The Image of Death in Russian Folk Tales

THE IMAGE OF DEATH IN RUSSIAN FOLK TALES

Alina Zalyaletdinova

A Third Year Research Project in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts in Cultural Studies at The School of Advanced Studies University of Tyumen

June 2020 МИНИСТЕРСТВО НАУКИ И ВЫСШЕГО ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ РОССИЙСКОЙ ФЕДЕРАЦИИ Федеральное государственное автономное образовательное учреждение высшего образования «ТЮМЕНСКИЙ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННЫЙ УНИВЕРСИТЕТ»

ШКОЛА ПЕРСПЕКТИВНЫХ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЙ (SAS) ТЮМГУ

Директор Школы к.ф.н., Ph.D. А.В. Щербенок

КУРСОВАЯ РАБОТА

ОБРАЗ СМЕРТИ В РУССКИХ НАРОДНЫХ СКАЗКАХ

50.03.01 Искусства и гуманитарные науки

Выполнила работу Студентка 3-ого курса Залялетдинова Алина Салимхановна Очной формы обучения

Руководитель Малхолл Энн PhD по литературной компаративистике

Тюмень 2020 3

DECLARATION OF ORIGINALITY

By submitting this research project, I hereby certify that: I am its sole author and that any ideas, techniques, quotations, or any other material from the work of other people included in my research project, published or otherwise, are fully acknowledged in accordance with the standard referencing practices of my major; and that no third- party proofreading, editing, or translating services have been used in its completion. Alina Zalyaletdinova

WORD COUNT: 4877

TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………….…….5 INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………….6 LITERATURE REVIEW………………………………………...……….….....10 ANALYSIS OF THE FOLK TALES………...………………………………....16 CONCLUSION……………………….…………………………………….…..20 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………….……………….……..21 APPENDIX……………………………………………………………….…….22

ABSTRACT

It is rare to come across a Russian folktale that does not deal in some way, even tangentially, with death and dying. Moreover, our contemporary understanding of death differs greatly from how it seems to have been understood in the pre-modern folkloric tradition. The gulf between these divergent responses to death has been well worked through by several folklorists of the Russian tradition. Yet the question of how exactly death is being shaped in the folktale and according to which criteria is one that has still not been properly answered. Engaging with the theories of Propp, who looks at this question from the position of narration, Pisarenko who uses linguosemiotics to understand symbols of death, and Malinov, who suggests that death in the folk tale is an art-form, I argue that death in the Russian folktale is “anti- sacral”. In other words, I suggest, despite multiple religious connotations across these tales, death never clearly exhibits any sense of God’s will or any other spiritual divinity. To make my argument, I rely on a collection of 579 Russian folktales from A.N. Afanasyev. Ultimately, my project opens up new questions about the changing meanings of death and dying from the pre-modern era to the present day.

INTRODUCTION

People who are familiar with original folk versions of fairy tales may well be acquainted with their typical cruelty. A vast majority of Russian folk tales begin with someone's death or end with it. Death in these folk tales is also perceived as unremarkable, which might seem strange for what is supposedly a children's genre of literature. In the very popular fairy tale Morozko, for example, an evil stepmother drives out her unloved stepdaughter, giving her in marriage to Morozko, the Spirit of Frost1. Contrary to the mother’s plans, Morozko brings the stepdaughter back to her home with a box of expensive gifts. Hoping to repeat this positive experience with her own daughters, the stepmother also sends them to the forest. This time, however, only the stiffened dead bodies of her daughters are returned to her from the forest. But the fairy tale ends in a stranger and more unexpected way. The stepmother scolds her stepdaughter, but then they they make up and start living happily. In this example, we can see a specific attitude to the demise of a person’s life that is often presented in Russian folk tales. The stepmother’s reaction may seem abnormal to a contemporary reader, who might find it hard to believe how this family calmly stepped over the corpses of their own children and began to live happily. Our contemporary perception of death often carries a certain tone of taboo: people are afraid of death and, as Philips Ariès notes in his book The Hour of our Death, we usually try to "silence" it. As my project will explore, however, it is not so in the case of folk tales, where death appears regularly and openly, and often in the in the violent forms of murder and dismemberment. In my research, I want to study how death is represented in Russian folk tales, to explore

1 Aleksandr N. Afanasyev, Narodniye russkiye skazki [Russian Folktales]. 3 vols. (Moscow: Nauka, 1984-1985), 95. All of the Afanasyev folktales translations in this essay are my own.

