The confused Cinderella and the riddle of the Hen Ryaba. The hidden meaning of old fairy tales

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

“What is not portrayed in them, not to mention the main main idea of almost all these tales, that is, the triumph of cunning aimed at achieving some selfish goal, in some, personified outrageous ideas are carried out, as, for example, in the fairy tale" Truth and falsehood ", which proves that" it is tricky to live with truth in the world, what the truth is today! You will please in Siberia for the truth."

We are used to thinking of fairy tales as simple, bright and kind stories for children. However, many fairy tales came from folk legends and tales filled with scary, obscene, and sometimes completely insane details. Anews wants to dive deeper into this world and tell about the true face of domestic and most famous world fairy tales.

How did Little Red Riding Hood become a cannibal? Why does the tale of the turnip drive specialists crazy? And what happened to the collection of Russian swearing tales?

Cinderella is a prostitute, Little Red Riding Hood is a cannibal

Many famous storytellers - the brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault - were, first of all, not authors, but collectors and copyists of folk legends. And the creative component of their activity consisted mainly in the fact that they “smoothed” the primary sources, adapting rather cruel stories for children. Thus, the Brothers Grimm fairy tales were published seven times, and the first edition of 1812 was regarded by the public as completely unsuitable for children's reading.

The fate of history is especially indicative here. about Cinderella … The earliest prototypes of this story refer us to Ancient Egypt, where Cinderella appears in the form of the girl Fodoris, who is kidnapped by pirates and sold into slavery. There, the owner makes her engage in prostitution, for which she buys beautiful gilded sandals.

Once the sandal Fodoris is kidnapped by a falcon (which was the Egyptian god Horus) and taken to the pharaoh, followed by falling in love, trying on, etc.

In the book by Giambattista Basile "A Tale of Fairy Tales" - the first collection of fairy-tale folklore in the history of European literature - Cinderella is called Zezolla. She not only endures humiliation, but fights with them, breaking her evil stepmother's neck with a chest lid. However, the girl's nanny, who advised her such a radical way out, takes advantage of the situation, makes her widowed father fall in love with herself and brings her five daughters to the house, making Zezolla's position completely deplorable. Then again comes the help of higher powers, sacramental shoes, searches …

In 1697, the Frenchman Charles Perrault wrote a canonical version - with a simple conflict, a good fairy, a pumpkin carriage and a crystal shoe. And, of course, with the sweetest possible ending - Cinderella “from the bottom of her heart” forgives her evil sisters and, having become a queen, passes them off as court nobles.

It would seem that here it is an idyll - but here the Grimm brothers have scraped together a more feasible option in the bins of the German people. The finale deserves special attention, which has become a truly bloody phantasmagoria. The Cinderella sisters, wanting to squeeze into a crystal slipper, cut off parts of their feet: one is a toe, the other is a whole heel. The prince, for some reason, does not notice this, but injustice is not allowed to happen … doves, cooing:

To top it off, the feathered guardians of morality peck out Cinderella's sisters' eyes.

Other extravagant primary sources include "Sleeping Beauty"recorded by Basile. There, a beauty named Thalia was also cursed with a spindle prick, after which the princess fell asleep without waking up. The inconsolable king father left her in a small house in the woods. Years later, another king passed by, entered the house and saw the Sleeping Beauty. Without becoming exchanged for kisses, he moved Talia to bed and, so to speak, took full advantage of the situation. At the same time, the girl did not wake up, but the pleased prince left.

The beauty, however, nine months later gave birth to twins - a son named the Sun and a daughter Luna. It was they who woke Talia: the boy, in search of his mother's breast, began to suck her finger and accidentally sucked a poisoned thorn.

The unlucky father returned after a few years - solely out of a desire to have a good time again. However, he found offspring in the house and could not get out. Then the lovers had to arrange their personal lives, simultaneously solving the issue with the first wife of the protagonist, who turned out to be a cannibal.

What, in these circumstances, remains to be expected from "Little Red Riding Hood"? A girl, a grandmother, an intelligent predatory animal - a truly explosive mixture. Even in the canonical version of the Brothers Grimm, with a good ending, everything looks quite like a knacker: the lumberjacks passing by hear a noise, kill a wolf, cut his belly and take out the living grandmother and granddaughter from there.

