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