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The Power of Russia’s Fairy Tales by Dr. Carol Reynolds
“The Grey Wolf sprinkled Prince Ivan’s body with the water of death—and the wounds healed. Then he sprinkled the body with the water of life—and Prince Ivan stood up and said: “How long have I slept?” “But for me you would have slept forever,” replied the Wolf.
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hat is more wondrous than a fairy tale? Or more dangerous? What can we learn from how a nation regards its legacy of fairy tales? Far from being fanciful stories to entertain a child, fairy tales offer sophisticated narratives cloaked in layers of symbolism and filled with nuanced or direct reflections of a culture's fears, values, and desires. Fairy tales unveil both the glories and the depravities of a society's behavior. They render harsh judgments and teach difficult Dr. Carol Reynolds is a widely acclaimed author, speaker, and educator. She regularly leads arts tours throughout Europe and Russia in partnership with the Smithsonian Institute.
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The Power of Russia's Fairy Tales
lessons, even when they conclude with the words "happily ever after." Because they have this kind of inherent power, fairy tales can become an impediment to anyone seeking to eviscerate a nation's culture or rewrite the flow of history. We here in the United States tend to be unfamiliar with Russian fairy tales. Yet few nations have exalted their fairy tales more heartily. With a literary tradition younger than that of Europe, Russians instinctively regarded their fairy tales (skazki) as "ancient literature" long before they appeared in written form. Once these tales assumed literary forms in the nineteenth century, their impact expanded dramatically. That impact continued in wonderfully creative ways until the great disaster of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Deemed a vestige of the tsarist era, fairy tales stood as an impediment to the Marxist agenda and the task of rewriting Russia's history. So skazki went into a kind of internal exile from which they emerged only after the fall of Communism. MemoriaPress.com
