Mr. Afanasiev's Naughty Little Secrets:

"Russkie zavetnye skazki"

Jack V. Haney. University of Washington. Seattle

If one were to judge solely from nineteenth century collections of Russian folktales, the

Russian peasant never swore, never abused priests or their wives, and indulged in procreative acts

only in the most delicate fashion. The collections of the populists (narodniki), who were mostly

school teachers by occupation if not training, are devoid of such things, as is the great collection

in three volumes of Alexander Afanasiev. But Afanasiev collected many tales that he clearly

intended to publish in his "Narodnye russkie skazki" [Folk Russian tales] which were banned by

the tsarist censors on the grounds that they were obscene or anticlerical. Clearly, such tales

existed and were in circulation throughout Russia.

The history of these tales that could not be printed in Russia until 1991 is most curious.

but far from sufficiently studied. First mention of them dates to 1856, when the ethnographer

and lexicographer, Vladimir Oal', wrote Afanasiev about them in conjunction with Oal's

transmittal of several thousand folktales that were to serve as the basis for Afanasiev's three

volume collection. By 1862 Afanasiev had compiled the collection of anticlerical and obscene

tales known in manuscript form as "Narodnye russkie skazki. Ne dUa pechati" [Folk Russian tales.

Not for print]. Afanasiev died in 1871, and there is no evidence that he knew they would ever be

printed.

Most probably it was in 1872 that the "Russkie zavetnye skazki" [Russian secret tales]

appeared. (It could have been as late as 1875). The place of publishing was Geneva, that citadel

of Calvinism! There is nothing in the first edition to identity any editor, publishing house, or

date or city, and the facts have had to be teased out of a great variety of sources. Suffice it here

to say that Yurii Sokolov long ago established that the tales were from Afanasiev's collection.

They appear to have been taken to Western Europe, probably to London first, by V. I. Kasatkin,

a young friend of Afanasiev. There the Russian emigre circles, which included N. P. Ogarev and

A. I. Herzen, decided to publish the tales anonymously. Why they waited until 1872 or later to

publish them is unknown. If the date was connected to Afanasiev's death, then there is in any

case no mention of him in the book.

There are seventy seven tales in the collection, and this order has been observed in all

subsequent editions. The tales have been catalogued according to the Aarne- Thompson system,

and each is indexed in the "Sravnitel'nyi ukazatel'siuzhetov. Vostochnslavianskaia skazka" (SUS)

[Comparative index of types. The east Slavic tale], the indispensable guide to the East Slavic

folktale.

Throughout the nineteenth century these tales were not officially known to exist,

although it is clear that copies of the Geneva editions, usually the second (1879), circulated and

made their way into both public and private collections. Nor were Afanasiev's obscene tales the

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only ones collected. The next important collecting was not done until the twentieth century. by

Nikolai Onchukov (1872- 1942), who spent the years 1900-08 working in the Far North under

the auspices of the Russian Geographical Society (RGO). In 1908 "Severnye skazki" [Northern

tales] appeared, a very large and important collection of tales edited by Onchukov, but with the

participation of the linguist A. A. Shakhmatov, the prose write Mikhail Prishvin, and others.

This volume contained but a portion of the total Onchukov collection, and among the tales that

were not -- could not -- be printed were "zavetnye skazki," mistranslated into English as "secret

tales." (The word "zavetnyj" was first used by V. I. Oal' in its Muscovite sense, "forbidden").

These "forbidden" tales were not published, but it is clear from the writings of scholars that they

were familiar with them.

Some of the tales from Afanasiev's archival texts, in sanitized form, found their way into

the three volume edition of the folktales published in 1984, and as they had been discussed in the

literature by V. la. Propp and others since the mid-seventies, it is fair to say that Afanasiev's

secret was out! But it was not until 1997 that Afanasiev's manuscript finally was published in its

entirely, i.e., four decades after it had become part of the archives of the Institute of Russian

Literature (Pushkinskii dom) of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. * The

manuscript of "Narodnye russkie skazki ne dlia pechati," constituting one hundred fifty eight

tales (not all of them complete), appeared together with Oal's famous collection of obscene

proverbs and sayings, many scabrous folk songs, tongue twisters, incantations, etc., in a volume

that is part of a series of erotic texts, including the tales of Onchukov. The "Geneva" edition

appeared in 1992 in an edition from Moscow and Paris with an important article appended by L.

