Transcriber’s Note:
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
Any editor of Slav folk-tales starts with great advantages.Russia is a country where artistic development beganvery late; where popular lore was conserved with littlealteration owing to the immensities of the country, theprimitiveness of the people, and the punctiliousness ofthe compilers.
The principal source for Russian folk-tales is thegreat collection of Afanáśev, a coeval of Rybnikov,Kirěyevski, Sakharov, Bezsonov, and others who all fromabout 1850 to 1870 laboriously took down from the lipsof the peasants of all parts of Russia what they could ofthe endless store of traditional song, ballad, and folk-tale.These great collectors were actuated only by thedesire for accuracy; they appended laboriously eruditenotes; but they were not literary men and did notsophisticate, or improve on their material.
But, before venturing on a brief account of the tales,something must be premised as to the position occupiedby folk-tales in the cultural development of a people.In Pagan times, there always existed a double religion,the ceremonial worship of the gods of nature and thetribal deities,—a realm of thought in which all currentphilosophy and idealism entered into a set form thatsymbolized the State,—and also local cults and superstitions,the adoration of the spirits of streams, wells,hills, etc. To all Aryan peoples, Nature has always beenalive, but never universalized, or romanticized, as inmodern days; wherever you were, the brook, the wind,the knoll, the stream were all inhabited by agencies,viwhich could be propitiated, cajoled, threatened, but,under all conditions, were personal forces, who could notbe disregarded.
When Christianity transformed the face of the world,it necessarily left much below the surface unaffected.The great national divinities were proscribed and submerged;some of their features reappearing in thelegendary feats of the saints. The local cults continued,with this difference, that they were now condemned bythe Church and became clandestine magic; or else theywere adopted by the Church, and the rites and sanctuariestransferred. The memory of them subsisted;the fear of these local gods degenerated into superstition;the magic of the folk-tales becomes half-fantastic,half-conventional, belief in which is surreptitious, usual,and optional. At this stage of