Russian Folk-Tales

Excerpt from Russian Folk-Tales The Stories contained in the following pages arc 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 but few extracts. It may, however, be as well to say a few words about them. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.