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Politicizing Magic An Anthology of Russian and Soviet
Fairy Tales 1st Edition Marina Balina Digital Instant
Download
Author(s): Marina Balina, Helena Goscilo, Mark Lipovetsky
ISBN(s): 9780810120327, 0810120321
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 2.71 MB
Year: 2005
Language: english
P OLITICIZING M AGIC
 P OLITICIZING M AGIC 
An Anthology of Russian and Soviet Fairy Tales

Edited by Marina Balina,

Helena Goscilo, and
Mark Lipovetsky

northwestern university press

evanston, illinois
 Northwestern University Press
www.nupress.northwestern.edu

Copyright © 2005 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2005. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

ISBN-13: 978-0-8101-2031-0 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-8101-2031-3 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8101-2032-7 (paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8101-2032-1 (paper)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Politicizing magic : an anthology of Russian and Soviet fairy tales / edited by Marina
Balina, Helena Goscilo, and Mark Lipovetsky.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8101-2031-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8101-2032-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Fairy tales—Russian (Federation) 2. Fairy tales—Soviet Union. 3. Folk literature,
Russian—Translations into English. 4. Folk literature, Soviet—Translations into English.
I. Balina, Marina. II. Goscilo, Helena, 1945– III. Lipoveëtìskiæi, M. N. (Mark Naumovich)
GR203.17.P65 2005
398.2'0947—dc22
2005010140

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
For Felix J. Oinas, the supreme bogatyr of Slavic folkloristics
 C ONTENTS

Foreword ix

PART I
Folkloric Fairy Tales

Introduction 5
The Frog Princess 23
The Three Kingdoms 28
Baba Yaga 32
Vasilisa the Beautiful 34
Maria Morevna 42
Tale of Prince Ivan, the Firebird, and the Gray Wolf 51
The Feather of Finist the Bright Falcon 62
The Magic Mirror 69
Danilo the Luckless 79
Ilya Muromets and the Dragon 85
The Maiden Tsar 91
The Magic Ring 96
 PART II
Fairy Tales of Socialist Realism

Introduction 105
Tale of the Military Secret, Malchish-Kibalchish
and His Solemn Word 123
Arkady Gaidar
The Golden Key, or The Adventures of Buratino 131
Alexey Tolstoy
The Old Genie Khottabych: A Story of Make-Believe 165
Lazar Lagin
The Malachite Casket 197
Pavel Bazhov
The Flower of Seven Colors 222
Valentin Kataev

PART III
Fairy Tales in Critique of Soviet Culture

Introduction 233
Fairy Tales for Grown-Up Children 251
Yevgeny Zamyatin
The Dragon: A Satiric Fable in Three Acts 267
Yevgeny Shvarts
Tale of the Troika 316
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Before the Cock Crows Thrice 345
Vasily Shukshin
That Very Munchausen 381
Grigory Gorin

Translators and Sources 417

 F OREWORD

Anyone surfing the Internet in the early twenty-first century, with

technology at an ambiguous peak and materialism at an all-time
high, might be startled at the numerous Web sites featuring texts that
recycle ageless folklore genres and, above all, fairy tales. Whether es-
capism or exoticized psychological landscapism, fairy tales resemble
science fiction in their capacity to clothe the problematically familiar
in a colorful symbolic garb that is accessible even to the intellectually
challenged. Throughout the centuries, tales of happenstance and
extraterrestrial heroism, inexplicable magical transformations, and
narrative closures affirming eternal happiness have entranced all
generations in disparate and diverse sociopolitical structures that
nevertheless find common ground in folkloric modes of thought.
Readers and viewers in the age of virtual reality are no exception.
During an era that glorifies well-intentioned mediocrity—the ever-
widening and intellectually sinking middle—Ivan the Fool in the con-
temporary guise of bumbling Gump remains alive and well in
Hollywoodized America and, no doubt, throughout the world.
Today’s lottery winners are yesteryear’s credulous fairy-tale protago-
nists. The modern Cinderella continues to toil and to toilette in vir-
tually all cultures, from ash-filled British and Russian hearths to Cal-
ifornia’s fast-dollared streets, reaping magical, logic-defying rewards
in such celluloid fantasies as the Stalinist Radiant Path (Svetlyi put’,

ix
 foreword

1940, Grigory Alexandrov), the Stagnation-era blockbuster Moscow

Doesn’t Believe in Tears (Moskva slezam ne verit, 1979, Vladimir Men-
shov), Hollywood’s Julia Roberts vehicle Pretty Woman (1990, Garry
Marshall), and the recent screen adaptations of the Harry Potter and
Lord of the Rings industry.
Soviet Russia, however, elaborated a very specific relationship to
fantasy and wonderland, harnessing the fairy tale’s teleological pro-
tagonist to socialist realist do-gooders and achievers (Gaidar’s
group-loyal Malchish-Kibalchish, Kataev’s “consciousness-raised,”
petal-tearing little girl), the magic helper to benevolent older Soviet
“mentors” (Kataev’s anonymous kindly old woman, Lagin’s ethnically
suspect but politically useful Khottabych, Bazhov’s rich but anticap-
italist Mistress of the Copper Mountain), and the happy ending to the
“radiant future” of a classless paradise (in Gaidar, Tolstoy, Lagin, and
Kataev). That same politicized paradigm, though fragmented and
antithetical in value, functions just as centrally in the satirized worlds
of Zamyatin, Shvarts, Gorin, Shukshin, and the Strugatsky brothers.
All of these works blatantly counter Vladimir Nabokov’s apodictic
assertion that “literature is not a dog carrying a message in its teeth.”
Indeed, their messages appear in oversized italics and rely on the
hermeneutical drumbeat of emphatic iteration (repetition, conve-
niently, being a cardinal feature of fairy tales). It is no coincidence that
the premier Soviet directors of fairy-tale screen adaptations, Alexan-
der Ptushko and Alexander Rou, thrived during Stalinism—an era
dominated by the brutally utopian slogan: “We were born to make
fairy tales come true.”1 In accord with the vertical axis of Russian fairy
tales, in 1935 Alexey Stakhanov enacted time-defying wonders in the
underworld of the Donbass coal mines, and Valery Chkalov, in an
unlikely synthesis of Finist and Ivan the Fool, soared high above
territorial borders on his metal magic carpet—Stalin’s favorite ma-
chine, the airplane.2 Pilots renowned for their skill bore the folkloric
name of “Stalin’s falcons,” and the populace enshrined the Leader in
the thrice-tenth kingdom of the Kremlin through a “fakelore” that
glorified his magical omnipotence.3 No other era in Soviet history

x
 foreword

embraced folklore for pragmatic ends with comparable gusto and

effectiveness, just as no other twentieth-century literary fairy tales
have so decisively shaped an entire nation’s collective unconscious. An
understanding of the formative role played by Stalinist fairy tales
provides its own “golden key” to Soviet culture and the mentality
that credited the eventual advent of the radiant future.
The contents and structure of Politicizing Magic aim to spotlight
the specifics of that strategic rhetorical adoption of national varia-
tions on universal collective models of human conduct. Divided
into three sections, each preceded by an introduction, this collection
consists of (1) Russia’s most popular folkloric tales; (2) literary
texts that transplant fairy-tale topoi to the realm of Soviet realia in
a spirit of stirring heroism; (3) works of Soviet fiction and drama
that ironically subvert the optimism of the fairy-tale paradigm
while preserving its constitutive features.

P L A N N E D PA R E N T H O O D A N D B I R T H

A shared passion for Russian folklore and a fascination with its man-
ifold appropriative recastings in Soviet culture gave birth to this proj-
ect à trois. Within our troika, the moving spirit behind the enterprise
was Marina, who conceived of the Idea and set it in motion. Mark’s
dissertation at Ekaterinburg University and his subsequent publica-
tions on the genre of the fairy tale made him a “natural” collaborator.
I found the role of a folkloric “third” irresistible because the enthusi-
asm for folklore ignited by Felix Oinas during my stint at Indiana
University many moons ago redoubled in the early 1990s, when I
elaborated a multimedia survey of Russian fairy tales at the Univer-
sity of Pittsburgh. From the outset we designated the anthology for
classroom use in courses on folklore, culture, and literature—not
exclusively within the framework of Russian studies.
Our omission of nineteenth-century literary fairy tales might
strike readers as willfully arbitrary, particularly in light of the collec-
tion edited by N. A. Listikova, The Russian Literary Fairy Tale

xi
 foreword

(Russkaia literaturnaia skazka, 1989). The decisive difference, how-

ever, between the entries in that volume—by Karamzin, Zhukovsky,
Pogorelsky, Somov, Odoevsky, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Dostoevsky, Tur-
genev, Tolstoy, Leskov, Remizov, Charskaya, Andreyev—and those
we have anthologized is the latter’s consistency of unambiguously ide-
ological perspective. Whereas, under the influence of Herder and E.
T. A. Hoffmann, nineteenth-century authors explored complex issues of
art, morality, immortality, and the irrational through a modernized
reassemblage of key folkloric elements, the Soviets appropriated the
fairy-tale paradigm wholesale for propagandistic purposes as un-
problematically as they requisitioned palaces, museums, and private
estates. In that sense the freighted simplicity of the folkloric fairy tale
differs radically from the nature of its orthodox Soviet literary coun-
terpart and only slightly less from its anti-Soviet “rebuttals.” In the
latter two, the challenge to today’s critic stems not from “decoding the
message,” but from analyzing the techniques of selective borrowing
that on the textual level create a psychologically seductive and credi-
ble utopia—or, in its deconstructed form, dystopia. Whereas solemn
exaltation presides over the Soviet utopia and its ideals, the double
vision inherent in dystopia shades into irony and moments of
grotesque hilarity that calmly alternate with savage cruelty and sudden
death (Zamyatin, Shvarts, Gorin) so familiar to readers of folkloric
fairy tales. Ultimately, the inclusion of nineteenth-century literary
fairy tales would have violated the coherence of the volume.

M AT U R AT I O N A N D E M I G R AT I O N

While working with available translations of the fairy tales that

appear in this volume, we checked them against the originals and
edited them—some lightly (The Old Genie Khottabych), others heavily
(The Golden Key, The Dragon)—in the interests of accuracy, fluency,
and the elimination of Briticisms and archaisms. We opted to offer
fresh translations of the tales in part 1 from Alexander Afanasev’s
standard anthology of fairy tales only because Norbert Guterman’s

xii
 foreword

excellent renditions into English sound somewhat dated to the con-

temporary student unfamiliar with such relics as “furbelows” and
“twain.” Since the existent English version of the “Tale of the Military
Secret” proved unusable, we translated it anew as well. Translations
of the tales in part 1 from Afanasev and of “Tale of the Military Secret”
belong to Helena Goscilo. We thank Seth Graham for translating Za-
myatin’s ironic narratives and the folkloric “Magic Mirror,” and
Christopher Hunter and Larissa Rudova for performing this meta-
morphosis on the works by Gorin and Kataev. A full listing of the
translators, translations, and the Russian originals of the texts in this
volume is provided in the “Translators and Sources” section at the end
of the book. Several of the selections in this volume are excerpts from
the full works; omitted passages of text are denoted by ellipses en-
closed in brackets.

A S S I M I L AT I O N / C O M M U N I C AT I O N

A word about transliteration: for the primary texts we have relied on

a mixture of systems for the practical purpose of enabling Anglo-
phone readers to approximate Russian names with reasonable pho-
netic accuracy. Our various introductions share this pragmatic goal;
however, the notes resort to Library of Congress transliteration for
Russian sources, which in any event will be meaningful only to read-
ers with a knowledge of Russian.
Throughout we have retained the word “bogatyr” (nonitalicized),
since the original Russian struck us as preferable to its awkwardly ex-
planatory English equivalent, “epic hero.” One “verst,” an antiquated
Russian measure of distance that we have preserved for flavor alone,
equals slightly more than half a mile.

