Russian Fairy Tales.
The Golden Mountain.
Third Edition
London
A. H. Bullen
18 Cecil Court, St. Martin’s Lane, W.C.
1901
[v]
Preface.
The existence of the Russian Skazki orMärchen was first made generally known to the BritishPublic some twenty years ago by Mr. W. R. S. Ralston in his RussianFolk Tales. That excellent and most engrossing volume was,primarily, a treatise on Slavonic Folk-Lore, illustrated with admirableskill and judgment, by stories, mainly selected from the vastcollection of Afanasiev, who did for the Russian what Asbjörnsenhas done for the Norwegian Folk-Tale. A year after the appearance ofMr. Ralston’s book, the eminent Russian historian andarchæologist, Peter Nikolaevich Polevoi (well known, too, as anable and ardent Shaksperian scholar), selected from the inexhaustiblestores of Afanasiev some three dozen of the Skazki most suitable forchildren, and worked them up into a fairy tale book which was publishedat St. Petersburg in 1874, under the title of Narodnuiya RusskiyaSkazki (Popular Russian Märchen). To manipulate these quaintlyvigorous old-world stories for nursery purposes was, as may well beimagined, no easy task, but, on the whole, M. Polevoi did his workexcellently well, and while [vi]softening the cruditiesand smoothing out the occasional roughness of these charming stories,neither injured their simple texture nor overlaid the originalpattern.
It is from the first Russian edition of M. Polevoi’s book thatthe following selection has been made. With the single exception of“Morozko,” a variant of which will be familiar tothose who know Mr. Ralston’s volume, none of these tales has seenthe light in an English dress before; for though both Ralston andPolevoi drew, for the most part, from the same copious stock, theirpurposes were so different that their selections naturally proved to bedifferent also.
As to the merits of these Skazki, they must be left to speak forthemselves.