The Complete Folktales of A. N. Afanas'ev, Vols. I and II ed. by Jack V. Haney (review)

Jack Haney has performed a great service in translating the first and second volumes of Afanas'ev's three-volume collection of folktales. Unfortunately, Haney died in 2015, but Volume III is being planned by the publisher, the University Press of Mississippi. This is a collection that any scholar interested in the folktale will want to have in his or her library. Afanas'ev's mid-nineteenth-century collection of some 553 tales is equivalent in importance to the Grimm's 1812 classic collection Kinder- und Hausmärchen, but it inexplicably was never translated into English in its entirety until the present edition. As Haney points out, Afanas'ev's collection marks the beginning of textual scholarship on the folktale in Russia. Unlike earlier collectors, Afanas'ev did not significantly edit the content of the tales; he included variants, and he grouped tales according to a classificatory scheme that he invented himself. Afanas'ev's scheme is close to the one later invented by Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson. It contains the following categories: animal tales, magic tales, novelistic tales, satirical tales, and anecdotes from everyday life. The sources for Afanas'ev's collection include a few tales that he collected in the Voronezh province, tales collected by Vladimir Dal', tales published in journals, and tales written down by amateur collectors, including those solicited by the Russian Geographical Society and Afanas'ev himself. The bulk of the tales are from Russian provinces, but a few others come from Ukraine and Belarus, which were then part of the Russian Empire.

Haney made his translation directly from the most recent scholarly edition compiled by L. G. Barag and N. V. Novikov and published in Mos-cow in 1984–1985. The original was first published in 1855–1863 and revised by the collector in a subsequent edition. It was then revised by other Russian editors in five subsequent editions (1897, 1913–1914, 1938–1940, 1957, and finally 1984–1985). Barag and Novikov's edition is an improvement over previous editions because it returns items removed by the censors, corrects inaccuracies from earlier editions, and adds information to the commentaries. Haney translated all of the tales in each volume. The first volume contains roughly 53 magic tales, 39 animal tales, 10 formula tales, and six tales of the stupid ogre; the second volume contains roughly 64 magic tales, six realistic tales, four religious tales, two animal tales, two legends, and one tale of the stupid ogre (according to the AT tale type classification system). The number of tales is only a rough estimate because tales often fit into more than one category. Afanas'ev presents many of the tales in more than one version: Volume I contains 108 tales in a total of 178 versions, and Volume II contains 79 tales in a total of 140 versions. Haney did not choose to translate the entire content of the commentaries. Instead, he translated what he considered essential, including the AT tale type, the source, where the tale is found among the Slavs, and major international analogues. The translated notes alone would probably be enough for most folklorists looking for basic information about individual tales, but those wanting to know more about the publishing or editing history of a given tale, about existing international variants, or specific information about sources would have to consult Barag and Novikov's Russian version.

The quality of the translation is overall quite good. Haney's translation differs in style and feel from the translation with which most people are familiar, Norbert Guterman's 1945 translation (Pantheon Books). Guterman is generally wordier, and he paraphrases, combines sentences, and occasionally uses archaic terms ("thrice," the verb "fancy...