D E D I C AT I O N

The study of Russian folklore would be a dramatically different, and

indisputably lesser, animal were it not for the numerous, erudite,

xiii
 foreword

wide-ranging contributions to sundry aspects of that folklore by the

extraordinary Felix J. Oinas. We therefore dedicate this volume to his
memory, with boundless respect and admiration—and in my case
with loving gratitude for some of the finest, intellectually richest, and
most laughter-filled hours of my checkered graduate experience.
Helena Goscilo

N OTES
1. Ptushko completed a screen version of Aleksei Tolstoy’s The Golden Key in 1939,
and of The Stone Flower (from Pavel Bazhov’s collection titled The Malachite Casket)
in 1946, which are more or less the dates of Rou’s most famous screen adaptations of
Russian fairy tales: Vasilisa the Beautiful (1939) and Koshchey the Deathless (1944).
In other words, four of Russia’s best-known celluloid fairy tales emerged during
Stalinism. The heavily edited, dubbed film released under Ptushko’s name in the West
as The Sword and the Dragon has the title Il’ia Muromets in the full Russian original;
it conflates several folkloric tales about the intrepid hero, and appeared in 1956.
2. The Leader’s avian romance with the skies, which Katerina Clark briefly dis-
cusses in terms of paternal-filial relations, found its way into subsequent works, such
as Vasily Aksyonov’s story “The Steel Bird” (1965) and the post-Soviet pop-rock
group Liube’s retro song,“The Little Eagles” (“Orliata,” 1996). See Katerina Clark, The
Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 2000), 124–29.
3. For samples and analysis of these pseudo-folkloric creations, see Frank J. Miller,
Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudofolklore of the Stalin Era (Armonk, N.Y.:
M. E. Sharpe, 1990).

xiv
P OLITICIZING M AGIC
 PA R T

I
Folkloric Fairy Tales



  
 




 INTRODUCTION

H ELENA G OSCILO

PERENNIAL YET MYSTERIOUS ENCHANTMENT

The abiding and universal appeal of folkloric fairy tales poses a cul-
tural enigma: do these brief, indefatigably repeated narratives seduce
the imagination through magic, fantasy, and vivid, unforgettable
personae as a pleasurable mode of escapism?1 Or do they fulfill a
pragmatic function, positing practical solutions (assimilated via un-
conscious identification) to typical psychological dilemmas firmly
grounded in everyday experience? Are fairy tales fanciful flights pro-
viding respite from, and wishful compensation for, lived reality—or
are they a fundamental part of that very reality, couched in symbolic
form? Whether exercising the mysterious lure of conjury, illuminat-
ing mythic origins, or functioning as paradigmatic keys to problems,
to what extent do fairy tales reflect the ethos and social mores of the
cultures that produce them? Whom does their presumed audience
comprise? In short, what do fairy tales strive for by endlessly iterating
a minuscule number of predictable plots in multiple guises? If they
have a more profound and submerged agenda than mere entertain-
ment, what is that agenda and may it be generalized across genera-
tions and cultures?
Perhaps the most striking aspect of folkloric fairy tales, and one
that urges interpretation, is the complete absence of “depth” and of

5
 folkloric fairy tales

even rudimentary analysis within the tales themselves.2 Unlike liter-

ary fiction, they eschew explicit psychology and motivation; rely on a
minimal, paratactic style; usually proceed as a series of actions indif-
ferent to logical causation yet relentless in their teleological drive;
combine supernatural, fantastic events and transformations with
banalities and mechanical repetition of set phrases and situations;
and cap dispassionately reported scenes of mayhem, inconceivable
cruelty, and violence with a formulaic happy ending—the obligatory
utopian closure that allies the genre with totalitarian scenarios of a
secular paradise. Such flagrant contradictions and heterogeneity
invite readers to elaborate some coherent hermeneutical model
capable of accounting for these glaringly incompatible extremes. In-
deed, the gratifyingly ample range of approaches advocated by both
Western and Slavic scholars over many decades pays homage to the
cryptic richness of the fairy-tale genre, while simultaneously compli-
cating the most basic issues it invariably raises.3

I N J U N C T I O N S T O I N T E R P R E TAT I O N

By now a classic of Russian structuralism and folkloric scholarship,

Vladimir Propp’s rigorously systematic Morphology of the Folktale
(1928) inventories the motifs that organize the fairy-tale plot and,
with impeccable logic, charts their immutable sequence. Scrupu-
lously confining himself to classification, Propp on principle ignores
the significance of the tales’ contents. While invaluable for revealing
the formal consistency of tales, Morphology (subsequently refined
upon by E. M. Meletinsky)4 categorically dismisses any attempt to
illuminate what fairy tales are about and why they beguile children
more potently and enduringly than any other genre.5 Max Lüthi’s for-
malist European Folktale (1947) extends Propp’s paradigm to posit a
stylistic model of the genre, which Lüthi, however, conceives as liter-
ary. Identifying one-dimensionality, depthlessness, abstract style,
isolation, and universal interconnection, in addition to sublimation
and all-inclusiveness, as the fairy tale’s constitutive features (Lüthi

6
 introduction

4–80), Lüthi ascribes wish fulfillment to the genre on a profound spir-

itual level (81–106). Such an approach to the genre neatly explains the
wholesale Soviet adoption of fairy-tale topoi for its portrayal of a
constantly deferred “radiant future” that never eventuates in reality
and therefore requires hyperbolic compensatory power in the rhetoric
of its cultural texts.
Precisely where Propp and such early structuralists as A. Nikiforov
fall (or stop) short, Bruno Bettelheim’s Uses of Enchantment (1975), a
famous psychoanalytical investigation mainly of French and Ger-
man versions of fairy tales, offers bounties.6 Occasionally mechanis-
tic, arbitrary, and overdetermined, Bettelheim’s study advances a
content-based thesis. Fairy tales, he riskily maintains, grapple with the
integration of human personality and inscribe immemorial rites of
passage rooted primarily, though not exclusively, in sexuality. Con-
troversial and recently discredited partly because of Richard Pollack’s
“exposé” biography of its author, The Uses of Enchantment nonethe-
less is obligatory reading for specialists in fairy tales, whatever their
resistance to neo-Freudianism.7 The Freudian concepts espoused by
Bettelheim have enormous explanatory power, especially in light of
the centrality accorded family and familial relations within the genre.
Fairy tales, he contends, captivate children because they facilitate their
maturation, subliminally furnishing ways of negotiating the ostensi-
bly insurmountable psychological obstacles that confront them in an
alienatingly adult world. How fairy tales accomplish this feat Bettel-
heim illustrates with copious exegetical examples. What Bettelheim
fails to elucidate, and apparently finds irrelevant, is the appeal of
fairy tales to adults—a blinkered omission that casts a certain naïveté
over the study, which presupposes a fairy-tale readership primarily
of children. In light of the sustained, large-scale Soviet co-optation of
fairy-tale formulas, his perspective lacks historicity—unless, of
course, one summarily concludes that Soviet culture was perpetually
arrested at an infantile stage.
The conviction that fairy tales symbolically inscribe psychic phe-
nomena likewise underpins Jungian readings, from Marie-Louise von

7
 folkloric fairy tales

Franz’s Interpretation of Fairy Tales (1970) to Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s

Women Who Run with the Wolves (1992)8 and The Maiden King by
Robert Bly and Marion Woodman (1998).9 These critics, however,
transfer the emphasis from sexuality to spirituality. Guided by Jung’s
essay “The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairy Tales,” they focus on
archetypes of the collective unconscious as manifested in the figures
and patterns of the tales. This approach to the genre proves uncom-
monly productive for readers of Soviet texts structured around the
genre’s paradigms, as attested by Mark Lipovetsky’s introduction to
the third part of this collection.
Readers skeptical of psychological approaches to folklore have
found Jack Zipes, indisputably the most prolific Western scholar of
fairy tales, a more congenial explicator of the genre’s import, pri-
marily along lines of power politics. Zipes’s sociohistorical analytical
model takes into consideration not only cultural production and dis-
semination, but also gender and class. Examining the ideological
components of fairy tales, Zipes, as an adherent of the Frankfurt
school, unsurprisingly contends that ever since the late seventeenth
century the self-serving interests of the dominant class (first aristoc-
racy, then bourgeoisie) have undermined the subversive potential of
the genuinely popular (i.e., folk) fairy tale through appropriatory
revision. Zipes’s neo-Marxist treatment of the genre tends to reduce
consumers of fairy tales to involuntary collaborators with a political
elite that is empowered to propagate class-marked values via its con-
trol of cultural production—a position consonant with the dynam-
ics between tyrannical victimizer and victim inscribed in Yevgeny
Shvarts’s fairy-tale play The Dragon. Whereas Bettelheim (berated by
Zipes for moralism and the misrepresentation of Freud) spotlights
children as intuitive readers, Zipes dissects “authors” as ideologues
determined to socialize children forcibly in their own image.10
Arkady Gaidar’s “Tale of the Military Secret” certainly lends credibil-
ity to such a view of authorial motivation, as noted in Marina Balina’s
introduction to the second part of the present volume.
Zipes’s concerns overlap with those of feminists such as Marcia

8
 introduction

Lieberman, Karen Rowe, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and, to a lesser

extent, Ruth B. Bottigheimer, who diagnose fairy tales as symptoms of
their cultures’ misogynistic traditions.11 For feminists, the fairy tales
favored by a given society reflect its gender biases. Accordingly, Amer-
icans’ Disney-abetted passion for “Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty,”
“Snow White,” and “Beauty and the Beast” testifies to our culture’s
expediently sexist projection of women as passively compliant, self-
sacrificing, beauty-obsessed creatures devoid of agency.12 The inclu-
sion of Russian fairy tales in Western feminists’ sphere of reference
would necessitate a modification of their critique, for, Russian soci-
ety’s notorious ageless sexism notwithstanding, some of Russia’s
favorite tales (“The Feather of Finist the Bright Falcon,”“The Maiden
Tsar,” and “The Frog Princess”) reverse the gender roles in the hack-
neyed paradigm that feminists deem generically quintessential.
Unlike the majority of their Western counterparts, contemporary
Russian folklorists continue to concentrate their scholarly energies on
classification, typologies, and performers/tellers of tales (skaziteli).
Decades ago, Alexander Afanasev, Pyotr Bogatyryov, and Roman
Jakobson all emphasized the collective origins of the fairy tale, the
latter two conceptualizing it as an evolving entity passed from gener-
ation to generation and subject to the prophylactic strictures of each
community’s shared values.13 Today, as then, such Russian specialists
as Meletinsky essentially concur that a fairy tale “fulfills the role of a
social utopia” (Jakobson 4:99) or, in Boris Sokolov’s more mythological
model, a dream compensation entailing, above all, the conquest of
nature. These features of the fairy tale, of course, rendered it a genre
supremely suited to the priorities of the Soviet Union’s propaganda
machine, which maximally exploited its miraculous and utopian
attributes in virtually every cultural genre.
Anglophone scholarship on the Russian fairy tale is relatively scant.
Maria Kravchenko’s highly readable World of the Russian Fairy Tale
(1987) belongs to the historical trend in folkloristics, inasmuch as it
seeks above all to establish the origins of the genre, principally in an-
cient rituals and beliefs.14 Jack Haney’s slim monograph An Intro-

9
 folkloric fairy tales

duction to the Russian Folktale (1999)—part of an impressive multi-

volume project—privileges description over analysis, relies heavily on
earlier studies, and advances no original thesis. Haney’s summary of
the major tendencies in Russian compilation, classification, and
interpretation (chapters 1 and 2) slights the modern period and does
not assess the political benefits to the Soviet state of championing
genuine folklore and particularly fakelore.15 Neither Kravchenko nor
Haney grapples with the conundrum of the genre’s colossal fascina-
tion for a young audience, an omission that indexes Anglophone
Slavic folklorists’ remoteness from current trends in Western schol-
arship.

