Word: folke
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Ivan the Terrible, who suffered from insomnia and, perhaps, a bad conscience, kept three blind old men to tell him fairy stories during the long nights in the Kremlin palace. For at least seven centuries in Russia, czars, noblemen, merchants and peasants sought diversion in the wondrous skazki, the folk tales told by itinerant bards who passed on their treasure from generation to generation...
There was little else to amuse the Russians. While the rest of Europe was spawning Dante, Chaucer and Rabelais, recorded literature in Russia until the 18th century consisted mainly of sermons, lives of saints and other edifying ecclesiastical texts. The oral folk tradition in Russia was truly a magic spring. As in the fairy tale, it flowed inexhaustibly, reviving, consoling and enlightening all who partook...
Cockroach Milk. When Russia burst triumphantly into literary history in the 19th century, it was hardly surprising that most of her great writers were steeped in folklore. "Each one is a poem!" said Pushkin, who, like Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, used folk tales as vital elements in his work. The selection of folk tales in this English volume was made from Alexander Afanasev's classic mid-19th century collection. First published in the U.S. 30 years ago, the book has now been reprinted under the somewhat misleading rubric Russian Fairy Tales. Actually, the stories include animal fables and laconic...
...Although folk tales throughout the world bear an uncanny and unexplained family resemblance, many of these stories have an outlandish ingenuity that marks them as uniquely Russian. Take, for example, the tale of the peasant Bukhtan, whose habitation was "a stove built on pillars in the middle of a field. He lay on the stove up to his elbows in cockroach milk." Since it is axiomatic in folk tales that the more wretched a peasant, the better his chances of making good, Bukhtan naturally ends up marrying the Czar's daughter...
Nowhere does this folk wisdom seem truer than in the field of master drawings. The springs have certainly dwindled. Fifty years ago, the appearance on the auction block of a sheet by one of the great father figures of 15th and 16th century drawing-Dürer, Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo-was not uncommon. Today one would hardly be more surprised if a live dodo waddled into the Parke-Bernet auction room. Drawings also are not a young man's hobby; they demand a degree of patient connoisseurship (tinged with philatelic mania) that only the old usually have. But late...