7 the differences between our contemporary perception of death, and perceptions of death in pre-modern folktales2. One of the reasons why fairy tales are so captivating for contemporary researchers is that, despite their narrative simplicity, they contain many sources of information about the society and the culture that they are depicting. Vladimir Propp, in the first chapter of his book Istoricheskie korni Volshebnoi Skazki (Historical Roots of the Wonder Tale), describes how the fairy tale combines religious beliefs, the influence of social institutions, rituals, myths, and primitive thinking3. And, although a fairy tale cannot give us a complete picture of any phenomenon in the past, it is still a unique viewpoint through which we can interpret past generations’ attitudes and relationships to death. The fairy tale allows us a window onto how the “techniques” of death, such as funeral rites and traditions, are enacted in the past, while it also gives us an equally important view of their philosophy regarding death. It is often suggested, for example, that death was perceived entirely differently to how it is now, and that this is in part due to the multiple gruesome conditions of peasants’ lifestyles. Rachel Glassford in her essay Death Objectified, Life Affirmed: Mortality and Materialism in Russian Folktales Featuring Koschei the Deathless, suggests that mortality rates in Late Tsarist Russia were especially high: “In 2017, the Russian population was around 144.5 million, with a mortality rate of twelve in one thousand and a life expectancy of seventy-two years on average” while “an average of forty-two people out of every thousand died in the year 1873 alone”4. Glassford

2 Specifically, I am interested in Russian fairy tales, and throughout my research I use “fairy tales” and “folk tales” as synonyms. It is beyond the scope of this paper to address other types of folklore besides fairy tales. Finally, I do not confine my research to fairy tales written by a certain author, but look across the genre in the Russian context.

3 Vladimir Propp, Istoricheskie korni Volshebnoi Skazki [Historical Roots of the Wonder Tale] (Leningrad: Leningrad University Press, 1946), 117-128. All translation of Propp are my own.

4 Rachel Glassford, Death Objectified, Life Affirmed: Mortality and Materialism in Russian Folktales Featuring Koschei the Deathless (San Marcos: Texas State University, 2018), 54.

8 comments that “In the case of Russian folklore, the objectification of death results from anxieties among the Russian peasantry about legacy – anxieties arising from the daily uncertainty of living during an era when the statistical probability of dying an early death was very real”5. By objectivity, she means that death in a fairy tale is material and embodied in the form of a certain object. Using similar logic, we may conclude that we found the answer to this cultural differentiation: death at that time was much more commonplace than it is now and therefore people were ready to accept their relative’s passing much more calmly. However, here we embark on the dangerous path of interpretative research based on “historical facts” or statistics. As many historians have argued, we can interpret the events of the past only from the present. E.H. Carr in his book What is History? describes this problem in great detail, suggesting that the very language that we use to describe events of the past belongs to the present: “Words like democracy, empire, war, revolution - have current connotations from which he cannot divorce them”6. Therefore, it might impossible to be neutral when it comes to historical interpretation; in the analysis of death rates from the pre-modern era, we cannot help but compare them to our present era. It is precisely due to this reason that approaching the question of death and dying in Russian fairy tale through an entirely historical lens would be flawed. Instead, paying close attention to the very particularities of the literary genre and fairy tale narrative is warranted. But fictional reality is not equal to the real world. The linguist Roman Jakobson, for example, puts forward the idea that poetic language and practical language are distinguished by the presence of sequences of measurement, a function that is used only in a poetic language. If we endlessly repeat something in our everyday speech, then our message will become uninformative. However, for poetical

5 Glassford, 58.

6 Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History? (London: Penguin UK, 2018), 79.

9 text (fictional literature) syntactic and semantic repetitions are normal7. That is why numerical repetitions often appear in fairy tales, when the same action is repeated several times until the result of this action changes. The fact that the hero almost invariably passes three trials before he reaches the final goal is more connected with the peculiarity of the structure of the fairy tale than with the ritualistic meaning of the figure three for the Slavs. That is why I mainly focus on literary analysis and corresponding sources since these studies deeply understand the structure, features, and narrative of a fictional work of art. However, I will also turn to sociological and historical literature to understand whether any specifics of the representation of death in folk tales were motivated by real features of the Russian peasants’ life. My analysis of the critical literature on the topic shows that since the time of Propp, the question of the representation of death in Russian fairy tales, surprisingly, hasn’t been a popular one to research. Despite this, one of the goals of my work is to build a full-fledged dialogue between folklorist researchers who have previously addressed the question of the meaning of death in Russian fairy tales, performing my own comparative analysis of their research. My analysis of academic sources consists of three stages. Firstly, I analyse a host of texts, some of which I have mentioned above, to look at the points of contact and divergences in subject matter, theme, and methodology between them. Secondly, I try to understand what exactly is considered a “sign” or an “image” of death in the fairy tale, according to their respective critical works. Propp, for example, describes how death can be represented through material objects such as “iron shoes,” while Malinov, on the other hand, explains the symbolic representation of death in motives of road or test. In a more recent engagement, Pisarenko delimits the signs of death by their origin, while adding personalized images of death such as Baba Yaga and Koschei the Deathless. Through engaging with these thinkers in particular, I have accumulated a large number of markers of

7 Roman Jakobson, Language in literature, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), chap. 7, http://commons.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/41/2017/09/Jakobson-Linguistics-and- Poetics.pdf.

10 death signs, which I use in my own analysis of fairy tales in the latter part of this paper. Finally, in this essay, I present my own theory about anti-sacrality in the Russian folk tale. My claim here is that despite multiple religious connotations within Russian folk tales, there is a lack of any specific spiritual divinity. This, I argue, is due to the formation of certain rules by which death in fairy tales is shaped, rules which are carried out in accordance with non-religious criteria.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Despite the fact that the fairy tale incorporates both monotheistic and pagan beliefs, death in the fairy tale is not played out in the realm of a Christian God. More specifically, as critics have suggested, the folk tale is inclined to the laws of mythological, not religious consciousness. “A fairy tale and a myth (especially myths of pre-class peoples)” suggests Propp, “can sometimes so completely coincide with each other that in ethnography and folklore studies such myths are often called fairy tales”8. For example, in the fairy tale Solntse, Mesiats i Voron Voronovich (The Sun, the Moon, and the Voron Voronovich), I noticed, the named heavenly bodies are personified, which refer us to the paganistic cult of nature9. There are plenty of similarly powerful mythological figures in the Russian fairy tale, but it is not clear what body, if any, in this world is responsible for fate and justice, and whether those concepts exist at all. Therefore, in the absence of a concrete authority that would govern the laws of the fairy tale world, it often seems that death in a fairy tale is simply senselessly and chaotically cruel. Nevertheless, there are some specific criteria that seem to be applicable to all folkloric deaths, and these criteria can be understood through different methodologies:

Propp analyses the aspect of death from the point of view of how the narrative is formed, Pisarenko focuses on reading death in the folktale through the linguosemiotic

8 Propp, 124.

9 Afanasyev, 92.

11 approach, while Malinov, in his turn, tries to consider the general picture of death in all its manifestations in these tales. Besides, as I have already mentioned, sociological and historical literature can explain life-based reasons behind some of these folkloric deaths’ criteria. Based on Rachel Glassford’s analysis, she concludes that Russian peasants of the 19th century considered “mortality as a natural fact of human experience, even in an era when life was full of uncertainty”10. According to her, this type of philosophy is sometimes called death-positivity. In his article Kul'tura Smerti V Russkoi derevne vtoroi poloviny XIX – nachala XX veka (Сulture of death in the Russian village of second half of the XIX – XX centuries) by D. A. Komarov supports this idea. Komarov claims that, despite the peasants' firm adherence to Christianity, Russian folklore does not have show any motive behind death as a desired deliverance from life. Moreover, he suggests, death was perceived in mind of the peasant as commonplace and inevitable end of human existence. Finally, according to the author, in Russian fairy tales, there is also the theme of death becoming tamed, when, for example, in certain tales, death is invited to become a godmother. Philippe Ariès in his book The Hour of Our Death has some thoughts that indirectly support both Glassford’s and Komarov’s claims. He suggests that up to the 19th century, the concept of “death tamed” was in fact present among the general population. People regarded death as a natural inevitability and it didn’t cause them much existential fear. Ariès illustrates this claim by numerous examples from the literature of that time. “Even the mad Quixote...would not try to escape from death into the dreams in which he had consumed his life. On the contrary, the signs of the end brought him back to reason”11. Since the idea of death-positivity seems rather essential for pre-industrial Russian culture, I decided to include that as one of my criteria for representation of death and looked for similar arguments in my other non- sociological texts.

10 Glassford, 57. 11 Philippe Aries, The Hour of Our Death (New York: Vintage Books, 2008), 29.

Propp’s book Istoricheskie korni Volshebnoi Skazki (Historical Roots of the Wonder Tale) carries a series of remarkable concepts that are also significant for my research. Notably, Propp wonders about the role of the hero that is heading for the realm of the dead. This hero can be a literal “living person” who is making that journey, or it can be an allegory for a dead man, an allegory through which, Propp suggests, pre-modern peasants reflected on the idea of the wanderings of the soul12. Regarding the first assumption, Propp cites the argument that the hero can be compared with a shaman, following the soul of a deceased or sick person. However, Propp later notes that this view is too simplistic and more complex interpretations exist13. He also adds that in Russian fairy tales, the objects that are usually connected with this path to the kingdom of the dead are iron shoes and iron crutch14. Furthermore, he claims that the world of the dead is essentially ambivalent to the world of the living: “The fairy tale is very naive, but it accurately expresses the essence of the matter, saying: "And there the light is the same as ours”15. The world of the living and the world of the dead are close, but nevertheless the borders between them shouldn't be crossed. This is an unambiguous taboo. Even useful items that are brought by a hero from another world should be used with extreme caution, as they can easily turn against their owners, Propp notes16. In this case, he gives us the example of the tale Morskoi tsar' i Vasilisa Premudraia (The Sea King and Vasilisa the Wise)17. The king spares an eagle on the hunt. In exchange, the eagle takes him to distant lands, and as a result of this trip the king receives a chest as a gift. When the chest is opened, a huge herd of cattle appears on the land. The eagle tells the king not to open the chest, but the king violates this prohibition and, as a result, his life

12 Propp, 146. 13 Propp, 146.

14 Propp, 144. 15 Propp, 366, “Skazka ochen’ naivno, no sovershenno tochno vyrazhaet sut’ dela, govoria: “I tam svet takoi zhe, kak u nas””. 16 Propp, 370.

17 Afanasyev, 219.

13 becomes endangered, as the whole island is filled with cattle. What deserves to be highlighted from Propp's text is the ambivalence of death, something that he constantly observes, and also that the protagonist's journey can symbolize the path to the afterlife. In Obraz smerti v russkoi skazke (The image of death in a Russian fairy tale) by Aleksey Malinov, the author is interested in the general picture of death that arises when one becomes acquainted with a Russian fairy tale. He suggests that if one will take away everything that is connected with death in a fairy tale and everything that hints at it then nothing will remains of the fairy tale18. Malinov notes that death in fairy tales always comes with ease: fairy-tale characters can easily kill and easily die19. Nevertheless, he rejects the idea that death in fairy tales is a simple routine and claims that the role of death in a fairy tale is so huge that it is somewhat akin to a type of art20. According to Malinov, death completely forms a Russian fairy tale, and this fact usually manifests itself in the denouement of a fairy tale. The climax of death occurs, he suggests, in the final act of the fairy tale, where the motive of the test or the confrontation appears. According to him, in the fairytale death has space, but not time21. As an example, he uses a fairy tale Kolobok, the Russian analog of The Gingerbread Man22. In the fairy tale, Kolobok's journey ends with his death, reflecting the interpretation of death as a road. Here, Malinov connects the concepts of road, test, and confrontation with death, thereby asserting that the folktale largely builds its narrative around death, and that it cannot exist without it.

18 Aleksey Valerevich Malinov, “Obraz smerti v russkoi skazke” [The image of death in a Russian fairy tale], Veche. Al'manakh russkoi filosofii i kul'tury. no. 3 (1995): 165, http://philosophy. spbu. ru/userfiles/rusphil/Veche 20. All translation of Malinov are my own. 19 Malinov, 166. 20 Malinov, 167.