THE CANON

Whereas Charles Perrault assembled the classic French collection of

fairy tales in 1697, and the Grimm brothers followed suit with its
German equivalent in 1812, what in modern times constitutes the
standard Russian repertory appeared only in the mid-nineteenth
century, compiled by Alexander Afanasev under the title of Popular
Russian Fairy Tales (Narodnye russkie skazki, 1855–64).16 The ap-
proximately 600 tales in Afanasev’s three-volume anthology represent
an oral tradition familiar to all Russians—a limitless source for
borrowings by High Culture, in particular music and literature, ever
since its publication. The impressively vulgar tales expunged from the
official edition, such as “The Magic Ring,” which we include in the
present volume, were printed later in, of all places, Geneva, Switzer-
land, and restored to Russia only after glasnost.
As a living oral form, thus subject to multiple variations depending
on the performance or recitation of the given work (and Afanasev’s
collection includes variants of individual tales), the traditional Russian
fairy tale consists almost exclusively of fast-paced, plot-driven, for-
mulaic narratives that pit mundane protagonists against apparently
invincible enemies; resort to magic; incorporate proverbs, riddles,
and verbal formulae; and end happily.17 The plots, characters, and

10
 introduction

motifs transcend national boundaries (i.e., the bulk of Russian tales

are versions of narratives shared by western Europe), yet concrete
details within fairy tales are endemic to Russia (e.g., Ivan the Fool lies
on a Russian stove, the musical merchant Sadko strums the uniquely
Russian guslia, the Russian bogatyrs [epic heroes] Ilya Muromets
and Alyosha Popovich serve at Prince Vladimir’s court, etc.).18 This
apparent paradox accommodates both the universalizing models of
feminist and psychoanalytical criticism, on the one hand, and on the
other, the empirically oriented analyses of the anthropological and
sociohistorical schools, which construct their arguments on the basis
of particularized conditions in specific contexts. The most tenable ap-
proach to fairy tales, in my view, is synthetic, drawing on structuralism,
psychology, feminism, and sociology. Social values, including no-
tions of gender, shape mental habits both individually and collec-
tively, while themselves simultaneously adjusting to the aesthetics of
an established, if dynamic, genre as practiced in a concrete milieu. Ac-
cordingly, the most productive reading of fairy tales requires negoti-
ation among several interpretive models that individually are
over-inclined to totalizing strategies. The portion of Sandra Gilbert
and Susan Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic (1979) devoted to an
analysis of “Snow White” stands out as an exemplar of a synthetic,
multilayered reading that opens up the tale in rewardingly provoca-
tive ways.

T H E PA R A D I G M

Russian “magical” fairy tales, like those of most nations, unfold a

quest or rite of passage as a colorful, improbable adventure: slaying a
dragon; creating an entire city overnight; rescuing a princess from an
evil, uncanny ogre; and so forth.19 The protagonist typically effects a
watershed transition—from childhood to adolescence, from puberty
to adulthood, from dependence to independence, from alienation to
integration, from helplessness to control. The phenomenal effort ex-
pended on the central exploits (frequently cast as an exhausting jour-

11
 folkloric fairy tales

ney) inevitably marks a new stage of life, which explains the frequency
of marriage as an ultimate reward for triumph over adversity.
Whether the surmounted hurdles be psychological (Bettelheim) or
social (Zipes) or both (Gilbert and Gubar), fairy tales culminate in a
victory over enemies and rivals achieved through a credulity-defying
intermixture of ingenuity, sheer persistence, and fortuitously en-
countered magical resources.
Fairy-tale heroes largely divide into two contrastive types: the
handsome, desirable prince, who is an object of competition among
three sisters (“The Feather of Finist the Bright Falcon,” “The Wicked
Sisters”); or the irresponsible youngest of three sons, often signally
named Ivan the Fool (Ivan Durachok), who lolls indolently on the
stove or spends his days drinking in taverns until the decisive moment
of action, usually undertaken in contest with his two older brothers
(“The Three Kingdoms”). Both sorts of protagonists represent every-
man, their generic names denoting their typological roles. Their
female counterparts (both everywoman and universal ideal) appear
as beautiful maidens awaiting rescue (“Tale of Prince Ivan, the Fire-
bird, and the Gray Wolf ”; Elsa in Shvarts’s play) or assisting the he-
roes to attain their elevated status, which at the tale’s conclusion they
share vicariously through marriage to them. (Whereas Freudians
and Jungians view these conjugal unions as a trope for desirable psy-
chic wholeness, feminists and Marxists deplore them as female sub-
mission to repressive phallocentric institutions.) Exceptions include
female warriors (“The Maiden Tsar”) and wise maidens (“The Wise
Maiden”) distinguished by their military or intellectual and visionary
prowess, and the extraordinary Swan Maiden, who, after a formidable
display of magical panache, abandons her hapless husband Danilo in
an eloquent flourish that would satisfy even the most exigent femi-
nist (“Danilo the Luckless”). Tales such as “Maria Morevna,” struc-
tured around a bipartite plot that casts the heroine as both imperi-
ous warrior and imprisoned victim, conflate the active-passive
female paradigms.
Antagonists against whom the heroes and heroines pit their

12
 introduction

courage and skill appear as siblings (“The Three Kingdoms”), step-

parents (“The Magic Mirror,”“Baba Yaga”), chance rivals (“Danilo the
Luckless”), or miraculous hostile forces such as dragons, the Nightin-
gale Robber, Koshchey the Deathless, and Baba Yaga. Jealousy, greed,
and thirst for power most commonly operate as springboards to
aggressive human enmity, though these motivations normally remain
unstated, to be inferred by the reader. By contrast, supernatural fig-
ures such as Koshchey the Deathless and Baba Yaga sooner incarnate
eternal principles inhering in the “nature of things,” their behavior a
given that defies elucidation (“Maria Morevna,”“Baba Yaga”). Whatever
their identity, villains deploy trickery and miraculous forces whose
ultimate futility is mandated by the genre’s requisite happy ending,
but whose pyrotechnics titillate the imagination.
Baba Yaga, by far the most popular and complex figure in Russian
tales, merits special attention. A composite of contradictory traits, she
encompasses the paradoxes of nature: life and death, destruction and
renewal, the feminine and the masculine—the last opposition sym-
bolized in the mortar and pestle that transport her through space
and time (“Vasilisa the Beautiful”). As a “uroboric” entity, Baba Yaga
unites fundamental polarities in a circle or ring that images the cycle
of life.20 Her dwelling on the border of the dark forest—a revolving
hut mounted on chicken legs containing the symbolic life-giving and
-depriving stove—testifies to her primal identity as all-embracing
Nature or Mother Earth. Both villain and magic helper, in the latter
hypostasis the gluttonous, time-controlling Baba Yaga (“Vasilisa the
Beautiful”) emerges as both practical provider and wise teacher dur-
ing the young protagonist’s enforced sojourn in her domain. Most fre-
quently, she supplies males with a means of orientation (spools of
thread, a rolling ball in “The Three Kingdoms”) or modes of trans-
portation (horses, eagles in “The Three Kingdoms”) and through
three seemingly impossible tasks teaches females the invaluable three
D lessons—differentiation, duty, and domesticity.21
Fairy-tale magic helpers or wise counselors comprise a multifac-
eted category, consisting above all of clever talking animals (from

13
 folkloric fairy tales

the three symbolic spheres of air, earth, and water—the birds,

snakes, and fish of Shvarts’s Dragon) whom the compassionate
hero(ine) befriends or saves from death; beings such as the Great
Drinker (Opivalo) and the Great Mountain (Gorynia); old men and
women; and, intriguingly, Baba Yaga in her benevolent hypostasis.
Enchanted maidens possessing special powers of metamorphosis
likewise act as miraculous helpers, their feats of assistance crowned
by marriage to the hero in a symbolic union of complementary
principles.
Magic objects are a staple of the fairy tale and, given the genre’s
animistic nature, hardly differ from its supernatural personages.
Water as a transforming entity plays a key role, especially the “water
of death,” which knits a dismembered body together, and “the water
of life,” which then animates it (“Tale of Prince Ivan, the Firebird, and
the Gray Wolf ”), as well as the water that increases and diminishes
strength (“Ilya Muromets and the Dragon,” “Maria Morevna”). Self-
sufficient miraculous items include the self-spreading tablecloth, the
self-playing dulcimer (guslia), the self-reciting psalter, the self-sewing
embroidery needle (“The Feather of Finist the Bright Falcon”), and a
host of implements and weapons. The flying carpet, the cap of invis-
ibility (both in Shvarts’s Dragon), the comb that metamorphoses into
a forest, the handkerchief that turns into a river, and the like occur
regularly, as do the mysteriously endowed apple, egg, seed, bone, mir-
ror, thread, pin, ring, box, spindle, and feather. Metals function sym-
bolically within the hierarchy of the fairy tale, with the progression
from copper or brass to silver and finally to gold mapping a platonic
ascent toward perfection or transcendence (“The Three Kingdoms”).
Within this value system, the firebird occupies a unique niche as a
symbol of illumination, of the ideal (“Tale of Prince Ivan, the Fire-
bird, and the Gray Wolf ”). Crystal mountains similarly symbolize
elevated aspiration, though they tend to be plot-subordinated, in-
stalled rather unobtrusively as the magical furniture of the fairy-tale
universe.
Any reader of fairy tales instantly notices the genre’s relentless

14
 introduction

intercalation at all narrative levels of the number three, or what Propp

calls trebling: three siblings, three stages, three helpers, three days,
etc. (crucial to the Strugatsky brothers’ “Tale of the Troika”). Bettel-
heim’s explanation of the loaded numerology (3 = child and both
parents, 3 = child and two rival siblings, 3 = the hero or heroine’s
distinguishing marks of sexual identity [penis and testicles, vagina
and breasts]) minimizes the prevalence of triples in most religions
and ancient rituals. As Erich Neumann astutely notes, the reason for
the appearance of phenomena in threes should be sought in “the
threefold articulation underlying all created things . . . most particu-
larly . . . the three temporal stages of all growth (beginning-middle-
end, birth-life-death, past-present-future)” (Neumann 228).22 This
symbolism, which recalls the Three Fates and the Sphinx’s riddle,
entails spinning and weaving—the occupation of countless wise
maidens and other females in Russian tales. In “Vasilisa the Beauti-
ful” the triple structure of temporality is materialized in the three
riders over whom Baba Yaga as Nature has dominion.
A persuasive argument for reading fairy tales as symbolic narra-
tives of universal rites of passage may, arguably, be found in several of
the genre’s formulas. The purposeful vagueness of openings (“once
upon a time,” “in a certain kingdom”) locates the action temporally
and geographically in the never-never land of anytime and any-
where—that is, always and everywhere. This generalizing tendency is
reinforced by such self-erasing markers as “not near, not far,” “a long
time or a short time,” randomly invoked fixed epithets (“beautiful
maiden,” “open field,” “fine youth,” “trusty steed”), and such “fillers”
as “more beautiful than pen can describe,”“quickly can a tale be spun,
slowly is a real deed done,” all doubling as oral techniques of retarda-
tion. Formulas likewise signal closure at tales’ end, the most common
being “and they lived happily ever after,” but often supplemented or
replaced by bravura rhymes, free-floating paronomasia, or the con-
ventional mock insistence on reliable, sober witness-reporting: “I
was there, and drank mead; it ran down my mustache but didn’t go
into my mouth.”

