Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales

Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales

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-talesI 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. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 29672
Author: Nisbet, Noel L. (Noel Laura)
Release Date: Aug 12, 2009
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Illustrator: Nisbet, Noel L. (Noel Laura), 1887-1956
Translator: Bain, R. Nisbet (Robert Nisbet), 1854-1909