The Project Gutenberg EBook of Russian Fairy Tales, by W. R. S. Ralston

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Title: Russian Fairy Tales
A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore

Author: W. R. S. Ralston

Release Date: August 22, 2007 [EBook #22373]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RUSSIAN FAIRY TALES ***

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Russian Fairy Tales.

A CHOICE COLLECTION

--OF--

MUSCOVITE FOLK-LORE.

--BY--

W. R. S. RALSTON, M. A.,

OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM,
CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE IMPERIAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
OF RUSSIA, AUTHOR OF "THE SONGS OF THE RUSSIAN
PEOPLE," "KRILOF AND HIS FABLES," ETC.

[Illustration]

NEW YORK:
HURST & CO., PUBLISHERS,
122 NASSAU STREET.

[Illustration: The King got on the Eagle's back. Away they went
flying.--Page 131.]

To the Memory of

ALEXANDER AFANASIEF

I Dedicate this Book,

TO HIM SO DEEPLY INDEBTED.

PREFACE.

The stories contained in the following pages are taken from the
collections published by Afanasief, Khudyakof, Erlenvein, and
Chudinsky. The South-Russian collections of Kulish and Rudchenko I
have been able to use but little, there being no complete dictionary
available of the dialect, or rather the language, in which they are
written. Of these works that of Afanasief is by far the most
important, extending to nearly 3,000 pages, and containing 332
distinct stories--of many of which several variants are given,
sometimes as many as five. Khudyakof's collection contains 122
skazkas--as the Russian folk-tales are called--Erlenvein's 41, and
Chudinsky's 31. Afanasief has also published a separate volume,
containing 33 "legends," and he has inserted a great number of stories
of various kinds in his "Poetic views of the Old Slavonians about
Nature," a work to which I have had constant recourse.

From the stories contained in what may be called the "chap-book
literature" of Russia, I have made bu