15
 folkloric fairy tales

CROSSING OVER AND DYING INTO LIFE

As numerous anthropologists and folklorists have remarked, in

pursuing their quests the protagonists of fairy tales, like those of leg-
ends and myths, typically cross symbolically saturated boundaries.
Whether in the form of flight to uncharted lands (the fabled “thrice-tenth
kingdom”), descent into subterranean realms (“Three Kingdoms”),
trespass into Baga Yaga’s domain (“Maria Morevna”), voyage across
the sea, or entry into mountains (“The Crystal Mountain”), castles,
and animals’ stomachs, these consequence-laden yet narratively
understated traversals register initiation into a new phase of human
development. The old self dies as a prerequisite for rebirth into a
more mature or complete self: Vasilisa emerges from Baba Yaga’s hut
ready for marriage, just as Ivan the Fool exits the three kingdoms
equipped to execute Baba Yaga’s instructions and to make essential
sacrifices—symbolized by feeding his own flesh to the eagle that car-
ries him back to Russia, to his newly won status of happy groom and
husband (“The Three Kingdoms”). In short, by eventually becoming
the potential perpetuator of his family line and the guarantor of con-
tinuity, Ivan grows into the role that fulfills his social and “human”
destiny.
Temporality plays an inestimable role in these scenarios, which fre-
quently illustrate the pitfalls of premature actions and decisions (such
as Ivan’s precipitant incineration of the frog skin in “The Frog
Princess”) and the urge to postpone a psychically demanding com-
mitment to a different mode of being. On first glance, the focus on a
lack of readiness, often figured as voluntary or involuntary sleep
(“The Maiden Tsar,”“The Feather of Finist the Bright Falcon”), seems
contradictory in a genre that embraces timelessness. Yet one of the
fairy tale’s salient features is precisely this sort of paradox, rooted in
the inseparable oxymoronic polarities of life-death, beginning-end,
high-low, inner-outer. Accordingly, timelessness tropes the univer-
sality of a rite of passage as intrinsic to the human condition, while
the command that a protagonist appear at such and such a location

16
 introduction

by a specific date and his failure to do so index the individual’s inner

struggle, his or her temporary incapacity to assume a responsibility
that requires additional psychological preparation.
The externalization of psychological states as concrete phenom-
ena produces the two-dimensional, object-freighted world of the fairy
tale, which teems with fantastic creatures, precious elements, and
mysterious items that appear and vanish without warning as sym-
bols of an interior landscape. Unraveling the enigma of these color-
ful symbols accounts in large part for the ludic and philosophical
pleasures that the genre of fairy tales has vouchsafed generations of
spellbound readers, children and adults alike.

N OTES
1. I happily acknowledge my debt to Seth Graham for his meticulous perusal of
an early draft of this introduction, which eliminated messy nails and splinters; to
Bozenka, my “always and ever” supreme editor; to the hundreds of appreciative stu-
dents at the University of Pittsburgh, University of Oregon, and University of Ohio
for lively classroom discussions of Russian fairy tales; to David Birnbaum, Volsheb-
nik extraordinaire, for sharing the spoils; and to the teaching assistants who over the
years have aided and abetted my public passion for this genre of Russian folklore:
chronologically, Julia Sagaidak, Benjamin Sutcliffe, Petre Petrov, Dawn Seckler, and
Maria Jett.
Throughout, I distinguish among the bona fide folk fairy tale (in Russian, vol-
shebnaia skazka) as a genuinely folkloric genre steeped in magic; the folktale (skazka),
likewise popular in origin but not necessarily infused with fantastic elements; and the
literary fairy tale, a narrative of individual authorship that has appropriated a fairy-
tale structure, personae, and motifs for specific purposes. Examples of the last range
from Aleksandr Pushkin’s recasting of the traditional folktale “The Wicked Sisters”
into his “Tale of Tsar Saltan” (1831) to Andrei Siniavsky’s/Abram Tertz’s The Make-
piece Experiment (in Russian, Liubimov, 1963) and Liudmila Petrushevskaia’s series
of short fairy tales throughout the 1990s treating everything from insects to Barbie.
2. This phenomenon, which Max Lüthi calls “depthlessness” (11–23), corresponds
to what E. M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel labels “flatness” (of character), i.e., two-
dimensionality.
3. For surveys of various “schools” among scholars of folkloric fairy tales, see
Zipes, “Might Makes Right,” Dégh, Jones (119–40), and Lüthi.
4. In English, see Meletinsky, “Structural-Typological Study of the Folktale.” For
a study that focuses on the utopian-democratic aspects of the genre, see Meletinskij,
“The ‘Low’ Hero of the Fairy Tale.”

17
 folkloric fairy tales

5. Propp’s other studies of the genre, such as The Historical Roots of the Fairy Tale
and The Fairy Tale, contrast dramatically with his best-known work, for in addition
to interpreting narratives, they readily engage in speculation.
6. Nikiforov advances the highly original (if contentious and not overly productive)
notion of fairy tales having the grammatical genders of Russian nouns: masculine,
feminine, and neuter.
7. Richard Pollack, The Creation of Dr. B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). Nina Sutton’s Bettelheim: A Life and a Legacy (New
York: Basic Books, 1996) favors a more balanced and nuanced treatment of Bettel-
heim’s personal and professional activities.
8. Estés’s third chapter (74–114) blends a meandering plot summary with some
keen insights into the initiatory tasks assigned the heroine of “Vasilisa the Beautiful,”
one of the most famous fairy tales in the Russian repertory.
9. Bly and Woodman’s 264-page volume attempts to explicate the Russian fairy
tale titled “The Maiden Tsar” (which the book renders as “The Maiden King”) as a
symbolic scenario dramatizing the reunion of the feminine and the masculine
selves. The balance in their prolix discussion between extensive mini-lectures on
basic Jungian principles and actual clarification of the fairy tale tilts heavily toward
the former.
10. Zipes’s articles and chapters treat the entire gamut of non-Slavic fairy tale
collectors and adapters, from Charles Perrault and the Grimm brothers to Joanna
Russ and Walt Disney. For Zipes, Disney exemplifies the self-promoting bogeyman
of capitalism. The fairy tales that Zipes champions, apart from their political cor-
rectness (or because of it), tend to lack the dark imagination that lends many tradi-
tional fairy tales a frisson-inducing edge.
11. Marcia K. Lieberman, “ ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’: Female Accultura-
tion through Fairy Tales” (1972); Karen Rowe, “Feminism and Fairy Tales” (1979);
and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “The Queen’s Looking Glass” (1979) are all
handily reprinted in Zipes’s Don’t Bet on the Prince. See also Ruth Bottigheimer’s
Fairy Tales and Society (1986).
12. The work of Marina Warner, though consonant with feminist values, accords
incomparably more attention to historical developments than that of her colleagues
in feminism.
13. As an advocate of the mythological school of folklorists, Afanas’ev sought what
Yu. Sokolov calls “the deep foundations of ancestral time” (386), which encouraged
the treatment of tales as a form of myth.
14. Such an orientation links Kravchenko with the mythological school of Rus-
sian folklorists, which justified mythologizing magic folktales on the grounds that
they seemed to be the most ancient of all folktales.
15. For a more detailed account of the Russian folkloristic scholarly tradition, as
well as its connections with western Europe, see Yu. Sokolov 40–155. For an investi-
gation of Soviet fakelore, see Miller Howell and Dara Prescott Howell, The Develop-
ment of Slavic Folkloristics (New York: Garland, 1992).

18
 introduction

16. Missing from this collection were the so-called “forbidden tales” (zavetnye
skazki), raunchy and often startlingly obscene narratives that failed to pass the Rus-
sian censor, saw first publication in Geneva, and were repatriated to Russia only after
perestroika. For a commentary on these tales, see Haney, “Mr. Afanasiev’s Naughty
Little Secrets.”
17. A small number of fairy tales constitute an exception to the rule of “a happy end-
ing” inasmuch as they end unhappily, even tragically: for example,“Two Ivans, Soldier’s
Sons.” For a discussion of such tales, see Kostiukhin.
18. Approximately 75 percent of Russian fairy tale subjects are international,
approximately 20 percent are exclusively Russian. For more information on the rela-
tionship between Russian and western European tales, see Yu. Sokolov 397, 419–20.
19. Antii Aarne’s authoritative Types of the Folk Tale: A Classification and Bibliog-
raphy (1911, 1928) divides all tales into (1) animal tales; (2) tales, properly so called; and
(3) anecdotes, and then proceeds to subdivide the second, major group into four
categories of tales: (a) magical; (b) legendary; (c) romantic; and (d) about the fool-
ish devil. My concern here is with category 2a. For an illuminating summary of tax-
onomical issues in this regard, see Yu. Sokolov.
20. On the uroboros, see Neumann, chap. 12.
21. For a detailed analysis of Baba Yaga, see Johns; Hubbs 36–52; and Kravchenko
184–204.
22. For an intriguing analysis of trebling in American culture, see Alan Dundes,
“The Number Three in American Culture,” in Dundes 134–59.

W ORKS C ITED AND S UGGESTED R EADINGS

Afanas’ev, Aleksandr. Russian Fairy Tales. Trans. Norbert Guterman. New York: Pan-
theon Books, 1945, 1973.
Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy
Tales. New York: Vintage Books, 1975.
Bly, Robert, and Marion Woodman. The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and
Feminine. New York: Henry Holt, 1998.
Bogatyrev, Petr, and Roman Jakobson. “Folklore as a Special Form of Creativity.” In
Roman Jakobson, Selected Writings, 4:1–15. The Hague and Paris: Mouton. 1966.
Bottigheimer, Ruth B. Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion and Paradigm.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986.
Dégh, Linda. Folktales and Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969.
Dundes, Alan. Interpreting Folklore. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.
Eliade, Mircea. Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1991.
Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run with the Wolves. New York: Ballantine
Books, 1992.
Franz, Mary-Louise von. The Interpretation of Fairy Tales. Boston: Shambhala Publi-
cations, Inc., 1970.

19
 folkloric fairy tales

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. “The Queen’s Looking Glass.” In Don’t Bet on
the Prince, ed. Jack Zipes, 201–8. New York: Routledge, 1987.
———. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.
Haney, Jack. An Introduction to the Russian Folktale. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe,
1999.
———. “Mr. Afanasiev’s Naughty Little Secrets: ‘Russkie zavetnye skazki.’ ” SEEFA
Journal 3, no. 2 (Fall 1998).
Hubbs, Joanna. Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1988, 1993.
Jakobson, Roman. “On Russian Fairy Tales.” In Roman Jakobson, Selected Writings,
vol. 4. The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1966.
Johns, Andrea. “Baba Iaga and the Russian Mother.” Slavic and East European
Journal 42, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 21–36.
Jones, Steven Swann. The Fairy Tale: The Magic Mirror of Imagination. New York:
Twayne, 1995.
Kostiukhin, E. A. “Magic Tales That End Badly.” SEEFA Journal 3, no. 2 (Fall 1998).
Kravchenko, Maria. The World of the Russian Fairy Tale. Berne and New York: Peter
Lang, 1987.
Lieberman, Marcia. “ ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’: Female Acculturation
through Fairy Tales.” College English 34 (1972): 383–95.
Lüthi, Max. The European Folktale: Form and Nature. Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 1986 (original publication in 1947).
Meletinskii, E. M.“Problems of the Structural Analysis of Fairytales.” In Soviet Struc-
tural Folkloristics, ed. Pierre Maranda, 73–139. The Hague: Mouton, 1974.
Meletinskij, E. M. “The ‘Low’ Hero of the Fairy Tale.” In Oinas and Soudakoff, Study
of Russian Folklore, 235–57.
Meletinsky, Eleasar M. “Structural-Typological Study of the Folktale.” Trans. Robin
Dietrich. Genre 4 (1971): 249–79.
Miller, Frank J. Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudofolklore of the Stalin Era.
Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1990.
Neumann, Erich. The Great Mother. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Bollingen Series 47.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1955, 1963.
Nikiforov, A. I. “Towards a Morphological Study of the Folktale.” In Oinas and
Soudakoff, Study of Russian Folklore, 55–61. Translation of A. I. Nikiforov, “K vo-
prosu o morfologicheskom izuchenii narodnoi skazki.” In Sbornik otdeleniia
russkogo iazyka i solvesnosti Akademii nauk, 3:173–78. Leningrad, 1938.
Oinas, Felix J., and Stephen Soudakoff, eds. and trans. The Study of Russian Folklore.
The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1975.
Propp, Vladimir. The Morphology of the Folktale. 2nd rev. ed. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1968.
Rowe, Karen. “Feminism and Fairy Tales.” Women’s Studies 6 (1979): 237–57.

