm yours.

- These are the nonsense: all mine! There is something and it's husband's!

She turned her ass to him and said:

- Here he is, “...” son - one ass!

Then the merchants went to the wife who did not cry, but laughed; They came under the window and looked: a lamp was burning in front of the icons, and she was on her knees, praying earnestly and saying: “Grant, Lord, to my partner on the path of every return!”

“Well,” says one merchant to another, “now let’s go trade.”

We went to the fair and traded very well: there was such a challenge in trade as never before!

It's time to go home; They began to get ready to go back and decided to buy their wives a gift. One merchant, whose wife prayed to God, bought her some nice brocade for her fur coat, and another bought his wife brocade for only one butt:

- It's my only ass! So I only need half an arshin: I don’t want to spoil my ass!

We arrived and gave gifts to the wives.

- Why did you buy such a scrap? - says the wife with a heart.

- And remember, “...”, how you sat with your lover and said that my only ass; Well, I equipped my unit! Our brocade on the ass and wear it.

"Men and Master"

The master came to mass on a holiday, stood and prayed to God; suddenly, out of nowhere, a man stood in front of him, this son of a bitch has sinned, he’s so careless that he can’t even breathe.

“What a scoundrel! “It stinks,” the master thinks. He approached the man, took out a ruble of money, held it in his hand and asked:

- Listen, man! Did you shit so well?

The man saw the money and said:

- I, master!

- Well, brother! You have a ruble of money for this.

The man took it and thought: “It’s true, the master really loves bzdoh, you have to go to church every holiday and stand next to him - he will always give you a ruble.”

Mass ended and everyone went home. The man went straight to his neighbor and told him how and what happened to him.

“Well, brother,” says the neighbor, “now, like a holiday raining, let’s both go to church; Together we will instil even more: he will give both of us money!

So they waited for the holiday, went to church, stood in front of the master and released a stink into the whole church. The master approached them and asked: