Russian Fairy Tales: A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore

Six thematic chapters of Russian peasant narrative, assembled by a British Museum cataloguer who taught himself the language so the institution’s Russian holdings could be catalogued. Ralston worked from the collections of Afanasief, Khudyakof, Erlenvein and Chudinsky, and argued in his preface that an untouched photograph of a storyteller is worth more than an ideal portrait, so the translations stay close to the spoken originals. The arrangement moves from the principal incarnations of evil (the Snake, Norka, Koshchei the Deathless, the Water King, Baba Yaga) to lesser impersonations such as One-Eyed Likho, Woe, Frost and the forest spirit Leshy, then to magic and witchcraft, then to Slavonic beliefs about the returning dead, and closes with legends of saints and demons. Ralston frames each group with commentary tying the tales to myths elsewhere in Europe.