20
 introduction

Sokolov, Yu. M. Russian Folklore. Trans. Catherine Ruth Smith. Hatboro, Pa.: Folk-
lore Associates, 1966.
Tatar, Maria. Off with Their Heads: Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood. Prince-
ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1994.
Zipes, Jack. Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales. New
York: Routledge, 1992.
———. Don’t Bet on the Prince. New York: Routledge, 1989.
———. Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale. Lexington: University of Kentucky
Press, 1994.
———. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion. New York: Methuen, 1983.
———. Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children and the Culture Industry. New York
and London: Routledge, 1997.
———. “Might Makes Right—The Politics of Folk and Fairy Tales.” In Zipes, Break-
ing the Magic Spell, 20–40.
———. “On the Use and Abuse of Folk and Fairy Tales with Children: Bruno Bet-
telheim’s Moralistic Magic Wand.” In Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell, 160–82.
———. When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition. New York
and London: Routledge, 1999.

21
 THE FRO G PRINCESS


Long, long ago, in ancient times, there was a king with three sons,
all of them full grown. And the king said to them, “Sons! I want each
of you to make a bow for yourself and to shoot it. Whichever woman
brings back your arrow will be your bride. Whoever’s arrow isn’t
brought back is not meant to marry.” The oldest son shot his arrow,
which was brought back by a prince’s daughter. The middle son shot
his arrow, which was brought back by a general’s daughter. But the
arrow of the youngest, Prince Ivan, was brought back by a frog, who
gripped it in her teeth. The two older brothers were happy and jubi-
lant, but Prince Ivan grew pensive and burst into tears.“How can I live
with a frog? To live one’s whole life isn’t like wading a river or cross-
ing a field!” He cried and cried and cried some more, but there was
nothing to be done—he married the frog. Their wedding observed
traditional rites; the frog was held on a dish.
And so they lived until one day the king wanted to find out what
gifts the brides could make, which one was the most skilled at sewing.
He gave the order. Prince Ivan again grew pensive and cried, “What
can my frog make! Everybody’ll laugh!” The frog only hopped on the
floor, only croaked. As soon as Prince Ivan fell asleep, she went out-
side, shed her skin, turned into a beautiful maiden, and cried,
“Nurses-purses! Make such and such!” The nurses-purses instantly
brought a shirt of the finest workmanship. She took it, folded it, and

23
 folkloric fairy tales

placed it beside Prince Ivan, and once again turned into a frog, as if
she’d never been anything else! Prince Ivan awoke, was overjoyed,
took the shirt, and brought it to the king. The king accepted it, and ex-
amined it. “Well, this is quite a shirt—made to wear on special holi-
days!” The middle son brought a shirt, and the king said, “The only
thing it’s good for is to wear in the bathhouse!” And he took the shirt
the oldest brother brought and said, “The only thing it’s good for is
to wear in a poor peasant’s hut!” The king’s sons went their separate
ways. The two oldest agreed. “We had no cause to laugh at Prince
Ivan’s wife. She’s not a frog, but a cunning witch!”
Once again the king gave an order—that his daughters-in-law bake
some bread and bring it to show him who could bake best. At first the
other two brides laughed at the frog; but when the time came they
sent the chambermaid to spy on how she baked. The frog realized this,
and she went and mixed some dough, rolled it, made a hollow in the
top of the stove, and tossed the dough directly into it. The chamber-
maid saw this and ran to tell her mistresses, the royal brides, and they
did exactly the same. But the cunning frog had fooled them. She im-
mediately dug the dough from the stove, cleaned and greased every-
thing as though nothing had happened, went out onto the porch, shed
her skin, and cried, “Nurses-purses! This very minute bake me the
kind of bread that my father ate only on Sundays and holidays!” The
nurses-purses instantly brought her the bread. She took it, placed it
beside Prince Ivan, and turned into a frog. Prince Ivan awoke, took the
bread, and brought it to his father. Just then his father was accepting
the older brothers’ bread: their wives had dropped theirs into the
stove just as the frog had, and so it had come out any which way. The
king accepted the oldest brother’s bread first, looked at it, and sent it
back to the kitchen; he took the middle son’s, and did the same. When
Ivan’s turn came, he handed over the bread. His father took it, looked
at it, and said, “Now, this is bread—fit to eat on special occasions!
Not like the older daughters-in-law’s, which is like stone!”
Next the king decided to hold a ball, to see which of his daughters-
in-law danced best. All of the guests and the daughters-in-law assem-

24
 the frog princess

bled, except for Prince Ivan. He thought, “How can I turn up with a
frog?” And our Prince Ivan sobbed uncontrollably. The frog said to
him, “Don’t cry, Prince Ivan! Go to the ball. I’ll be there in an hour.”
Prince Ivan cheered up a little when he heard the frog’s words. He left,
and the frog went, shed her skin, and dressed up in wonderful clothes!
She arrived at the ball. Prince Ivan was overjoyed and everyone ap-
plauded: what a beauty she was! The guests started to eat; the princess
would pick a bone and toss it in her sleeve, drink something, and toss
the rest in her other sleeve. The other sisters-in-law saw what she was
doing and also started putting their bones in their sleeves and pour-
ing the remnants of their drinks in their other sleeves. The time came
for dancing, and the king ordered the older daughters-in-law to dance,
but they let the frog go first. She instantly took Prince Ivan’s arm and
headed for the floor: she danced and danced, whirled and whirled, to
everyone’s wonder! She waved her right hand, and forests and lakes ap-
peared; she waved her left hand, and various birds appeared in flight!
Everyone was awed. When she finished dancing, everything vanished.
The other sisters-in-law took their turn dancing, and tried to do the
same: whenever they waved their right hands, bones came flying out
right at the guests; they’d wave their left hands, and water would spray,
also onto the guests. The king was displeased, and shouted, “That’s
enough!” The daughters-in-law stopped dancing.
The ball was over. Prince Ivan left first, found his wife’s skin some-
where, took it, and burned it. She came home, looked for the skin,
but it was gone, burned! She went to bed with Prince Ivan, and be-
fore morning said to him, “Well, Prince Ivan, you should have waited
a bit longer. I’d have been yours, but now God knows! Good-bye!
Search for me beyond the thrice-ninth lands, in the thrice-tenth king-
dom.” And the princess vanished.
A year passed. Prince Ivan missed his wife. During the second year
he got ready, received his father’s and his mother’s blessing, and set
off. He walked for a long time and suddenly came upon a little hut,
with its front facing the forest, its back to him. And he said,“Little hut,
little hut! Stand as you used to of old, the way your mother stood

25
 folkloric fairy tales

you—with your back to the forest, and your front facing me.” The lit-
tle hut turned around. He entered the hut. An old woman sat there,
and said, “Fie, fie! There was no whiff of a Russian bone to be sniffed,
no sight to be seen, and now a Russian bone has actually come to my
house! Where are you off to, Prince Ivan?” “First give me food and
drink, old woman, and then ask questions.” The old woman gave him
food and drink and put him to bed. Prince Ivan said to her, “Granny!
I’ve set off to find Elena the Beautiful.” “Oh, my dear child, you took
so long to come! At first she often used to mention you, but now she
doesn’t any longer, and she hasn’t visited me for a long time. Go along
to my middle sister, she knows more.”
Next morning Prince Ivan set off, and came to another little hut,
and said, “Little hut, little hut! Stand as you used to of old, the way
your mother stood you—with your back to the forest, and your front
facing me.” The little hut turned around. He entered, and saw an old
woman sitting there, who said, “Fie, fie! There was no whiff of a Rus-
sian bone to be sniffed, no sight to be seen, and now a Russian bone
has actually come to my house! Where are you off to, Prince Ivan?”
“I’m here, Granny, in search of Elena the Beautiful.”“Oh, Prince Ivan,”
said the old woman. “You took so long to come! She’s started to for-
get you, and is marrying someone else. Their wedding is soon! She
lives with my older sister now. Go there, but watch out: as soon as
you come near, they’ll sense it, and Elena will turn into a spindle, and
her dress will become golden thread. My sister will start winding the
golden thread: when she’s wound it around the spindle and put it in
a box and locked the box, you have to find the key, open the box, break
the spindle, throw the top back over your shoulder, and the bottom
in front of you. Then she’ll appear before you.”
Prince Ivan set off, came to the third old woman, and entered the
hut. She was winding golden thread, wound it around the spindle, and
put it in a box, locked it, and put the key somewhere. He took the key,
opened the box, took out the spindle, and, as said and as written,
broke the top and threw the top over his shoulder, and the bottom in
front of him. Suddenly Elena the Beautiful appeared, and greeted

26
 the frog princess

him.“Oh, you took so long to come, Prince Ivan! I almost married an-
other.” And the new groom was supposed to arrive soon. Elena the
Beautiful took a flying carpet from the old woman, sat on it, and they
took off, flew like the birds. The bridegroom suddenly appeared and
found out that they’d left. He also was cunning! He followed in pur-
suit, and chased and chased them, and was only ten yards short of
catching up with them. They flew into Russia on the carpet, and for
some reason he wasn’t allowed in Russia, and he returned. But they
flew home, all were overjoyed, and they started to live and prosper, to
everyone’s glory at the end of the story.

27
 THE THREE KINGD OMS


Once upon a time there lived an old man and old woman. They
had three sons: the first was Egorushko the Strayer, the second was
Misha the Pigeon-Toed, and the third was Ivashko the Stove-Sitter. The
father and mother decided to marry them off. They sent the oldest to
look for a bride. He walked and walked for a long time, and no matter
where he checked out the girls he couldn’t choose a bride for himself,
for none appealed to him. Then he met a three-headed dragon on the
road and was frightened, and the dragon said to him, “Where are you
going, my good fellow?” Egorushko said, “I’m going so as to arrange
my marriage, but I can’t find a bride.” The dragon said, “Come with
me. I’ll show you where to go and perhaps you’ll get a bride.”
So they walked and walked until they came to a big stone. The
dragon said, “Pull up the stone. There you’ll get whatever you wish.”
Egorushko tried to pull it up, but couldn’t do a thing with it. The
dragon said to him, “So there’s no bride for you!” And Egorushko re-
turned home and told his father and mother everything that had hap-
pened. The father and mother thought and thought about what to do,
then sent off the middle son, Misha the Pigeon-Toed. The same thing
happened with him. So the old man and woman thought and
thought, not knowing what to do: if they sent Ivashko the Stove-
Sitter, he wouldn’t be able to do anything, for sure!
But Ivashko the Stove-Sitter himself asked to go and have a look at

28
 the three kingdoms

the dragon. At first the father and mother refused, but then let him go.
And Ivashko also walked and walked, and met the three-headed
dragon. The dragon asked him, “Where are you going, my good fel-
low?” He said, “My brothers wanted to get married, but couldn’t find
a bride. And now it’s my turn.”“Then come with me and I’ll show you,
and perhaps you’ll be able to get a bride.”
So the dragon and Ivashko set off, reached the same stone, and the
dragon told him to pull the stone from its place. Ivashko gripped the
stone and in a second rolled the stone away. There turned out to be a
hole in the ground and some straps fastened near it.
The dragon said, “Ivashko! Sit on the straps, I’ll lower you down,
and there you’ll walk until you get to the three kingdoms, and in each
kingdom you’ll see a maiden.”
Ivashko was lowered and set off. He walked and walked until he
reached the copper kingdom. He entered and saw a beautiful maiden.
The maiden said, “Welcome, rare guest! Come and sit down wherever
you see a spot. Tell me, where are you from and where are you going?”
“Ah, beautiful maiden!” said Ivashko. “You’ve given me neither food
nor drink, and you’re already asking questions.” And the maiden set
all sorts of food and drink on the table, and Ivan ate and drank, then
told her that he was searching for a bride. “If you find me appealing,
please marry me.”“No, my good fellow,” said the maiden. “Go farther
on, and you’ll come to the silver kingdom. There’s a maiden there
even more beautiful than I!” And she gave him a silver ring as a gift.
The fine youth thanked the maiden for her hospitality, said good-
bye, and set off. He walked and walked until he reached the silver
kingdom. He entered and saw a maiden sitting there more beautiful
than the first one. He sent up a prayer to God, and bowed humbly to
her, “Greetings, beautiful maiden!” She answered, “Welcome, un-
known youth! Have a seat and boast a bit: who are you, where are you
from and on what business have you come here?” “Ah, beautiful
maiden!” said Ivashko. “You’ve given me neither food nor drink, and
you’re already asking questions.” And the maiden set all sorts of food
and drink on the table, and Ivan ate and drank as much as he wanted,

