The Complete Folktales of A. N. Afanas'ev transed. by Jack V. Haney (review)

Folklorists and casual readers alike will appreciate this readable collection of beautiful Russian folktales. Jack V. Haney's new two-volume translation of the mid-nineteenth century collection of A. N. Afanas'ev folktales is a necessary addition to the bookshelf of any scholar of Slavic folklore. A new, complete translation of the Afanas'ev collection is long overdue; the last, incomplete collection was Norbert Guterman's Russian Fairy Tales (1945), old enough that the language is out of date and the text lacks any classification apparatus. The translator and editor of the present volumes is Haney, former professor of Slavic languages at the University of Washington, who sadly did not live to see the publication of the third volume of this collection, which is set to be published in 2020 by the University Press of Mississippi. Haney has made a lifetime of contributions to the field of folklore, most recently his The Complete Russian Folktale (1999–2006), a staggering seven-volume collection of tales, and Long, Long Tales from the Russian North (2015), a collection of long-form Russian folk narratives.

Afanas'ev's collection, originally published in Russian from 1855 to 1867, is one of the largest regional collections of folktales in history; the final edition features 575 tales. To compare, the Grimms' collection only has 211 tales. Afanas'ev collected some of his tales directly from informants, but most were gathered second-hand from scholarly publications and collections. Many tales will be familiar to folklorists thanks to Vladimir Propp, who demonstrates his thirty-one functions on one hundred tales from the Afanas'ev collection in his Morphology of the Folktale (1928).

The Afanas'ev collection is unique for two important reasons: first, sheer volume—the large number of tales makes this an exhaustive introduction to the variety and beauty of Slavic folktales. Second is its advanced scholarship for a nineteenth-century collection. Afanas'ev includes detailed notes about the collection, origin, and translation of his tales. For many of the more widespread tale types included in this collection, he includes as many as four variants, especially when there is wide divergence between variants or when they merge with other tale types. Afanas'ev developed a classification system for tale types that broadly overlaps with the ATU tale-type index. It is an organic system, based on the theme and content of tales, such that the reader may select a favorite tale by title and find similar tales in the pages before and after, making this collection a pleasure to explore. In this new edition, Haney maintains the same ordering.

Some notable tales included in this collection are "The Magic Mirror," a familiar variant of "Snow White"; "The Feather of Finist the Bright Falcon," a romantic variant of "Beauty and the Beast"; the eerie "The Tsarevna in the Underground Tsardom," a variant of "Cap O' Rushes" where the heroine escapes underground with her sentient dolls; "Gold Slipper," a variant of "Cinderella" in which the fairy godmother is a fish in a well; and the truly horrific "Up to the Knee in Gold, Up to the Elbow in Silver," a variant of the always-troubling "The Maiden without Hands" (2018).

Haney includes a brief, yet thorough, introduction to the life and scholarship of Afanas'ev and the legacy of his work. The details of his life lend a somber air to the collection; Afanas'ev was a scholar of philosophy, science, literature, and politics in addition to folklore and mythology, but his career and accomplishments were thwarted by the conservative Russian government of the period, who took issue with his progressive ideals. He struggled to support his family with his intellectual labor. The field of folklore is fortunate indeed that he was able to accomplish so much work in his short life and that his collections remain for our benefit.

In addition to this...