21 Malinov, 169.

22 Afanasyev, 36.

Crucially, Malinov also notes the principle of ambivalence that exists in fairy tales. In his view, ambivalence exists in the form of the duality of the world of the dead (which can be represented in a variety of images, one of which can be, for example, a crystal mountain) and the world of the living23. They coexist quite peacefully, but nevertheless their borders should not be violated. The author concludes that death in fairy tales is like a chaotic entropic celebration, where death amuses, and destruction marks a celebration24. Death, in other words, does not mark the end, but instead the beginning of the narrative. As we can see, Malinov not only largely supports the ideas of ambivalence that are expressed by Propp, but also gives his own description of the representation of death. However, his argument about entropy is not universal, since, as I have suggested above, there are some rules that limit and shape death. One of them, death-positivity, is also expressed in Malinov's work since he notes that in a fairy tale, death is treated simply and without fear25. Taking an altogether different approach is the essay Lingvosemioticheskie Osobennosti Znakov Smerti v Russkikh Narodnykh Skazkakh (Linguosemiotic Peculiarities of Death Signs In Russian Folk Tales) by Daria Pisarenko. In this text, Pisarenko analyzes 250 stories from A. N. Afanasyev’s collection of Russian fairy tales. She claims that there are certain signs that indicate the presence of death: these are bones, a skull, a deadman, immobility, a sleeping man, blood, silver, a candle, a shroud, The Other Side, Baba Yaga, Koschei the Deathless and death itself. We should take a look at the first example of signs that are associated with the knowledge of man about his biological demise: these are bones, the skull, the deadman, immobility and the sleeping man. The deadman as a sign often appears on the borders between worlds, and is sometimes used interchangeably with the sign of

23 Malinov, 170-172.

24 Malinov, 178. 25 Malinov, 166.

15 the sleeping man. As death in the fairytale is an eternal dream, the sleeping person is also located on the borderline26. The second category is associated with the funeral and funeral rites. The signs here are blood, silver, the candle, and the shroud. Blood, silver, and the candle symbolize life and light, but in certain situations, they can take the opposite meaning27. The candle is also directly associated with funeral rites. The shroud, in turn, is a more obvious sign of a person’s transitional state. The author says that the dual semantics of signs symbolizing both life and death is a reflection of the axiological polarization inherent in the Russian language and the Russian picture of the world in general28. Thus, we can notice that already three authors note ambivalence in their essays, and all of them locate this ambivalence in a specifically Russian context. The third category is the “Other Side” itself, or the place where the soul goes after death. According to Pisarenko, the location of this place is connected with Christian ideas about Heaven and Hell, and in fairy tales, it is often located somewhere below - in the underground or water29. The final category is unusual since it includes personified signs, in the mythological characters Baba Yaga and Koschei the Deathless, and in death itself. They are also the most ancient and semantically indefinite signs30. On the one hand, according to the author of the article, all three

26 Pisarenko, Linguosemiotic “Lingvosemioticheskie Osobennosti Znakov Smerti v Russkikh Narodnykh Skazkakh” [Peculiarities of Death Signs In Russian Folk Tales], Humanitarian and Legal Studies, no. 1 (2019): 249, https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/lingvosemioticheskie-osobennosti-znakov-smerti-v-russkih- narodnyh-skazkah. All translation of Pisarenko are my own. 27 Pisarenko, 250. 28 Pisarenko, 250.

29 Pisarenko, 250.

30 Pisarenko, 251.

16 characters are the personification of death. On the other hand, Baba Yaga is also the one who conducts the rite of initiation and guards the border between the worlds31. As a result, we can conclude that all the above authors in one form or another agree that the Russian folk tale has the following features: ambivalence, death- positivity, and the dependence of the fairy tale plot on the death. It is these criteria that should characterize death in the anti-sacred world. By saying that a fairy tale is “anti-sacral,” however, I do not mean that there are no sacred elements in it. As literature has shown us, they are plenty of them. In this regard, Malinov notes that the duality in the tale comes from the mythology of the two twins32, Propp notes that the main character plays the role of a shaman, and Pisarenko indicates that certain signs of death have a religious role. However, as it was stated by Malinov, there is no world of a philosophically conceivable world of the Highest Good or Almighty Being in fairy tales33. As the three categories I have found prove, in spite of the anti- sacredness, the death of a fairy tale has certain meta-narratological features that shape it.

ANALYSIS OF THE FOLK TALES

Here, I wish to apply my argument about an anti-sacredness in the Russian fairy tale that is shaped by certain limitations, to a selection of fairy tales. In analyzing these fairytales, I try to both understand and to challenge the three categories that I have established: the dependence of the fairy tale plot on the element of death, death- positivity and ambivalence. For that I use the collection of fairy tales by A. N. Afanasyev, consisting of three volumes. In total, the number of fairy tales that I use as the initial material for analysis is 579 (some of them were written in Ukrainian). It seems to me that it was enough for a full analysis of my question. If we will consider