29
 folkloric fairy tales

then told her that he’d set off in search of a bride, and he asked her to
marry him. She said to him, “Go farther on, and you’ll come to the
golden kingdom, and in that kingdom you’ll find a maiden even more
beautiful than I!” And she gave him a golden ring as a gift.
Ivashko said good-bye and set off. He walked and walked until he
reached the golden kingdom. He entered and saw a maiden more
beautiful than the others. He sent up a prayer to God and greeted the
maiden as was proper. The maiden asked him where he was from and
where he was going. “Ah, beautiful maiden!” he said. “You’ve given
me neither food nor drink, and you’re already asking questions.” And
she set all sorts of food and drink on the table, the best one could ask
for. Ivashko the Stove-Sitter treated himself generously to everything
and then told her, “I set off in search of a bride for myself. If you want
to marry me, then come with me.” The maiden agreed and gave him
a golden ball as a gift, and they set off together.
They walked and walked, and they came to the silver kingdom.
They took the maiden there with them. Again they walked and
walked, and came to the copper kingdom. They took the maiden
there with them, and they all went to the hole through which they
had to climb out and where the straps were hanging. The older
brothers were already standing at the hole, about to climb down to
look for Ivashko.
Ivashko seated the maiden from the copper kingdom on the straps
and shook a strap. The brothers pulled, and pulled out the maiden,
then lowered the straps again. Ivashko seated the maiden from the
silver kingdom on the straps, and they pulled her out, and lowered the
straps again. Then he seated the maiden from the golden kingdom
on the straps, and they pulled her out, then lowered the straps. Fi-
nally Ivashko himself sat on the straps, and his brothers began pulling,
pulled and pulled, but when they saw that it was Ivashko, they
thought, “What if we pull him out and he won’t give us any of the
maidens?” and they cut the straps and Ivashko fell down. There was
nothing he could do, he cried a bit, cried some more, and then set off.
He walked and walked, and saw sitting on a tree stump an old man

