Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov ed. by Robert Chandler (review)

Russians call their equivalent to fairy tales volshebniye skazki, or sorcerous stories, when they are being precise, but more commonly they simply use skazki, “stories,” thus implying that all stories are linked to the fantastic, which leads to some confusion in cultures where the split between high culture and low, fantasy and realism, is more strictly enforced. In Russian Magic Tales, a thoughtfully presented overview, Robert Chandler has compiled a collection that not only manages to represent the breadth of the Russian fantastic but also captures the cross-currents at play between Russian folk belief and Russian literature.

The book is subdivided in an unusual fashion. Although its arrangement is roughly chronological, it is almost evenly split between anthologized sections (the earliest collections of folktales, folktales from the Soviet period, etc.) and sections dedicated to influential individual authors, including canonical favorites as well as less often translated writers. In Part 1 Chandler spotlights Pushkin; Part 2, “The First Folktale Collections,” provides a sampling of works by Aleksandr Afanasyev and Ivan Khudyakov; and Part 3 is titled “Early Twentieth-Century Collections.” Parts 4 and 5 are dedicated to the works of single authors again, Nadezhda Teffi and Pavel Bashov, respectively; Part 6 focuses on folktale collections from the Soviet period, and Part 7 concludes with a section of works from Andrey Platonov. Each of the seven sections includes both biographical and critical contextualization, which are as much a pleasure to consume as the stories themselves.

In his introduction Chandler provides an intriguing, broadly sketched overview of fairy tales both in general and in Russia. There are moments that whet one’s interest without satisfying it; for example, Chandler says, “Soviet folklorists collected a vast number of tales and made a still undervalued contribution to our historical understanding of them, but they said little about why these tales should still hold our interest” (xiv). We can only hope that they will be the seeds of future projects. In this one, however, Chandler makes an excellent beginning by piquing the interest of a new readership: those readers who may want to consider the works of Frank Miller, Alexander Panchenko, Marina Balina, Helena Goscilo, and Mark Lipovetsky, the last three of whom are the editors of the superb, recently published related text Politicizing Magic: An Anthology of Russian and Soviet Fairy Tales (2004), which is referenced in the bibliography.

The tales present an excellent cross-section of Russian perspectives concerning both the cultural value of the folktale and the specific, ironic, and occasionally counterintuitive humor or terror of its marvelous manifestations. In choosing from Pushkin’s oeuvre, for example, Chandler selects “A Tale About a Fisherman and His Servant Balda” and “A Tale About a Fisherman and a Fish,” two works that occupy opposite poles in Pushkin’s repertoire; the first is a traditional tale as heard from his former nurse, Arina Rodionovna, adapted only for its medium; and the second is an original tale inspired by a story out of the Grimms embedded with critical political commentary on Catherine the Great. Similar care has been taken with the scope of the collection as a whole.

Chandler includes two essays regarding Baba Yaga. Sibelan Forrester’s introduction to her excellent Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Folklore (2013), is excerpted to provide a thorough, humorous, and unusually compassionate overview of this cruelest and occasionally kindest of characters. Forrester observes that as well as occasionally turning up as a helper figure, Baba Yaga still holds echoes not only of the chthonic goddess that Propp and Von Franz supposed her to be but also of the Russian saint Paraskeva, protector of women in childbirth. Forrester returns to the tales to observe that “in times of high infant and child mortality, the goddess of the borders of death would necessarily play a part,” and she notes that should the worst come to pass, the tales provide the symbolic comfort that the “stolen” child “seems...