Severe folk art is especially subtle here. All their zeal would not have helped the brave lumberjacks - from the belly of the wolf, they could only get Little Red Riding Hood. Because the grandmother … was in the belly of the girl herself.

According to the plot of most versions of the legend, the wolf kills the old woman, prepares food from her body, and a drink from the blood, dresses in the clothes of the grandmother and lies in her bed. When the girl arrives, the wolf invites her to eat. The domestic cat tries to warn the girl that she is eating the remains of her grandmother, but the villain throws wooden shoes at the cat and kills her.

Then the wolf invites the girl to undress and lie down next to him, and throw the clothes into the fire. She does just that - well, then there are sacramental questions about big eyes and teeth.

Crazy Turnip and apocalyptic Ryaba Hen

Naturally, all this also applies to our fairy tale folklore. As an example, we can cite the fairy tale about the Snow Maiden, in which a childless old man and an old woman sculpt a figure out of snow that has turned into a beautiful living daughter.

In the famous version, the girl feels great in winter, but by the spring she becomes sad and eventually melts poetically, going into the forest with her friends and jumping over the fire.

The Russian people, however, produced another, far from so poetic version. In it, the Snegurushka girl did not experience any special problems in the spring and, having gone into the forest with her friends, was not going to melt - on the contrary, she plugged everyone in the belt, picking up a full basket of berries. The girlfriends, obviously, were not satisfied with such well-being - and they killed Snegurushka without any trick.

The girl's body was buried under a bush and fastened with a twig, and the old man and the old woman were told that their daughter was lost. Unfortunately for the girls, a merchant made a pipe out of the bush they were looking for, and instead of the usual sounds, the pipe began to sing about what had happened.

As a result, it came to the village of Snegurushki, where one of the culprits was offered to blow a pipe. She refused and, in the hope of ending the accusations, smashed the instrument on the ground. However, Snegurushka appeared from the broken pipe, telling about the crime already a cappella and in prose. With the culprits in the best folklore traditions did not become almonds - they sent them "to the forest for animals to eat."

The fact that the originals of Russian folk tales were far from always "comme il faut" is evidenced by the reaction of the official censorship to the central domestic work in this area - the book "Folk Russian Tales" by the literary critic and historian Alexander Afanasyev.

In 1870, the first edition received the following review:

How did they end up pulling the turnip? This question is answered by the last line of the tale:

What do these lines hide? The secret of eternal life or an explanation of why a dog still needs a fifth leg? The answer is also unknown to specialists. Journalist Valery Panyushkin writes: “The secret of the fifth leg is unknowable. I asked folklorists. They don't know either. Sometimes it seems to me that the Arkhangelsk grandmother (or grandfather), who more than a hundred years ago told the researcher Kharitonov her unique and inexplicable version of the tale about the turnip, was simply drunk or openly mocked the city eccentric with glasses, who seriously wrote down fairy tales that even children do not listen to attentively.

The situation with another cult Russian fairy tale is no less strange - "Ryaba Chicken" … Its modern text itself raises questions from many readers and professionals:

Why is a simple egg better than a golden one? Why were the grandfather and the woman upset that the egg broke, although they themselves tried to break it? Perhaps there is a symbol hidden here that the desire for luxury corrupts? Or is the motive of death played out?

It is interesting that the teacher Konstantin Ushinsky, who compiled this text, focused it on children and concluded, in his opinion, a meaning “accessible and understandable” to them.

The strangeness of the situation is enhanced by looking at the original of the tale. There, a broken egg leads to a long string of misfortunes. In mild versions, the villagers just get upset, cry and make a mess. In hard ones, the hut burns out, the grandmother dies in the fire, the granddaughter hangs herself out of grief, the desperate servant throws the church bells off the bell tower, and the priest who sees this in a frenzy tears the holy books, hits the doorframe and dies. In some places, the entire village burns down. There are also options where the action reaches the animal world - in particular, a bear bites off its own tail, so now bears have practically no tail.

The ending of these tales is almost the same - "this is what happens from a simple broken egg."

