The origins of fairy tales that we consider ours

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

Blogger Maxim Mirovich reveals in LJ the foreign origins of children's fairy tales, which we all consider ours.

The Golden Key, 1935 and The Adventures of Pinocchio, 1883

To begin with, I'll tell you about a couple of textbook examples of plagiarism and borrowing, which you've probably all heard of. Number one on my list is Alexei Tolstoy's Golden Key, whose characters and part of the storyline are copied from Pinocchio of the Italian fairy tale by Carl Collodi, which came out 50 years earlier. In Carl Collodi's tale, an old carpenter named Antonio (who became Carlo's organ grinder for Tolstoy) finds a piece of wood and is going to make a table leg out of it, but the log begins to complain of pain and tickling. Antonio is visited by his friend Gepotto (turned by Tolstoy into Giuseppe), who tells Antonio to make a wooden doll out of logs. Reminds nothing)? A wise cricket, a girl with azure hair, Medoro the poodle, the robbers Cat and the Fox, the evil puppeteer Manjafoko - Collodi already had all this. Tolstoy even copied entire scenes - for example, the attack of the Fox and the Cat in mask-bags, the medical consultation of animal doctors over the wounded Pinocchio, the scene in the Red Cancer tavern (which became Tolstoy's "Tavern of the Three Gudgeons") and many others.

The Adventures of Pinocchio was published in Russian in 1895, 1906, 1908, 1914. Particularly interesting is the 1924 edition, which was translated by Nina Petrovskaya from Italian edited by Alexei Tolstoy (ie he edited it 10 years before he wrote "Buratino"). According to A. Belinsky - in the future, Tolstoy, who was close to government circles, achieved a ban on reprinting Pinocchio and vice versa - lobbied for the release of his Buratino in huge circulations. And they also say that the use of the state nomenclature in the interests of their business in this family is inherited)

The Wizard of the Emerald City, 1939 and The Wizard of Oz, 1900

The second example of plagiarism, which you also probably heard about - the writer Volkov almost completely copied his famous "Emerald City" from the book "The Amazing Wizard of Oz", which was written by American writer Lyman Frank Baum in 1900. Alexander Volkov was a mathematician, knew English quite well - and in fact made, as they say now, a "literary translation" of Baum's book, having published it in the Pioneer magazine in 1939. A separate book "The Wizard of the Emerald City" was published in 1941 - and neither in the preface, nor in the imprint, Lyman Frank Baum was not even mentioned. In 1959, the second edition of the book was published, where the author of the American original was already mentioned in the preface.

If you think that Volkov copied only the first part from the Baum universe, then this is not so, he continued to draw plot moves from there - for example, in Baum's second book entitled "The Wonderful Land of Oz" command of a woman general named Ginger, who later became good and kind - it is not difficult to see here the motives of Volkov's "Oorfene Deuce and his wooden soldiers."

Interestingly, the rest of Volkov's books (in addition to the "Emerald City" cycle) remained unknown, and you can judge about their plots and quality by the titles - the poems "The Red Army", "The Ballad of the Soviet Pilot", "Young Partisans" and "Motherland", songs "Marching Komsomolskaya" and "Song of Timurovites", radio plays "Leader goes to the front", "Patriots" and "Sweatshirt", as well as “How to fish with a rod. Fisherman's Notes”(announced as a popular science book).

The Adventures of Dunno, 1954 and The Adventures of Forest Men, 1913

And now let's move on to lesser-known examples of plagiarism) Do you like books about Dunno and his friends? These characters have a very curious history of appearance - in 1952 Nikolai Nosov visited Minsk for the anniversary Yakub Kolas, where he told the Ukrainian writer Bogdan Chaly about the idea of "Dunno" - which he decided to write on the basis of the heroes of Anna Khvolson "The Kingdom of Babies", which was published in 1889. Anna, in turn, borrowed her characters from the Canadian artist and writer Palmer Cox, whose comics were published in the 1880s.

It was Palmer Cox who invented Dunno. This writer has a whole cycle about little people that live in the forest and go in search of adventure - in the comic "The Amazing Adventures of Forest Men", just like Nosov's heroes, they fly to travel in a homemade balloon. True, here it must be added that, unlike Tolstoy and Volkov, Nosov still got a completely independent work with its own plot - in fact, he borrowed only the names of the heroes and a couple of plot moves.

Interestingly, Palmer Cox also invented another favorite of Soviet children - Murzilka, this was the name of one of his heroes in the pre-revolutionary Russian-language edition of Khvolson. True, Cox's hero is very different from the Soviet Murzilka (a pioneer, journalist and photographer), Cox has a dandy snob in a top hat who talks somewhat dismissively with other characters in the book and tries not to get his white gloves dirty.

The Old Man Hottabych, 1938 and The Copper Jug, 1900

Also not a very well-known example of "soft plagiarism", which can be called the borrowing of some plot moves - the famous tale about Hottabych, written by Lazar Lagin in the 1930s, strongly echoes the English book by the author F. came out in 1900.

What is the book "The Copper Jug" about? A certain young man finds an old copper jug and releases a genie, who is completely unfamiliar with the realities of modern life after a thousand years of imprisonment. Djinn Fakrash, trying to benefit his liberator, commits many curious acts that give the liberator only problems. Reminds nothing)? Just like Hottabych, Fakrash absolutely does not understand the operation of modern mechanisms and factories, believing that they contain genies. As you can see, the plots are very similar.

Lazar Lagin transferred his actions to the USSR, introduced an ideological component - the pioneer Volka does not accept gifts from the genie because of his "contempt for private property" and constantly tells him about the advantages of life in the USSR, and the endings of the books are different - Fakrash returns to the bottle, and Hottabych remains an ordinary citizen today. "Hottabych" went through several reprints - in 1953, the "struggle against cosmopolitanism" was in full swing, and extremely harsh attacks on the United States, the post-colonial authorities of India, and so on were added to the book.

Two years later, the edits were removed in the new edition, but new ones were added instead - on a flying carpet the heroes of the book flew from Moscow under the rule of the capitalists, and immediately began to suffer unbearably) By the way, they write that Lazar Lagin himself did not touch the text of the book after the publication itself the first version, and it is not clear who made the edits.

Doctor Aibolit, 1929 and Doctor Dolittle, 1920

For a snack, my favorite cocktail cherry on the cake - the well-known good doctor Aibolit was almost completely copied from Doctor Dolittle, the books about which were published ten years earlier. The writer Hugh Lofting came up with his kind doctor, sitting in the trenches of the First World War - as a kind of alternative to the terrible surrounding reality.

The good doctor Dolittle (from the English do-little, "do little") lives in a fictional town, heals animals and knows how to speak their languages, Dolittle has several close animals among animals - the pig Ha-Gab, the dog Jeep, the duck Dub- Dab, monkey Chi-Chi and Tyanitolkai. Later, Dolittle travels to Africa to help sick monkeys, his ship is shipwrecked, and he himself is captured by the local king Jollijinka and experiences many adventures, but in the end he saves the sick animals from the epidemic. Korney Chukovsky argued that Tsemakh Shabad, a famous Jewish doctor and public figure from Vilnius, became the prototype of Aibolit, but it is not hard to see how similar the stories and heroes of Chukovsky and the heroes of Hugh Lofting are - even Barmalei was written off from the African king-villain.

As you can see, even the plots of many famous children's books in the USSR were, shall we say, "borrowed". Against this background, the honest act of Boris Zakhoder stands out - he told Soviet children the stories about Winnie the Pooh, honestly pointing out the author - Alan Alexander Milne.