31 Pisarenko, 251.

32 Malinov, 170. 33 Malinov, 172.

17 these fairy tales by genre then we will find that they are quite diverse: Afanasyev's collections contain fairy tales, common tales ("bylichki"), and tales about animals. My own research into the folktales confirms Malinov’s assumption that the fairy tale is impossible without the element of death. Out of the 579 tales I selected, 503 of them in one form or another explicitly mention death. Many of them also include the markers that were indicated by previous researchers: bones, the skull, the deadman, immobility, the sleeping man, blood, silver, the candle, the shroud, The Other Side, Baba Yaga, Koschei the Deathless and death itself, the iron shoes and iron crutch, the crystal mountain, the test, confrontation, and the road. Since some cases in the tales turned out to be ambivalent, I also had to turn to the plot itself to find proof of a character’s death. For example, in the fairy tales about the Fox and the Wolf (Lisichka-sestrichka i volk), seven tales with a synonymous plot, I found a number of different endings34. In one version, thanks to the Fox's tricks, the Wolf ends up being killed by villagers, while in another, the Wolf manages to escape from the arranged trap. Firstly, as practice shows, the plot of the folk tale seems to be crucially dependent on the death. In many tales, the plot begins with the death of an old man or an old woman. In other cases, the tale may begin with the threat of death, as in the tale Veshchii son (The Dream of Prophets), where the merchant himself says that he will order the execution of his sons if they conceal their dreams from him35. In the fairy tale Tsarevna, razreshaiushchaia zagadki (The princess who solved riddles), the princess tells her father that she wants to make riddles and cut heads of those who guess them wrong36. The plot reason for the princess to play the sphinx is unclear. It seems that it is just that if she didn’t decide to start guessing riddles and chopping the heads of those who create them badly, fairy tales would not happen. It may seem that by itself the criterion for the codependent relationship between plot and death tells us

34 Afanasyev, 1-7.

35 Afanasyev, 240.

36 Afanasyev, 239.

18 nothing. However, we should pay attention to how this close relationship is interpreted by Malinov. He argues that death in the fairy tale is not just a cardinal function that accumulates the plot action. According to Malinov, there is so much death in a fairy tale that it becomes a special type of cruel art37. In this case, the plot is not only dependent on the aspect of death, but he also sees it as the main source of entertainment. Therefore, it is difficult to talk about any sacredness of death in this vision. Secondly, the category of death-positivity is quite controversial. Death- positivity says that death should not be experienced as a source of fear and that a person should perceive it as the natural end of our biological being38. However, this philosophy does not mean that a person should try to bring his demise on faster than is needed. On the one hand, as we can see from the example of the tale of Morozko, the characters in folktales often don’t focus on another character’s death, even if it is their own relative. On the other hand, and in reference to the same death-positivity, fairytale characters are often very careless about their own lives, and sometimes even behave in an almost suicidal fashion. For example, in a fairy tale Okhotnik i ego zhena (The Hunter and his Wife) the hunter receives the gift of being able to understand animal voices39. However, the story goes, if he talks about his abilities to someone, he will die. Using his newly-acquired skill, the hunter learns that his wife did not feed the dog. She then enquires where he learned about this fact. The husband informs her that he will die if he has to tell her, to which the wife replies that she is not particularly concerned about this. In addition, he himself agrees with her requirements, puts on a white сlothes, and prepares to die because he can’t argue with his wife. Of course, we can say that this tale is simply comical, but such a carefree attitude to death is not limited to one example. In the fairy tale Emelia-durak (Emelya the Fool), the main character is willing to die from the cold because he is too lazy to

37 Malinov, 167.

38 Glassford, 57.

39 Afanasyev, 248.

19 chop wood40. I believe that in these cases, the tales are not so much depicting the real attitude of the peasants towards death, but that these tropes appear as a common feature of the literary text. In a sense, the suicidality of the characters supports Malinov’s theory that death in a fairytale is a source of entertainment, and that therefore it has an anti-sacred element. Thirdly, as was already mentioned, the principle of ambivalence is noticed by Propp, Pisarenko and Malinov. My main argument that death in the fairytale, with all its amusing cruelty is nevertheless subject to certain laws of being, is built on this criterion. Ambivalence in the folk tale is mainly expressed in the opposition of the living and the dead, where the border between the living and the dead is very thin. Nevertheless, there is this border, and the prohibition on crossing it as a taboo is present in the majority of tales. In these tales, the characters cannot simply cross this border on their own, but rather, always require a special intermediary. Propp identifies that in the fairy tale this role is always played by a special mythological figure that exists specifically for this purpose - Baba Yaga41. She is perhaps the most ambivalent hero of Russian fairy tales. In one fairy tale, she chases after children and eats them, and in another she helps the main character to achieve his goal of killing his enemy and stealing a needed magical object. Propp further suggests that the Baba Yaga is what remains of the myth in the fairy tale. She is, he claims, a reinterpreted image of the priestess performing the burial rite so that the hero can travel to the world of the dead42. Thus, she is perhaps one of the few sacred elements in a desacralized world. Finally, it is clear from my research that while a divine force of goodness doesn't exist in the folk tale, divine evil is ever-present. By that I mean that in the fairy tale, in addition to otherworldly forms of evil (Koschei the Deathless, Miracle- Yudo, Likho), there is also the figure of the devil, a figure that is often ridiculed. For

40Afanasyev, 165.