After such a surprise at the strangeness of the modern version of "Ryaba Chicken" is no longer necessary. Rather, the question arises - why did Professor Ushinsky decide from such a fairy tale to make an "accessible and understandable" message for the little ones? Well, perhaps the answer to it will allow you to come closer to unraveling the eternal mystery of the Russian soul.

Mat and pornography

In his research, Alexander Afanasyev and his assistants collected many fairy tales - some of them, perhaps, even Ushinsky would not have dared to adapt for children. Such tales had nothing to hope to drag through the imperial censorship, so the researcher compiled a collection entitled "Russian folk tales not for print" and secretly sent it to Europe. In 1872, many of the texts included in the collection were published in Geneva without the name of the compiler under the title “Russian cherished tales”.

In Russia, stories containing explicit pornography, obscenities and ridicule of religion were first published only in 1991. From a collection of fairy tales with the eloquent titles "My ass", "Sowing xy … c" or "Like a dog" we bring to your attention one of the most decent ones called "The Wife of the Blind":

Of course, the Slavic names are also based on Slavic roots. Reading the chronicles, historians often come across names with roots -world-, -svyato-, -slav-, -rad-, -stani-, -vyache-, -volod-, -mir-, -love-, -neg- and others … Since most of them are used by us in everyday life, therefore, at the level of innate intuition, we understand the meaning of ancient names. For example, Lyudmila means “dear to people”, and Bogdan means “given by God”. It is curious that such namesake names are still preserved among different Slavic peoples. For example, in the countries of Western Europe, the name Voislav is popular (howl + glory = glorious warrior), while our Russian navigator and geographer of the 19th century Rimsky-Korsakov bore the name Warrior.

But there were also some preferences in the traditions of names in different Slavic territories. For Russian people, names with the roots -volod- and -vlad- were preferred, such as Vsevolod and Vladimir. But Serbs prefer names with the root -mil-: Milava, Milos, Milica, Milodukh, Milodan.

Traditions of princely names

A child who appeared in a princely family, and the name should have been chosen exclusively euphonious. Therefore, we know ancient rulers with traditionally "prestigious" and "positive" names: in the chronicles we meet Vladimir, Vsevolod, Yaroslav, Vyacheslav. Traditions also prescribed for the heirs of the ruling dynasty to use a common root in names. For example, the sons of the prince of Novgorod and Kiev Yaroslav the Wise were called Izyaslav, Svyatoslav, Vyacheslav.

But his grandson and son of the Kiev prince Izyaslav Svyatopolk, although he did not inherit the princely name (they say that he was illegitimate), he did not forget to take into account the “hereditary high root” in the names of his children, and they received the names of Sbyslav, Izyaslav, Predslav, Yaroslav, Mstislav and Bryachislav.

This is how strong the desire is through the names to declare their rights to the Kiev throne! After all, initially the name served as a surname.

Another curious tradition that has survived to this day is the continuity of names in the same family. Naming a baby after a grandfather or grandmother is not only a tribute to ancestors, but also echoes of the ancient belief in the ability to transmigrate souls. They wished the child only happiness, therefore they called him by the name of a relative, believing that all the good qualities of the ancestor would be passed on to the representative of the new generation.

How to protect a child with a name

Both in Russia and in many other cultures, giving several names to a child at once was considered mandatory. The logic is simple: in people one name is used while the rest remain secret. Accordingly, evil forces do not know him and cannot harm him. But sometimes the desire to mislead spirits became somewhat strange by modern standards. So, the baby could be called Nelyub, Nekras, Gryaznoy, Ghoul, Besson, Nevzor.

That is, the child received a name in honor of some flaw, although in reality it might not have it. It seemed to the ancient Slavs that harmful entities would not contact such a "spoiled" person. Philologists even have a term for such names - preventive. Over time, surnames were formed from them, and now you can meet the Nekrasovs, Bessonovs and Gryaznovs. So such a surname is not an indicator of the inferiority of ancestors, but a kind of amulet.