30
Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
 “Do you remember, Rank, that evening the Pebworths and
ourselves went to the Gaiety?”
“Perfectly.”
“You bowed to an awfully pretty woman in the stalls. She was
with a good-looking bounder.”
I knew perfectly well whom he meant, of course; but, as he
paused for me to refresh my memory, I looked puzzled.
“You must remember—an extraordinarily pretty woman.”
I still looked blank.
“Surely you must remember. A fair woman with fluffy hair and
enormous blue eyes, but not a bit dolly, like most fair women. Rather
a large mouth.”
“Oh yes; I think I remember.”
“Well, I fancy she’s married to that man.”
“If it’s the girl I think you mean, she is married to him. Her name
is Sibella Holland.” It was not very well-bred to call Lionel Holland a
bounder without first finding out if he was a friend of mine.
“What a ripping name! They’ve got a flat below mine. I should
very much like to know them.”
“Do you want me to introduce you?”
Considering that Sir Anthony had gone out of his way on more
than one occasion to be rude to me, I could not help thinking that
there was a certain insolence in his obvious readiness to make use
of me. If he intended doing so, however, I should certainly return the
compliment.
“I am obliged to hurry away now, but that’s my address. I am
usually at home between six and seven.”
I gave him a card and said good-bye.
I had promised to spend the evening with the Gascoynes. I was
making immense strides with their niece, and I fancy that both Mr.
and Mrs. Gascoyne were a little surprised at our having so much in
common.
 Chapter XIV
If I was to have access to Sibella at all, it was necessary to make
friends with her husband, and the only way to make friends with him
was to be useful to him. I knew quite well that my continued success
—and success in his eyes was a question of moving in a higher
grade of society—had annoyed him beyond measure. He believed
that money ought to be able to buy anything. Money is a thing the
power of which the vulgar are always overrating and the cultured are
always underrating. He and Sibella had a large income, with the
prospect of a very much larger one, therefore the doors of good
society should fly open. They knew people who had been her friends
before marriage, and who moved in what a celebrated English lady
novelist would have called “genteel circles,” but her husband, having
neither the atmosphere of good breeding nor the tact which might
have taken its place, was ambitious of forcing the most select
assemblies.
If I could be of use to him in this way I was sure that he would be
content to waive his dislike for the present, especially as he
imagined himself to be in sole possession of the prize we had
contended for.
It was, of course, just possible that Sibella herself might now
object to my coming to the house. She might have fallen
passionately in love with her husband, as wives often do after
marriage. Lady Pebworth was still ready to do anything for me, and if
Sibella was still ready to receive me, I must persuade her ladyship to
call.
I met Lionel on his way home from the City one evening, and
somewhat to his surprise stopped to speak to him. He was a little
cool at first, but I was careful to start a conversation about himself,
and he warmed to the subject at once.
 He talked of being sick of the City. His father was very ill, and he
expressed his intention of selling out and giving up the business
should anything happen to the old gentleman.
“I shall go and live in the country, and get as much hunting and
shooting as I can manage.”
“Still, a man ought to do something,” I suggested.
“Oh, cut that; don’t preach.”
“I wasn’t thinking of it from a moral point of view. You’re a rich
man. You ought to furnish the powers that be with sufficient excuse
for giving you something later on.”
“What do you mean?”
“A man with twenty thousand a year may aspire to anything.”
“What am I to do?”
“Go in for politics. The losing side, of course. They’ll be having
their spell of office in a few years.”
“I don’t know anything about politics.”
“No, but you’ve got intelligence; you’ll soon learn.”
He looked flattered. Inwardly I smiled at the idea of his being in
the House of Commons.
“How does one begin?”
It was strange that Lionel, who was heir to a couple of
newspapers, should know so little.
“Oh, you get to know all the right people. Let them know that you
are ready to drop a certain amount of money. Lady Pebworth was
saying only the other day that their people want money. She’s rather
a power in the political world, you know.”
He looked vacant, and had the frankness to ask:
“Who’s Lady Pebworth?”
“Well, her husband was in the last Cabinet. Your wife ought to
know her. Lady Pebworth admired her immensely the only time she
saw her.”
“Have they met?”
“No, but do you remember one evening when you and Sibella
were in the stalls at the Gaiety, and I was in a box with some
people?”
“Yes.”
 “That was Lady Pebworth. She has been very civil to me. I don’t
suppose I should have had such a good time if it had not been for
her.”
This admission of my own indebtedness to someone else for the
entrée to certain houses that he had envied me made him quite
genial, and broke down the barrier between us, while a little more
flattery judiciously laid on accomplished what I desired.
“You haven’t been to see us yet,” he said, quite graciously.
“I haven’t been asked,” I laughed.
“I’ll get Sibella to write and ask you to one of our Sunday
lunches.”
We parted quite amicably, and I think I left him under the
impression that I was most anxious to be friendly with him.
Sir Anthony Cross delayed coming to see me, as I thought he
would, but evidently he could think of no other way of making
Sibella’s acquaintance, and one evening when I was drinking tea—a
habit to which I am addicted—he was shown in.
“No thanks, I never drink tea. I don’t know what people see in it.”
There was a perceptible patronage in his manner. He assumed
the usual attitude of an Englishman of birth when brought into
familiar intercourse with a man of whose caste he is not sure. There
was no superficial fault to be found with his manner, but it was
obvious to a keen perception that he presumed a gulf.
“Not tea as they make it in this country,” I answered languidly.
“Tea drinking is an art. It is one of the most extraordinary facts of the
latter part of the nineteenth century how readily the country
exchanged China for Indian tea, and yet it is like preferring cider to
champagne.” I pushed the cigars towards him. “Most men cannot
appreciate tea because their palates are ruined by alcohol.”
The cigar put him in a good temper; I knew that it was something
exceptional.
He was not interested in the subject of tea, but at the same time,
being a gentleman, he hardly liked to make it too patent that he had
come about an introduction to a woman, and that further than
obtaining that introduction he was not prepared to consider our
acquaintance.
 “You’ve got a jolly little place here,” he said, looking round. I knew
that in his heart he considered it somewhat overdone.
“I am a Jew, and as an Oriental I defy the canons of Western
good taste in order to get the amount of colour necessary to my
appetite.”
He did not quite follow, and I did not intend that he should. It was
of no account. There were limits even to my adaptability, and I am
afraid I never could have adapted myself to the idiosyncrasies of Sir
Anthony Cross. I don’t think he had a single delicate sentiment in
him.
After a time, and when I considered he had listened to me long
enough to be sufficiently subdued, I said: “Oh, by the way, I met
Holland, Mrs. Holland’s husband, you know, a few days ago.”
“Yes?” He made a valiant effort to conceal his interest.
“They are only just married, and of course very much in love.”
“What is he?”
“Well, as far as I know, he is something in his father’s business.
His father is enormously wealthy—owns a couple of newspapers. I
don’t think he’ll hold out much longer though, and then the young
people will come into everything.”
Riches did not mean much to Sir Anthony Cross. He had eighty
thousand a year, so report said.
He was evidently too obsessed with the idea of Sibella to be
turned aside by a husband.
“Of course,” I continued, “her brother is my greatest friend; we
were at school together. She and I used to be sweethearts when we
were children, but when Lionel Holland came on the scene he cut
me out.”
“She looks a charming woman, and I should very much like to
know her.”
“I can introduce you to Holland if you like. I’ll ask them both to
dine and meet you.”
Sir Anthony hardly disguised his joy.
“I shall be delighted,” he said.
“Then I’ll let you know when I’ve fixed things up.”
I gave him the opportunity of departing, but he stayed on, talking
incessantly of Sibella. He was so infatuated as to be unable to
appreciate how obvious he was making it that he was seeking an
introduction to a married woman because he was in love with her.
I knew that Sir Anthony was a friend of Ughtred Gascoyne’s, and
it might so happen that he would be useful to me in that direction.
“Have you known Mrs. Goodsall long?” he asked.
“A few weeks.”
“Don’t know Gascoyne, do you?”
“Who is he?”
“Ughtred Gascoyne; I thought everybody knew him. He’s a great
pal of hers. People do say things, but I don’t believe it myself. I
mention him because I’ve heard a rumour that her husband is dead,
and that she and Gascoyne are going to be married.”
“Indeed?”
“Of course they’ve always been thick, but it isn’t often the man
does the right thing.”
I laughed.
“No, there’s all the difference in being able to go and see a
woman when you want to and being obliged to see her when you
don’t want to. Such a prospect immediately subjects her to a new
test. I know a great many women who are delightful companions, but
I should not care to live with them.”
He went away at last, after making me promise again that I would
arrange the dinner and let him know.
I was determined, if possible, to persuade Lady Pebworth to be of
the party, and called on her a day or two after. She had just returned
to town, and received me rather coldly. She had been away for three
months, and she protested that I had written to her but twice during
her absence. I pointed out that she was blaming me for a too
zealous care of her reputation, and that it was one thing for her to
write to me when the chance of her letters being seen by anyone
else was practically non-existent, and quite another thing for me to
write to her, and that I had only done so when I was certain that Lord
Pebworth was out of the way. It took me some time to soothe her,
inasmuch as she informed me that she thought our friendship had
better cease, and I really believe she was in the mood to take a great
resolution. This roused me to an effort. It was not convenient to
quarrel with her at the moment. I regret to say that in the course of
our interview her ladyship so far forgot what was due to good taste
as to throw my obscurity in my face, and to make a scarcely veiled
insinuation that had it not been for her I should not have been
acquainted with anyone of consequence. At this I dignifiedly rose,
and, telling her that I had no wish to intrude where I was considered
an adventurer, moved towards the door. Then she begged my
pardon, said she could not understand how she came to be so rude,
and professed her undying readiness to do anything for me. A
weaker diplomatist might have seized the opportunity to mention the
dinner-party, but I cautiously paid court to her for some days before I
asked her if she would come and meet Sibella and her husband. I
explained that Lionel was quite ready to be of financial use to her
political organisation, putting it in such a way that it was impossible
for her to take offence. Finally, she said she would be very glad, so I
made up my dinner-party, which was quite a little social triumph.
I fancy Sir Anthony Cross was surprised when he heard whom he
was asked to meet.
I entertained them at the best restaurant in town. Sibella’s
manners were perfect—they always were when she chose—and
Lady Pebworth took an immediate liking to her, I of course being
very careful not to show the least partiality for her.
The Hollands thus found themselves taken up by a woman who
could probably launch them better than they could, in their wildest
dreams, have expected. To do her justice, I do not think Sibella
would have run after anybody for the purpose of getting into better
society. She had enough of the Hallward pride and egotism to save
her from vulgarity. At the same time she was quite prepared to swim
with the tide and hold her own.
Sir Anthony managed to keep his admiration within bounds, and
the evening was a great success. We finished up by spending an
hour at a famous theatre of varieties. Lionel Holland from this time
attached himself to me much more than I cared about. He was
amazingly proud of Sir Anthony’s friendship, and I fancy that
exclusive gentleman had to pay somewhat dearly for the privilege of
being near Sibella so much. He became quite the friend of the
house, however.
 Sibella’s dazzling beauty was not long in making its way. She was
noticed at a brilliant social function by exalted folk, and as a
consequence was presented by Lady Pebworth. Lionel was selected
as a forlorn hope for the next General Election, and Mr. Holland was
so pleased that he appreciably increased their allowance.
It may be asked what good this was all doing me. As a matter of
fact, it is an instance of how impossible it is to generalise about
character. I was perfectly sure of my power over Sibella, and enjoyed
seeing her admired and sweeping everything before her.
They could not get away from the fact—and I don’t think Sibella
had any wish to—that it was I who had launched them. Of course,
people tried to shatter Sibella’s reputation by way of putting a speedy
stop to her upward climb, but nothing could be said which was in any
way susceptible of proof.
I had not since her marriage treated her with anything except the
most ordinary friendliness. I was certainly not going to risk a snub. I
was convinced of one thing, that had I made a more strenuous effort
to win her from Lionel Holland I might have done so. Perhaps some
intuitive feeling warned me to suffer, and not to risk my own ultimate
profit.
Whilst engaged in trifles I was not neglecting the main business
of my life. I had not been able to avoid an introduction to Ughtred
Gascoyne, who somewhat inopportunely took a fancy to me. It was
rather awkward, as it would have been far more convenient to have
remained unknown.
By degrees it leaked out that Catherine Goodsall’s husband was
dead, and that she and Ughtred Gascoyne were going to be married.
She told me the news herself, with tears in her eyes. I am sure I
should have been glad if the words of congratulation I spoke could
have been sincere, and I really hoped that things could at least be so
arranged that they might have some time of married happiness
before Ughtred Gascoyne was removed. But this was not my
business; and, further, it might result in another human obstacle
being placed in my path.
Their wedding was fixed for a day in Christmas week. It was now
October. I had therefore not much time to lose. Of course, neither of
them was young, and it was improbable that they would have any
children, but it was possible. I had so managed to make everything
in my mind subservient to my main object that the prospect of
Catherine Goodsall’s disappointment only raised a momentary pang.
I racked my brains by day and night, trying to devise some new
and entirely original way of starting Ughtred Gascoyne on his way to
a happier world.
Being known as a friend of his, it would not do to use poison.
Pistols and daggers, although they have their uses, both in
melodrama and out of it, did not commend themselves. They
suggested danger, blood, and noise. I had early grasped the cardinal
principles of my undertaking; firstly, that I must be absolutely
relentless; and, secondly, that the word horror must be eliminated
from my vocabulary.
As I lay awake one night in my room in St. James’s thinking the
matter over, I heard the cry of fire, the galloping of horses, and the
jingle of the engine as it swayed along Piccadilly. I have always been
fond of fires: even as a small boy they possessed a weird fascination
for me.
I lay debating whether I should not get up and see the fun. It was
evidently not far off, for I could hear the hiss of the water as it shot
through the air, and the shouts of men. Suddenly an idea came into
my head. Fire was apparently used as a rule in the clumsiest way by
murderers. How often may it not have been used successfully and
with complete secrecy?
It was important to keep in mind that successful crimes do not as
a rule come to light.
Arson to the average mind always conveys a sensation of horror
that is perhaps wanting in all other crimes. Suffocation or burning
were neither of them pleasant methods, but I was not to be deterred
by a sentiment.
The idea, once in my brain, became fixed. I found it impossible to
dislodge it. I should have liked to go to the British Museum and read
up all the details I could obtain of crime by arson, but this would have
been a risky proceeding, and might in the never-to-be-forgotten
contingency of my falling under suspicion be exceedingly damning.
I should have to trust to my own invention. Ughtred Gascoyne
had asked me to call on him, and early one Sunday morning I did so.
He occupied an upper part in Albemarle Street. There was a side
door and a flight of stairs leading to his rooms. I immediately grasped
the importance of the fact that there was no porter or lift. He had a
manservant who slept on the floor above his own, and a woman who
came in in the daytime. The establishment was thus conveniently
miniature. On the first floor he had a sitting-room that led into his
bedroom, with a bathroom beyond. Above this was his dining-room,
which was seldom used; also a kitchen and a very small bedroom for
his servant. The place was old, curiously so for such a smart quarter
of the town, and, I imagined, highly combustible.
The rooms were too solidly furnished for my purpose, but they
had muslin curtains and a fair number of knick-knacks. I quite
realised that it was an off chance, but at the same time I believed it
could be carried out with little or no personal risk. What I particularly
wished to do was to enter his rooms with him at night without
anybody being aware of it, and to leave them unnoticed.
The Sunday morning I called on him he was, I fancy, a little
surprised to see me, but evidently quite pleased.
“I am very fond of young people, and I like to have them about
me. Mrs. Goodsall and I agree on that. I cannot understand old
people who are content to vegetate with their faded contemporaries.”
“It isn’t everybody who gets on with young people.”
“It is merely a question of mood. You must feel young, and you
will get on with them well enough.”
“To feel young. Therein lies the difficulty for most people.”
“Yes, most people eat and drink and sedenterate themselves—if I
may coin a verb—into premature old age.”
Whilst he talked I was wondering how long it would take to
suffocate a human being, and what density of smoke was necessary,