41 Propp, 147.

42 Propp, 161.

20 example, in fairy tale Beglyi soldat i chert (Runaway Soldier and Devil), an ironic dialogue takes place when a soldier calls the devil a "good man"43. Not only is there no God or other great power whose will should be respected, but nowhere in the fairy tale is the devil, universally considered a source of human misfortune, perceived as a threat. On the contrary, the devil in the fairy tale usually appears as just another source of entertainment.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, I would like to suggest that an unusual perception of death in the fairy tale arises from the peculiarity of the genre. As analysis has shown, most Russian folk stories depend on death, as it begins, completes, or climaxes the plot. In part, this suggests that Russian peasants perceived death as a serious aspect of their life, since it is so important for their folk stories and it reflects a part of their mentality, the so-called death-positivity. In our contemporary moment, death often conjures religious connotations. To consider the “afterlife” often means necessarily to consider God also. The folk tale, however, is not burdened with spiritual transcendental powers. It is anti-sacred in the sense that it does not have the main divine authority, but is not entropic, in the sense that it still has functioning rules. We are left, finally, with the question of how fairy tales coexisted with the religious consciousness of peasants. Did folktales somehow influence the peasant’s Christian picture of the world? Or was death in the folk tale, with its mythological picture of the world, perceived in contradistinction to the official image of death presented by the Christian church? To fully answer these questions would certainly require further case studies. In any case, I hope that my research into the anti-sacredness of death in the Russian fairy tales opens up new spaces for further discussions in the field.

43Afanasyev, 154.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Afanasyev, Aleksandr N. Narodniye russkiye skazki [Russian Folktales]. 3 vols., Moscow: Nauka, 1984-1985. Aries, Philippe. The hour of our death. New York: Vintage Books, 2008. Carr, Edward Hallett. What is history?. London: Penguin UK, 2018. Glassford, Rachel. Death Objectified, Life Affirmed: Mortality and Materialism in Russian Folktales Featuring Koschei the Deathless. San Marcos: Texas State University, 2018. Jakobson, Roman. Language in literature, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987, http://commons.princeton.edu/wp- content/uploads/sites/41/2017/09/Jkobson-Linguistics-and-Poetics.pdf. Komarov, Dmitry Andreevich. “Kul'tura Smerti V Russkoi derevne vtoroi poloviny XIX – nachala XX veka” [Сulture of Death in the Russian Village of the Second Half of the XIX – XX centuries], Vestnik TvGU. Ser. Istoriia no. 3 (2008), https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/74268423.pdf. Malinov, Aleksey Valerevich. “Obraz smerti v russkoi skazke” [The image of death in a Russian fairy tale], Veche. Al'manakh russkoi filosofii i kul'tury. no. 3 (1995), http://philosophy. spbu. ru/userfiles/rusphil/Veche 20. Pisarenko, Daria Alexandrovna. “Lingvosemioticheskie Osobennosti Znakov Smerti v Russkikh Narodnykh Skazkakh” [Linguosemiotic Peculiarities of Death Signs in Russian Folk Tales], Humanitarian and Legal Studies no. 1 (2019), https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/lingvosemioticheskie-osobennosti- znakov-smerti-v-russkih-narodnyh-skazkah. Propp, Vladimir. Istoricheskie korni Volshebnoi Skazki [Historical Roots of the Wonder Tale]. Leningrad: Leningrad University Press 1946.

