Russian Folk-TalesAfanas'ev, A. N. (Aleksandr Nikolaevich)
General
Russian Folk-Tales
Afanas'ev, A. N. (Aleksandr Nikolaevich)
Folklore -- Russia
Then the sisters looked on and they became envious and wanted to take
the saucer away from their sister, but she would not exchange her saucer
for anything else in the world. So the evil sisters walked about, called
out and began to talk. “Oh, my darling sisters, let us go into the wood
and pick berries and look for wild strawberries!” So the Fool gave her
saucer to her father and herself went into the wood. She wandered about
with her sisters, plucked the strawberries, and saw a spade lying on the
grass; then the other sisters took the spade and began beating the Fool
with it, slew the Fool, buried her under a silver birch, and came back
to their father late at night, saying, “The Little Fool ran away from
us, we could not find her, we went all over the wood searching for her.
We suppose the wolves must have eaten her up.” But the father was sorry.
She was a Fool, but she was his daughter after all, and so the peasant
wept for his daughter, took the silver saucer and the apple, put them
into a coffer and locked them up. And the sisters also wept for her.
Soon a herd came by and the trumpet sounded at dawn. But the shepherd
was taking his flock, and at dawn he sounded his trumpet and went into
the wood to look for a little lamb. He saw a little hummock beside a
silver birch, and on it all around ruby-red and azure flowers, and
bulrushes standing above the flowers. So the young shepherd broke a
bulrush, made a pipe of it, and a wonderful wonder happened, a
marvellous marvel: the pipe began of itself to sing and to speak. “Play
on, play on, my little pipe. Console my father, console my guiding
light, my father, and tell my mother of me, and my sisters, the little
doves. For they killed me, the poor one, and for a silver saucer have
severed me from light, all for my enchanted apple.”
People heard and ran together, the entire village thronged round the
shepherd, asked him who had been slain. There was no end to the
question. “Good folks all,” said the shepherd, “I do not know anything
about it. I was looking for a little sheep in the wood, and I saw a
knoll, on the knoll flowers, and a bulrush over the knoll. I broke off a
bulrush, carved myself a pipe out of it, and the pipe began singing and
speaking of itself.”
Now it so happened that the father of the Little Fool was there, heard
the words of the shepherd, wanted to lay hold of the pipe, when the pipe
began singing, “Play on, play on, little pipe: this is my father;
console him with my mother. My poor little self they slew, they withdrew
from the white world, all for the sake of my silver vessel and crystal
apple.”
“Lead us, shepherd,” said the father, “where you broke off the bulrush.”
So they followed the shepherd into the wood and to the knoll, and they
were amazed at the beautiful flowers, ruby-red, sky-blue, that grew
there.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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