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Inhaltsangabe
A compendium of folkloric, literary, and critical texts that show how the Russian fairy tale acquired political and historical meanings during the Soviet era
We were born to make fairy tales come true. As one of Stalinism's more memorable slogans, this one suggests that the fairy tale figured in Soviet culture as far more than a category of children's literature. How much more-and how cannily Russian fairy tales reflect and interpret Soviet culture, especially in its utopian ambitions-becomes clear for the first time in Politicizing Magic, a compendium of folkloric, literary, and critical texts that demonstrate the degree to which ancient fairy-tale fantasies acquired political and historical meanings during the catastrophic twentieth century.
Introducing Western readers to the most representative texts of Russian folkloric and literary tales, this book documents a rich exploration of this colorful genre through all periods of Soviet literary production (1920-1985) by authors with varied political and aesthetic allegiances. Here are traditional Russian folkloric tales and transformations of these tales that, adopting the didacticism of Soviet ideology, proved significant for the official discourse of Socialist Realism. Here, too, are narratives produced during the same era that use the fairy-tale paradigm as a deconstructive device aimed at the very underpinnings of the Soviet system. The editors' introductory essays acquaint readers with the fairy-tale paradigm and the permutations it underwent within the utopian dream of Soviet culture, deftly placing each-from traditional folklore to fairy tales of Socialist Realism, to real-life events recast as fairy tales for ironic effect-in its literary, historical, and political context.
We were born to make fairy tales come true. As one of Stalinism's more memorable slogans, this one suggests that the fairy tale figured in Soviet culture as far more than a category of children's literature. How much more-and how cannily Russian fairy tales reflect and interpret Soviet culture, especially in its utopian ambitions-becomes clear for the first time in Politicizing Magic, a compendium of folkloric, literary, and critical texts that demonstrate the degree to which ancient fairy-tale fantasies acquired political and historical meanings during the catastrophic twentieth century.
Introducing Western readers to the most representative texts of Russian folkloric and literary tales, this book documents a rich exploration of this colorful genre through all periods of Soviet literary production (1920-1985) by authors with varied political and aesthetic allegiances. Here are traditional Russian folkloric tales and transformations of these tales that, adopting the didacticism of Soviet ideology, proved significant for the official discourse of Socialist Realism. Here, too, are narratives produced during the same era that use the fairy-tale paradigm as a deconstructive device aimed at the very underpinnings of the Soviet system. The editors' introductory essays acquaint readers with the fairy-tale paradigm and the permutations it underwent within the utopian dream of Soviet culture, deftly placing each-from traditional folklore to fairy tales of Socialist Realism, to real-life events recast as fairy tales for ironic effect-in its literary, historical, and political context.
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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor
Marina Balina is a professor of Russian at Illinois Wesleyan University. Her publications include Endquote: Sots-Art Literature and Soviet Grand Style with Nancy Condee and Evgeny Dobrenko (Northwestern, 2000), Soviet Treasure: Culture, Literature, and Film with Evgeny Dobrenko and Jurii Murashov (Akademiheskii project, 2002), and Dictionary of Literary Biography: Russian Writers Since 1980 with Mark Lipovetsky (Gale Group, 2003).
Helena Goscilo is UCIS Research Professor of Slavic at the University of Pittsburgh. She has authored and edited more than a dozen volumes, most recently Russian Culture in the 1990s, a special issue of Studies in 20th Century Literature (2000). She is also the editor of Shamara and Other Stories by Svetlana Vasilenko (Northwestern, 2000).
Mark Lipovetsky is an associate professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His is the author of five books, including Russian Postmodernist Fiction: Dialogue with Chaos (M. E. Sharpe, 1999) and Modern Russian Literature,1950s-1990s with Naum Leiderman (Academia, 2003).
Helena Goscilo is UCIS Research Professor of Slavic at the University of Pittsburgh. She has authored and edited more than a dozen volumes, most recently Russian Culture in the 1990s, a special issue of Studies in 20th Century Literature (2000). She is also the editor of Shamara and Other Stories by Svetlana Vasilenko (Northwestern, 2000).
Mark Lipovetsky is an associate professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His is the author of five books, including Russian Postmodernist Fiction: Dialogue with Chaos (M. E. Sharpe, 1999) and Modern Russian Literature,1950s-1990s with Naum Leiderman (Academia, 2003).