APPENDIX

Total number of Tales written in Tales in which Tales in which fairy tales Ukrainian (not death wasn't death was amenable to mentioned at all mentioned analysis) 579 23 53 503

List of mentioned Folk tales:

Lisichka-sestrichka i volk [Fox and the Wolf] (№1-7). Markers of death signs: immobility, when fox pretends to be dead - “Ded slez s voza, podoshel k lisichke, a ona ne vorokhnetsia, lezhit sebe kak mertvaia”, villagers are trying to kill a wolf, wolf, and fox threatens to eat each other (a potential allusion to cannibalism), fox eats animals from the village, the wolf is killed by villagers, the bear kills himself. Categories of death: dependence with the plot - as can be seen from the found markers, death or its threat constantly move the plot, death-positivity - “Tut ded smeknul, chto lisichka-to byla ne mertvaia; pogoreval, pogoreval, da delat'-to nechego”, the villager is saddened by the fact that the fox is not dead, the bear tries to eat his guts and kills himself, and the fox is very happy about this circumstance since now she has food, ambivalence - the fox who is a protagonist is constantly in the threshold state of death, at the very beginning of the tale, she pretends to be dead, and at the end, to escape from the real threat of the wolf, she pretends to have her head smashed Emelia-durak [Emelya the Fool] (№165-166). Markers of death signs: immobility, when the main character is drunk and tied his father's death. Categories of death: dependence with the plot - a plot begins with the death of his father and his last will, death-positivity - the main character is willing to die from the cold because he is too lazy to chop wood which signifies his lack of fear of death, this lack of fear is further rewarded by the appearance of magical abilities fulfilling the wishes of

Emelya, the protagonist accidentally crushes a bunch of people and the structure of the tale "forgives" him for that, without making a negative figure out of him. Kolobok (№36). Markers of death signs: the road, death manifest itself quite literally since animals want to eat Kolobok along his whole path, and by the end it the fox manages to do so. Categories of death: dependence with the plot - the entire plot of the tale is built as the main character’s death road, Kolobok throughout the tale is saved from death threats, but in the end, he is being eaten by the fox. Morozko (№95-96). Markers of death signs: dead bodies, confrontation with Morozko, numbness. Categories of death: dependence with the plot - the plot is based on the confrontation with Morozko, who is a deadly figure who can kill or spare a character, death-positivity - the stepmother calmly accepts the death of her daughters, ambivalence - Morozko can be attributed to a figure from another world, he embodies a chaotic natural element that can both kill and endow those who meet in his way. Beglyi soldat i chert [Runaway Soldier and Devil] (№154). Markers of death signs: the confrontation with the Devil, recognition of the defeat of the soldier at the end of the tale. Categories of death: dependence with the plot - the whole plot is built on a confrontation with the Devil, and although the fairy tale does not directly indicate what happened to the soldier it’s not entirely difficult to guess his fate at the end, death-positivity - soldier calmly accepts his defeat asks the Devil to let him say the last goodbye to the young wife, ambivalence - the Devil is both an assistant and an opponent of the Soldier. Veshchii son [The Dream of Prophets] (№240). Markers of death signs: death threat, the test, hunger, and thirst. Categories of death: dependence with the plot - confrontation with Elena the Beautiful, ambivalence - Elena the Beautiful is both an award and an opponent to the protagonist. Okhotnik i ego zhena [The Hunter and his Wife] (№248). Markers of death signs: test, the threat of death, saving a snake from a fire. Categories of death: dependence with the plot - the plot begins with saving the snake from the fire and continues to move with the motive of the death threat of the protagonist, death- positivity - the main character is not afraid of the possibility of his death, ambivalence

- this gift is both a blessing and a curse at the same time, since the hero can listen to the voices of animals, but will die if someone learns about his abilities. Tsarevna, razreshaiushchaia zagadki [The princess who solved riddles] (№239). Markers of death signs: the threat of death, test, confrontation, dead bodies, the protagonist kills a snake. Categories of death: dependence with the plot - the plot begins with the princess deciding to arrange a death riddle test, a death threat hangs over the hero throughout the whole story, the serpent killed by the hero along the way helps him escape from the princess, ambivalence - the princess is both an award and an opponent to the protagonist. Morskoi tsar' i Vasilisa Premudraia [The Sea King and Vasilisa the Wise] (№219). Markers of death signs: the king spares the eagle on the hunt, test. Categories of death: dependence with the plot - the plot begins with the hero sparing the eagle on the hunt, then throughout the whole story, the death threat hangs over the hero, ambivalence - the magical item that is gifted to the king by the eagle turns out to be both a gift and a curse. Solntse, Mesiats i Voron Voronovich [The Sun, the Moon, and the Voron Voronovich] (№92). Markers of death signs: confrontation, accidental death. Categories of death: ambivalence - Voron Voronovich being a figure from "The Other World" on the one hand is the son-in-law of the protagonist and does not wish him harm, but at the end of the tale he accidentally murders the hero.