Reading Week 14: Russian Fairy Tales, Part A

Sadko by Ilya Repin on Wikipedia

For this week, I read the Russian Fairy Tales unit. I chose this unit because I have enjoyed all of the other fairy tales that I have read in this class this semester, and I did not know much about Russia’s storytelling. Some of these stories were pretty short with common themes, such as a greedy man who gets what is coming to him. Other stories are longer with more bizarre plots. I also learned from this unit that the days of the week are embodied as supernatural characters.

One shorter tale about a greedy priest had a disturbing yet foreseeable ending. In The Treasure, an old, poor man must bury his dead wife. No one will help him dig a grave because he is poor, not even the priest. The priest is actually the rudest of all and declares that the old man cannot show his face to him again without money. The old man begins to dig a grave for his wife himself and hits a pot of gold. He uses the gold to bury his wife and provide a feast in her honor. When the priest finds out about the gold, he dresses in a sheep’s skin and goes to the old man pretending to be the devil. He takes all the gold back to his own wife, but is stuck in the sheep’s skin as God’s punishment for his greediness. I was not surprised that the priest was punished, but this is a weird and gross method of punishment.

A tale that was longer and with a more convoluted plot was The Water Snake. A group of girls go bathing and one finds a snake on her clothing when preparing to leave. The snake demands that she marry him, and she agrees thinking that it will be impossible to marry a snake. The girl goes home only to be captured by a hoard of snakes a week later. She is taken to the pond where the snakes become people who live under the water. After three years of living with the snake and having two of his children, the girl is allowed to visit her mother on land. The mother ends up going to the pond to kill the snake while her daughter sleeps. However, it appears that the girl actually liked her life underwater with the snake, and she is distraught at finding out about his death. She then recites lines to her two children and herself claiming that they will forevermore live as birds.

The tales of the weekdays were interesting because I had never read any stories in which they were personified. They appear as supernatural characters, such as the tale of Friday when a woman does not pray to Mother Friday and has her eyes filled with dust. Another tale, Wednesday, is of a girl who does not cross herself for Mother Wednesday before sleeping. Mother Wednesday appears as an evil spirit who wishes to do the girl harm.

If you would like to read these tales, click here: link.

Note on image: The chosen image is not from this particular unit. I did not read any tales about mermaids for this post, but as it was difficult to find artwork relevant to this blog post, I chose this painting to demonstrate what life might have been like for the girl in The Water Snake. The artist was born in what was once the Russian Empire and is today Ukraine.