Produced by David Starner, Sam W. and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net Russian Fairy Tales. A CHOICE COLLECTION --OF-- MUSCOVITE FOLK-LORE. --BY-- W. R. S. RALSTON, M. A., OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM, CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE IMPERIAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY OF RUSSIA, AUTHOR OF "THE SONGS OF THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE," "KRILOF AND HIS FABLES," ETC. [Illustration] NEW YORK: HURST & CO., PUBLISHERS, 122 NASSAU STREET. [Illustration: The King got on the Eagle's back. Away they went flying.--Page 131.] To the Memory of ALEXANDER AFANASIEF I Dedicate this Book, TO HIM SO DEEPLY INDEBTED. PREFACE. The stories contained in the following pages are taken from the collections published by Afanasief, Khudyakof, Erlenvein, and Chudinsky. The South-Russian collections of Kulish and Rudchenko I have been able to use but little, there being no complete dictionary available of the dialect, or rather the language, in which they are written. Of these works that of Afanasief is by far the most important, extending to nearly 3,000 pages, and containing 332 distinct stories--of many of which several variants are given, sometimes as many as five. Khudyakof's collection contains 122 skazkas--as the Russian folk-tales are called--Erlenvein's 41, and Chudinsky's 31. Afanasief has also published a separate volume, containing 33 "legends," and he has inserted a great number of stories of various kinds in his "Poetic views of the Old Slavonians about Nature," a work to which I have had constant recourse. From the stories contained in what may be called the "chap-book literature" of Russia, I have made but few extracts. It may, however, be as well to say a few words about them. There is a Russian word _lub_, diminutive _lubok_, meaning the soft bark of the lime tree, which at one time was used instead of paper. The popular tales which were current in former days were at first printed on sheets or strips of this substance, whence the term _lubochnuiya_ came to be given to all such productions of the cheap press, even after paper had taken the place of bark.[1]