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Politicizing Magic
An Anthology of Russian and Soviet Fairy TalesNORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2005 Northwestern University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-2031-0
Contents
Foreword................................................................................................ixPART I Folkloric Fairy TalesIntroduction............................................................................................5The Frog Princess.......................................................................................23The Three Kingdoms......................................................................................28Baba Yaga...............................................................................................32Vasilisa the Beautiful..................................................................................34Maria Morevna...........................................................................................42Tale of Prince Ivan, the Firebird, and the Gray Wolf....................................................51The Feather of Finist the Bright Falcon.................................................................62The Magic Mirror........................................................................................69Danilo the Luckless.....................................................................................79Ilya Muromets and the Dragon............................................................................85The Maiden Tsar.........................................................................................91The Magic Ring..........................................................................................96PART II Fairy Tales of Socialist RealismIntroduction............................................................................................105Tale of the Military Secret, Malchish-Kibalchish and His Solemn Word Arkady Gaidar.....................123The Golden Key, or The Adventures of Buratino Alexey Tolstoy...........................................131The Old Genie Khottabych: A Story of Make-Believe Lazar Lagin..........................................165The Malachite Casket Pavel Bazhov......................................................................197The Flower of Seven Colors Valentin Kataev.............................................................222PART III Fairy Tales in Critique of Soviet CultureIntroduction............................................................................................233Fairy Tales for Grown-Up Children Yevgeny Zamyatin......................................................251The Dragon: A Satiric Fable in Three Acts Yevgeny Shvarts..............................................267Tale of the Troika Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.........................................................316Before the Cock Crows Thrice Vasily Shukshin...........................................................345That Very Munchausen Grigory Gorin.....................................................................381Translators and Sources.................................................................................417
Chapter One
Folkloric Fairy TalesINTRODUCTION
* * *
Helena Goscilo
PERENNIAL YET MYSTERIOUS ENCHANTMENT
The abiding and universal appeal of folkloric fairy tales poses a cultural enigma: do these brief, indefatigably repeated narratives seduce the imagination through magic, fantasy, and vivid, unforgettable personae as a pleasurable mode of escapism? Or do they fulfill a pragmatic function, positing practical solutions (assimilated via unconscious identification) to typical psychological dilemmas firmly grounded in everyday experience? Are fairy tales fanciful flights providing respite from, and wishful compensation for, lived reality-or are they a fundamental part of that very reality, couched in symbolic form? Whether exercising the mysterious lure of conjury, illuminating mythic origins, or functioning as paradigmatic keys to problems, to what extent do fairy tales reflect the ethos and social mores of the cultures that produce them? Whom does their presumed audience comprise? In short, what do fairy tales strive for by endlessly iterating a minuscule number of predictable plots in multiple guises? If they have a more profound and submerged agenda than mere entertainment, what is that agenda and may it be generalized across generations and cultures?
Perhaps the most striking aspect of folkloric fairy tales, and one that urges interpretation, is the complete absence of "depth" and of even rudimentary analysis within the tales themselves. Unlike literary fiction, they eschew explicit psychology and motivation; rely on a minimal, paratactic style; usually proceed as a series of actions indifferent to logical causation yet relentless in their teleological drive; combine supernatural, fantastic events and transformations with banalities and mechanical repetition of set phrases and situations; and cap dispassionately reported scenes of mayhem, inconceivable cruelty, and violence with a formulaic happy ending-the obligatory utopian closure that allies the genre with totalitarian scenarios of a secular paradise. Such flagrant contradictions and heterogeneity invite readers to elaborate some coherent hermeneutical model capable of accounting for these glaringly incompatible extremes. Indeed, the gratifyingly ample range of approaches advocated by both Western and Slavic scholars over many decades pays homage to the cryptic richness of the fairy-tale genre, while simultaneously complicating the most basic issues it invariably raises.
INJUNCTIONS TO INTERPRETATION
By now a classic of Russian structuralism and folkloric scholarship, Vladimir Propp's rigorously systematic Morphology of the Folktale (1928) inventories the motifs that organize the fairy-tale plot and, with impeccable logic, charts their immutable sequence. Scrupulously confining himself to classification, Propp on principle ignores the significance of the tales' contents. While invaluable for revealing the formal consistency of tales, Morphology (subsequently refined upon by E. M. Meletinsky) categorically dismisses any attempt to illuminate what fairy tales are about and why they beguile children more potently and enduringly than any other genre. Max Lthi's formalist European Folktale (1947) extends Propp's paradigm to posit a stylistic model of the genre, which Lthi, however, conceives as literary. Identifying one-dimensionality, depthlessness, abstract style, isolation, and universal interconnection, in addition to sublimation and all-inclusiveness, as the fairy tale's constitutive features (Lthi 4-80), Lthi ascribes wish fulfillment to the genre on a profound spiritual level (81-106). Such an approach to the genre neatly explains the wholesale Soviet adoption of fairy-tale topoi for its portrayal of a constantly deferred "radiant future" that never eventuates in reality and therefore requires hyperbolic compensatory power in the rhetoric of its cultural texts.
Precisely where Propp and such early structuralists as A. Nikiforov fall (or stop) short, Bruno Bettelheim's Uses of Enchantment (1975), a famous psychoanalytical investigation mainly of French and German versions of fairy tales, offers bounties. Occasionally mechanistic, arbitrary, and overdetermined, Bettelheim's study advances a content-based thesis. Fairy tales, he riskily maintains, grapple with the integration of human...
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