PAGE
They came to the place where he had left her Frontispiece
All manner of evil powers walked abroad 16
"How much do you want for that horse?" 24
The wind came and swept all his corn away 30
"Out of the drum, my henchmen!" 40
The Tsarivna arose from her coffin 86
They were both on their knees 90
Daniel waved his sword 114
His wife caressed and wheedled him 118
The girl drove the heifer out to graze 148
The Tsar's councillors went to the houses of all
the nobles and princes 154
The Tsar went about inquiring of his people if
any were wronged 178
The rulers of Hell laid hands upon the overseer
straightway 186
Nineteen times did she cast off one of her suits
of clothes 198
Suddenly St Peter appeared to him 230
Ivan Golik drew the bow 276
INTRODUCTION TO THE
FIRST EDITION
The favourable reception given to my volume of _Russian Fairy Tales_
has encouraged me to follow it up with a sister volume of stories
selected from another Slavonic dialect extraordinarily rich in
folk-tales--I mean Ruthenian, the language of the Cossacks.
Ruthenian is a language intermediate between Russian and Polish, but
quite independent of both. Its territory embraces, roughly speaking,
that vast plain which lies between the Carpathians, the watershed of
the Dnieper, and the Sea of Azov, with Lemberg and Kiev for its chief
intellectual centres. Though it has been rigorously repressed by the
Russian Government, it is still spoken by more than twenty millions of
people. It possesses a noble literature, numerous folk-songs, not
inferior even to those of Serbia, and, what chiefly concerns us now, a
copious collection of justly admired folk-tales, many of them of great
antiquity, which are regarded, both in Russia and Poland, as quite
unique of their kind. Mr Ralston, I fancy, was the first to call the
attention of the West to these curious stories, though the want at
that time of a good Ruthenian dictionary (a want since supplied by the
excellent lexicon of Zhelekhovsky and Nidilsky) prevented him from
utilizing them. Another Slavonic scholar, Mr Morfill, has also
frequently alluded to them in terms of enthusiastic but by no means
extravagant praise.
The three chief collections of Ruthenian folk-lore are those of
Kulish, Rudchenko, and Dragomanov, which represent, at least
approximately, the three dialects into which Ruthenian is generally
divided. It is from these three collections that the present selection
has been made. Kulish, who has the merit of priority, was little more
than a pioneer, his contribution merely consisting of some dozen
_kazki_ (_Maerchen_) and _kazochiki_ (_Maerchenlein_), incorporated in
the second volume of his _Zapiski o yuzhnoi Rusi_ ("Descriptions of
South Russia," Petrograd, 1856-7). Twelve years later Rudchenko
published at Kiev what is still, on the whole, the best collection of
Ruthenian folk-tales, under the title of _Narodnuiya Yuzhnorusskiya
Skazki_ ("Popular South Russian Folk-tales"). Like Linnroet among the
Finns, Rudchenko took down the greater part of these tales direct from
the lips of the people. In a second volume, published in the following
year, he added other stories gleaned from various minor manuscript
collections of great rarity. In 1876 the Imperial Russian Geographical
Society published at Kiev, under the title of _Malorusskiya Narodnuiya
Predonyia i Razkazui_ ("Little-Russian Popular Traditions and Tales"),
an edition of as many manuscript collections of Ruthenian folk-lore
(including poems, proverbs, riddles, and rites) as it could lay its
hands upon. This collection, though far less rich in variants than
Rudchenko's, contained many original tales which had escaped him, and
was ably edited by Michael Dragomanov, by whose name, indeed, it is
generally known.
The present attempt to popularize these Cossack stories is, I
believe, the first translation ever made from Ruthenian into
English. The selection, though naturally restricted, is fairly
representative; every variety of folk-tale has a place in it, and it
should never be forgotten that the Ruthenian _kazka_ (_Maerchen_),
owing to favourable circumstances, has managed to preserve far more of
the fresh spontaneity and naive simplicity of the primitive folk-tale
than her more sophisticated sister, the Russian _skazka_. It is
maintained, moreover, by Slavonic scholars that there are peculiar
and original elements in these stories not to be found in the
folk-lore of other European peoples; such data, for instance, as the
magic handkerchiefs (generally beneficial, but sometimes, as in the
story of Ivan Golik, terribly baleful), the demon-expelling
hemp-and-tar whips, and the magic cattle-teeming egg, so mischievous
a possession to the unwary. It may be so, but, after all that Mr
Andrew Lang has taught us on the subject, it would be rash for any
mere philologist to assert positively that there can be anything
really new in folk-lore under the sun. On the other hand, the
comparative isolation and primitiveness of the Cossacks, and their
remoteness from the great theatres of historical events, would seem
to be favourable conditions both for the safe preservation of old
myths and the easy development of new ones. It is for professional
students of folk-lore to study the original documents for themselves.