V. Bessmertnykh.

There have been several editions of Afanasiev's naughty little tales in English, and each

has been reprinted. The first of them was entitled Stories from the Folk-Lore of Russia (Rouskiya

Zavetnu~va Skazki), and the translator is believed to have been one Charles Carrington, an

Englishman who worked in Paris. This edition is reproduced by G. Legman in Russian Secret

Tales: Bawdy Folktales of Old Russia, first published in New York in 1966. Besides its ribald

illustrations, the edition of 1966 is noteworthy for its folkloric annotations presumed to be by

the famous folklorist, Giuseppe Pitre. The latter discuss the tales within their Eurasian context,

but ignore the Slavic roots entirely.

The other English edition is by Yury Perkov, whose edition Erotic Tales of Old Russia

appeared in Berkeley in 1980 and then again in 1988. Whereas the Carrington translations often

resort to circumlocutions and stylistic substitutions to convey the very racy Russian, Perkov's

emphasizes the vulgarity of the original, and, make no mistake, the original is very vulgar. The

Perkov edition does not include all the tales of the Geneva editions. He eliminates those based on

word playas being essentially untranslatable. What the student of Russian and Russian folklore

will find most fun, I suspect, is Perkov's inclusion of the Russian texts in the volume, although

not side by side.

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The most recent addition to the English language versions of Russian bawdy stories is a

reprint of the old Carrington translation introduced by G. Legman, an authority on erotic

literature, if not Russia: Russian Secret Tales: Bawdy Folklore of Old Russia, Baltimore, 1998

(ISBN 0-8063-4778-3) This edition features a new introduction by the noted folklorist from the

University of California, Berkeley, Alan Dundes. Dundes faults folklorists and especially

publishers -- past and present -- for their prudish refusal to countenance "obscene" folkloric

texts. He notes that the collection of the brothers Grimm contained not a single risque tale, as if

the Germans had no such humor in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries! Danish and Norwegian

scholars collected obscene tales in the 1830s, but the world could not know that until 1977. The

censorship continues in almost every tradition. It seems to have been especially bad in the United

States, and has continued to the present time. Dundes briefly recounts the dreary story.

Dundes is not on very sure ground when he turns to the Russian folktale, and here it is the

Russian scholars writing in English who are at fault. He relies too much on the faulty translation

of Yuri Sokolov's "Russian Folklore" in his discussion of Afanasiev, for instance.

Afanasiev's collection, in its second edition, inspired Aarne's ordering as may be seen by

the fact that Afanasiev's numbers are often identical to Aarne's types, as is the general layout of

tales: animal tales, wondertales, then tales of everyday life. And of course Russian scholars refer

to Afanasiev's tales by his numbers and continue to this day to publish his tales in the same order

as they were published in the second and third editions. So, too, are the tales of the brothers

Grimm published in the same order from edition to edition. But Russian folktales from other

collections are always referred to by their A- T numbers and certainly not with reference to

Afanasiev's collection.

Too, Dundes can scarcely be faulted for not knowing that if the tales contained in this

volume are not identified by A- T number, it would have been a simple matter for the editor to

equip the edition with that information, as it is all included in SUS.

Of the two editions, the folklorist will prefer Legman's because of Pitre's commentary.

The Russianist will want to read the tales in the original, and here the Russian edition of 1997 is

by far the best. The casual reader in English will find Perkov's closer in spirit and language to the

original. The obvious solution is to have all three.

*For reasons that remain unclear to this reader the edition was dedicated to the 850th

anniversary of the founding of Moscow!

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