and whether he was a heavy sleeper, a fact he was good enough to
enlighten me on.
“Youth is merely a question of spirits, and spirits are largely if not
entirely a question of sleep. No, I have never missed a night’s sleep
in my life that I can remember, not even”—he lowered his voice
—“when my mother died.”
“You are lucky. I wish I could say as much.”
 “Directly my head touches the pillow I am asleep, and I don’t
wake till I am called.”
This was indeed good news, that is, if it could be relied upon. It is
amazing how people will lie about their own habits. They are a
matter of personal delusion to a great extent, and people talking
about themselves will, in good faith, deny idiosyncrasies of which
their intimates are fully aware.
For aught I could be sure of, Ughtred Gascoyne was a martyr to
insomnia, although he certainly did not suggest it.
His bedroom was a light, airy room with very little furniture, and a
severe, narrow bed such as is affected by the average English
gentleman, and is to me an abomination.
At any rate, this was the room it was my business to set on fire
with such completeness as might ensure the passing of Ughtred
Gascoyne.
It is the usual habit for those with a weakness for arson to empty
paraffin oil over a quantity of furniture, and then set a light to it, a
method of procedure that nearly always leads to detection. I
remembered when thinking over my plans that Ughtred Gascoyne’s
rooms were lighted by lamps and not by electric light. Would this
help me in any way? It might. I already foresaw that my nerve and
courage would be called into play in this enterprise far more than
had hitherto been the case.
October passed and some part of November, and nothing had
been done, except that I had grown more and more friendly with
Ughtred Gascoyne. He was very musical, and liked to hear me sing
and play.
Sometimes I made a point of meeting him late at night on his way
home from the club, and went in and smoked a cigar with him. I
could not help reflecting how very much those whom it was my
unfortunate duty to remove seemed to like me. Perhaps it was a
premonition that I was about to do them a good turn or what might
prove to be so.
His servant was usually in bed when I returned to his rooms with
him at night.
Both Catherine Goodsall and he were always talking of the time
they would have me to stay with them at the little place they were
taking in the country.
“Quite small,” said Ughtred Gascoyne, “but altogether delightful,
isn’t it, Catherine?”
“You know, dear, I’m in love with it. I am looking forward to having
a little vault in that dear old church with a stained glass window, to
the memory of Ughtred and Catherine Gascoyne of this parish.”
“I can’t say that that is a very cheerful way of looking forward.”
“Well, it’s only when that happens that a woman can be said to
have her husband to herself.”
We laughed. It was really quite delightful to see how happy they
meant to be, and after all if “man never is but always to be blest,”
and the pleasure of all things is a question of the imagination and
lies almost entirely in anticipation, they had had as much pleasure
out of it as could be expected.
I knew the time Ughtred Gascoyne usually went home, and my
meetings with him, looked upon by him as accidental, were by no
means so.
November went by, and it was the first week in December, and,
strangely enough in this perverse climate of ours, the weather was
bitterly cold. It was the sort of weather for my purpose, for Ughtred
Gascoyne was a great stickler for fresh air, and it was only in such
weather as this that he was likely to shut his windows. He was
turning into Bond Street one night when I passed him. I laughed as
we met.
“You won’t be allowed to stay out as late as this soon.”
“No, penal servitude is upon me. Coming in?”
We went up to his room, where there was a bright fire burning.
“Now, this is comfortable. By the way, I met a cousin of mine to-
day. He says you are in his office.”
“I told you I was in a stockbroker’s office.”
“Yes, but you never told me he was my cousin, and that you are
also a cousin.”
“I always leave the Gascoynes to find me out themselves. You
see, my mother was a Gascoyne, and she was left to keep lodgings
in Clapham.”
He looked at me kindly.
“You don’t feel bitter?”
 “Oh dear no, only it isn’t a great encouragement to push myself
forward, is it?”
“He tells me that there is another cousin of mine staying with him
and his wife. He describes her as beautiful. What do you think?”
“I agree. I knew her brother.”
“Poor Harry Gascoyne. Killed by a fall from his horse, wasn’t he?”
“Horse kicked him.”
“Strange, must have been a brute.”
I talked to him as he undressed. He was inquisitive about the
South Kensington household.
“Hardly know Gascoyne Gascoyne myself. Always heard he
married badly.”
“He married very well, only her father happened to be a linen-
draper.”
“Good heavens, that’s nothing in our days. Lord Southwick’s
father-in-law was a grocer, and a very distinguished old gentleman,
too. A damned sight better bred than ever the Southwicks were.
They all look like stable-boys. Sort of family in which you’d think the
women had been going wrong with the grooms for generations.
Southwick married groceries and manners at the same time.”
“Mrs. Gascoyne is a very charming woman.”
“My dear fellow, I can quite believe it. A man like Gascoyne
Gascoyne does not retain his polish undimmed if he has been living
for years with a woman who isn’t a lady at heart.”
“I don’t think Miss Gascoyne would be devoted to anyone who
was capable of offending the canons of good taste.”
“They are great friends?”
“I should think so.”
“Well, when I am married we must have a nice family party. Don’t
mind my getting into bed. You can let yourself out, can’t you?”
“Easily.”
I stood and talked to him while I put on my coat, and then I said
good-night.
“Oh, do you mind shutting my bedroom door, the woman makes
such a beastly row doing it if it’s left till the morning.”
“Good-night.”
“Good-night. Mind you come to my wedding.”
 I shut the bedroom door. I was in the outer room alone. I went to
the door, and going outside shut it. Then I ran downstairs, opened
the front door and banged it, leaving myself inside. I sat down on the
stairs and waited. After a while I stole upstairs again. The darkened
room with the firelight playing over it looked very comfortable. I
gently took the glass off the reading-lamp, and, unscrewing the
burner, poured the contents over the foot of the curtains near which
was the only wicker chair in the room.
I had to close the old-fashioned shutters so as to screen the room
from any policeman on his beat as long as possible. One of my
original ideas had been to put a large piece of coal on the fire and
lower the register, leaving the room to fill with smoke.
The lowering of the register, however, would make noise. Things
were better as they were. While I was completing all these
arrangements I was on the alert for the least sound from the other
room. Again and again I paused, ready to make for the door and be
out of the house before he could reach me. I had placed a chair in
such a position in front of his door that he would be bound to trip
over it if he came out in a hurry.
Lastly came the most difficult part of my task. I had to remove the
chair and open his bedroom door slightly. I listened long and
carefully till a snore assured me that it was safe. I leant across the
chair and opened the door a little way. The heavy breathing in the
bed stopped. For one moment I felt terror; the next moment he had
snored again. I removed the chair.
The striking of a match might have betrayed me. I lit a piece of
paper at the fire and held it to the soaked curtains. Then I was out of
the room like a shot and downstairs. As I glanced back the room was
already full of flame.
When I emerged into the streets I looked carefully up and down.
There was not a policeman to be seen. I reached my rooms and
went to bed. I wish I could boast of such a nerve as would have
allowed me to sleep through the night.
The next morning I started for the City at the usual time. I
scanned the morning paper, but there was nothing about a fire in
Albemarle Street. At lunch-time the first thing that met my gaze as I
left the office was a placard issued by one of the earlier and cheaper
evening papers:—‘Gentleman suffocated in Albemarle Street.’
With an extraordinary calm I read that about three a.m. a fire
occurred at the chambers of the Hon. Ughtred Gascoyne, resulting in
the death of that gentleman, who was well known in social and
sporting circles. His servant, who slept on the floor above, was
awakened by the smell of smoke, and getting out of bed and
hurrying to the top of the stairs to arouse his master was driven back
by the flames and smoke. He was subsequently rescued by a fire
escape from the top storey.
On the fire being extinguished the unfortunate gentleman was
discovered in his bed. He must have been suffocated in his sleep.
I put down the paper with satisfaction and ate a good lunch. I had
at any rate not inflicted any great physical suffering.
Mr. Gascoyne came back from his lunch looking very white.
“It’s a most awful thing, Israel. There seems to be a curse on our
family.”
“Why, sir, what is the matter now?”
“You know my cousin Ughtred?”
“Yes.”
“The poor fellow has been suffocated in his bed.”
I appeared horrified. “You don’t mean to say at his rooms in
Albemarle Street?”
“Yes.”
I looked terribly concerned.
“He was to have been married quite soon.”
“So I understood. Mrs. Goodsall, the actress, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Curiously enough, I met him yesterday at the club of a friend of
mine. I hadn’t seen him for years.”
I called a hansom directly I left the office and drove to Albemarle
Street. A small group was watching the house from the other side of
the road. The windows were boarded up and the stonework round
them blackened with smoke. I knocked at the door, and it was
opened by Ughtred Gascoyne’s servant. He had reason to
remember me with gratitude, for I knew that servants are the
adventurer’s staunchest allies or greatest enemies.
 “Will you step inside, sir? Lord Gascoyne has been here most of
the day. He’s just gone.”
I did not wish to meet his lordship.
“When do you expect him to return?”
“Not till to-morrow, sir.”
I went in. There was a gruesome smell of charred wood and
stuffs. I followed Mason upstairs.
“This it where it must have begun, sir.” He pointed to where the
wicker work chair had stood.
“What I can’t understand, sir, is how the shutters came to be
closed. I never knew Mr. Gascoyne to shut them, and he gave me
particular instructions to the contrary. There was no need for them,
you see.”
I looked towards the bedroom.
“They took him away to the mortuary, sir, to await the inquest. No
man could have been a better master.”
“He was a splendid chap, Mason. You know how I looked up to
him.” I spoke in my most ingenuous tones.
“And very fond he was of you, sir. He was always at home to
you.”
I pressed half a sovereign into his hand.
“Did he come home alone, Mason?”
“No, sir—at least, I fancy I heard voices. Oh yes, and I heard the
door bang. I don’t know who it was, sir, I’m sure.”
The front room was quite burnt out, and there could be absolutely
no trace of the oil with which I had started the conflagration.
I had apparently succeeded in a very risky undertaking.
I left a card at Mrs. Goodsall’s with my deepest sympathy. The
servant informed me she was quite prostrated, and I was made
somewhat uncomfortable by hearing sounds of sobbing from the
second storey of the tiny house.
At the Gascoynes’, where I was to dine, I found the household in
the deepest gloom. The tragedy seemed to have brought back
something of the bitterness of their own grief. It was too similar in its
horror to the death of the two young Gascoynes to be much
discussed. We avoided gloomy topics with an almost hysterical
earnestness, but it is extraordinary how matters of that kind will
obtrude themselves when they are desired not to do so. Left alone
with Mr. Gascoyne, however, the constraint passed and we talked
freely.
“Just one of those things that are quite inexplicable. The fire
brigade authorities do not agree with the theory that a live coal must
have dropped out of the grate. They think the fire originated at the
other end of the room, and that it must have been a cigarette or
something of the kind.”
“It doesn’t matter much what it was, does it?”
“Of course not; only one cannot help travelling round a case like
that and looking at it from every point of view. I called there this
afternoon.”
“And I was there this evening.”
“Did you see Lord Gascoyne?”
“No.”
“He was there when I called, and seemed terribly upset. He kept
on saying, ‘Poor Uncle Ughtred!’ and ‘He was the life and soul of
everything.’ ”
I could not see that these remarks of Lord Gascoyne’s were very
illuminating or helpful, but it is curious how little people trouble to be
sensible when they are talking of the dead.
Miss Gascoyne pressed my hand as I said good-night.
“What a friend you are! You are always cheering us. You knew
him, too, which makes it all the nicer of you to be so cheerful.”
“Good-night,” I said, and then threw into my glance a confession
of admiration for which I had been months preparing the way. I was
sure that had I ventured on such a thing a year before she would
have felt anger, born of injured pride, but now her eyes fell, and I
knew that I was on the road to success. She had taken me at my
own valuation, as I had intended she should.
 Chapter XV
I was glad to discover that Ughtred Gascoyne had left all his little
fortune, excepting such as did not return to the Gascoyne coffers, to
Catherine Goodsall, and that she would be quite well off. She looked
very woebegone when I saw her again, but she was not a pessimist,
and soon pulled herself together; not that I believe she ever forgot
him. She gave me a tie-pin that had belonged to him, because he
had been very fond of me, and had often talked of me to her.
A Sunday or two afterwards I lunched with Sibella and her
husband. The old hunger for her was beginning to grow on me, and
impel me towards her.
They were for a wonder alone, and Lionel looked discontented.
He had evidently reached the frame of mind peculiar to vulgar folk,
who think that unless they are living at high pressure and constantly
entertaining or being entertained by those they consider great they
are dropping out of it. Great folk can afford their holidays, but such
social climbers as Lionel Holland can have no respite from the
treadmill of entertainment.
I think he was verily too stupid to see that it was his wife’s beauty
and charm, lacking in depth though they were, to which they owed
their improved position.
Sir Anthony Cross—who I knew was with them constantly—must
have played a very clever game, a much cleverer game than I had
imagined him capable of. To do Lionel justice, he was not the sort of
man to play the complaisant husband for the sake of any position,
and he had evidently not grasped that Sir Anthony’s presence at
their house was solely and entirely due to admiration of his wife.
I was certain that so far Sir Anthony had not even been permitted
to declare himself. Sibella was vain enough of his attention to keep
him dangling after her, but she had no notion of making herself
cheap to the men of a society the women of which she was anxious
to propitiate.
I suppose Lionel thought that an old lover like myself, who had
been discarded for years, was no possible danger. Possibly—for the
minx was clever—he had absolute confidence in Sibella.
At any rate, after lunch he left us together. It was the first time we
had been alone since her marriage.
It was a little awkward, but I exerted myself to free the situation
from constraint.
“Things have changed,” I said, lighting another cigarette with a
languid feeling of enjoyment at being alone with her, and conscious
that the ménage I had contemplated had begun.
“You are wonderful, Israel. It is quite extraordinary how people
talk about you, and quote what you say, and yet——” She paused,
and I laughed.
“And yet I began life in a third-rate Clapham lodging-house, and
am still only a clerk in a stockbroker’s office.”
“As far as that goes, I can’t quite see why people make such a
fuss of us.”
“Can’t you? Then look in the glass.”
Sibella rippled with laughter. She loved flattery, and expected it.
“My dear child,” I said lazily, “everything finds its level. We were
bound to rise. You and I, Sibella, are very wonderful people.”
“And Lionel?”
“Lionel is not in the least wonderful. He is good-looking, but by
himself he would never have wheeled the shortest flight above the
ordinary.”
“I won’t have you talking against my husband.”
“I am not talking against him. I have rather an affection for Lionel.
He is your husband.”
“It is sometimes borne in upon me, Israel, and I cannot say why,
that you are extraordinarily wicked.”
“What makes you think that?”
“There is something mysterious about you. There always was
even as a boy, and it has grown with you.”
I did not like to hear this. Above all people, a secret murderer
cannot afford to suggest the mysterious.
 “Do you remember what a pretty little boy you were?” she asked.
“Perfectly.”
“Do you know, I’ve got a lock of your hair that I cut off at a
children’s party. It’s such a dear, silky little curl. Quite black.”
“Let me see it.”
She rose and left the room. Returning, she unwrapped the
covering of tissue paper and showed me the curl, as soft and sweet
as the day it was cut.
“My hair is coarser than that now,” I laughed.
“It’s very nice hair, Israel.”
And then I took her in my arms and kissed her, which may seem
rather premature, but there had been that in the conversation which
had led up to the situation. Of course, Sibella would not have been a
woman had she not declared that she would never forget that she
was now Lionel’s wife, and that on a former occasion she must have
been mad. She repeated that she always knew I was wicked, and
that I had gained an ascendancy over her. She then proceeded to
tell me that I was in love with Lady Pebworth, with whom she had
lately had a coolness. That lady evidently thought that she had
purchased by her introductions a perpetual right to the subservience
of Sibella and her husband. She was now experiencing the utter
callousness of Sibella’s disposition towards her own sex, a
callousness she was exceedingly clever at masking till she had
obtained what she wanted.
It was difficult to say where the weak point in Sibella’s armour
came in. She was, of course, vain, but as a rule her vanity was not
allowed to interfere with her interests. She was dominated to a great
extent by looks. It was this passion for beautiful people that had
made it a perfectly safe proceeding to introduce Sir Anthony Cross to
her. I was sure that no man so destitute of pretensions to physical
charm could ever win her suffrages. In fact, I was pleased to know
that he was always to be seen near her, for his case was hopeless.
“Perhaps it is a very good thing we did not marry, Sibella. A strict
barrier should always be preserved between the official and the
sentimental roles.”
“My dear Israel, Lionel is much more sentimental than you are.”