Another option to show evil spirits that this baby should not be touched is to pretend that the child does not belong to this clan-tribe. The newborns received the names Foundling, Priemysh, Nayden, Nezhdan, Nenash. Thus, the parents believed that unkind forces launched on a false trail would not be able to do anything bad to the child. Interestingly, modern dads and mothers would use such methods of protection from the evil eye and damage?

A special place in the Slavic namebook was occupied by names derived from totem animals. In ancient times, it was believed that a baby with such a name would absorb the virtues of the patron saint of the tribe, because wild animals in their concepts possessed mystical abilities. So, the bear has always been associated with unprecedented strength, the wolf was endowed with agility, courage and devotion to comrades. And even a hare could "give" names to children, because he was a symbol of speed, resourcefulness and fertility. Another argument in favor of the name-totem was the belief that a predator does not attack a baby who is "of the same blood with him." So even now in Serbia you can find a person with the name Vuk (Wolf).

Subsequently, such names were taken as the basis of many common Russian surnames: Volkovs, Medverevs, Zaitsevs, Vorobievs, Lisitsyn, Barsukovs, Solovievs, etc.

In contrast to the name-amulets, the Slavs still like to use names that reflect the positive qualities of a person: Radmila (caring and sweet), Rada (joy, happiness), Slobodan (free, giving freedom), Tikhomir (quiet and peaceful), Yasna (clear). Parents who call their children this way probably hope that their children will grow up just like that.

A nickname is a sign of personality

If now the presence of a nickname is usually something offensive, then among the ancient Slavs there was no particular difference between a name and a nickname. The middle name, indicating some personality of the owner, was usually given as the child grew and was used on an equal basis with the name at birth.

It had a special meaning: by the nickname it was easy to understand what kind of person we are talking about, what traits of character or appearance he possesses. For example, in history there are many princes named Vsevolod. But when the annals say about Vsevolod the Big Nest, it immediately becomes clear that this is the great Vladimir ruler, the son of Yuri Dolgoruky (an excellent warrior, "gatherer of lands"), who had eight sons and four daughters. Wise, Bogolyubsky, Prophetic, Krasno Solnyshko, Grozny, Nevsky, Donskoy, etc. - all these are courageous and stately nicknames of the ancient Russian princes.

However, there were also not such "valiant" nicknames. For example, a playful baby could later be called Prokud, a plump one - Kvashnya, with speech impairments - Shevkun, and a child with a big head could well become Golovan for life. Do not think that noble princes avoided offensive nicknames. So, Tsar Vasily II was called the Dark - at the end of his life he had to fiercely fight for power with another Vasily - Kosy. And Ivan III, according to the historian Karamzin, was called the Tormentor by the people.

Often a nickname indicated an occupation. For example, grandfather Shchukar from Mikhail Sholokhov's story was probably a fisherman. Crucian carp, Bream, Catfish are other nicknames.

Why Dobrynya is not necessarily kind, and other features of Slavic names

In Old Russian literature, it was common to use both full names and their diminutive versions. Fairy tales in which the main characters are called Dobrynya Nikitich and Alyosha Popovich can be a striking example. The name Dobrynya is quite likely formed from the Old Russian Dobroslav and does not mean at all sweet and warm, as you might think, but strong and healthy. Many names in short form have come down to the modern namebook. For example, Boris (Borislav), Putyata (Putimir), Tverdilo (Tverdislav), Ratsha (Ratibor).

Another feature of Slavic names is the reflection in the name of the situation in which the baby was born. So, the common surname Tretyak came from a name meaning that this baby was the third for the parents. And names such as Frost or Yarets could tell in what weather the child was born.

How the arrival of a new religion affected the nominal traditions of the Slavs

Integration into European culture, which occurred with the advent of Christianity, brought about changes in the fashion for names. So, many Greek, Hebrew and Roman names have become widespread. Vasily, Yuri (George), Alexander, Peter and other names became popular.

Some found a Russian translation - the Greek Photinia was transformed into the "light of the earth" - Svetlana. Now of the ancient Slavic names, only a few are most often used, and for the most part these are the names of princes. And all because the Slavic name-book was replaced by the Holy Tsesles - the Orthodox calendar, where every day of the year is dedicated to the memory of this or that saint. Therefore, only the names of the canonized Slavic rulers got there.