Ways to depict the hero of a fairy tale. Main features of a fairy tale

The question of the possibility of a systematic approach to the study of dramatis personae was raised in the works of V. Ya. Propp “Morphology of the Fairy Tale” and “Historical Roots of the Fairy Tale”1. In "Morphology of a Fairy Tale" the idea of ​​considering a character as a bundle of functions was first voiced. However, the diachronic interpretation of a single fairy tale plot, carried out in “The Historical Roots of a Fairy Tale,” led to some rearrangement of emphasis: the researcher’s main attention turned out to be directed to the analysis of how the heritage of myth is reinterpreted by a fairy tale, how native mythological characters are transformed into fairy-tale characters.

This article attempts to describe the system of characters in the form in which they are presented in the fairy tale itself, regardless of the “roots” that gave birth to them. The material for analysis was the fairy tales from Afanasyev’s collection.

A systematic description of the characters in a fairy tale involves identifying invariant forms, mechanisms of shape formation and mechanisms of shape change. The central task in this regard is to clarify the question of whether the cliché of a fairy tale is limited to the “constancy of functions”, whether this constancy is the only basis that allows us to bring into the system such elements of a fairy tale as the forms and attributes of characters.

Insisting on the uniformity of functions, on the fundamental unity of the plot formula of a fairy tale, V. Ya. Propp was inclined to believe that “the nomenclature and attributes of the characters represent the variable values ​​of the fairy tale”2. Therefore, when analyzing characters, the researcher proposed to proceed from “constant,” repeating and independent narrative units, which are the functions of the characters.

Meanwhile, just as the same functions can be performed by different characters3, so the same character can play a wide variety of roles:

The serpent kidnaps the princess (Aph. 129)4 - a pest.

The serpent gives the hero a flying carpet (Aph. 208) - the donor.

The serpent revives the dead hero (Af. 208) - assistant.

The serpent claims the hand of the princess (Aph. 124) - a rival.

The serpent is the sworn prince (Aph. 276), the hero-victim (or the “ultimate fairy-tale value” - the groom).

The wife takes away her husband’s wonderful helper (Aph. 199) - a pest.

The wife gives her husband a wonderful ball and towel (Aph. 212) - the giver.

The wife helps her husband escape from the Sea King (Aph. 219) - assistant.

The wife regains her lost husband (Aph. 234) - heroine.

The hero receives his wife as a reward for his exploits - the ultimate fairytale value.

The classification of characters by role is also complicated by the fact that the functions are given in relation to the hero, while both the hero and, for example, the saboteur can act in the same way: the Serpent kidnaps the Tsar’s daughter, Ivan Tsarevich, with the help of the Gray Wolf, kidnaps the Tsar’s daughter; the stepmother slaughters her stepdaughter's cow, the children themselves slaughter the wonderful bull; snakes turn into tempting objects, Vasilisa the Wise wraps herself and the groom in a lake, a ladle, etc.

The independence of functions from the performing character also has a downside - the relative independence of the character from the functions he performs, the absence of direct correlations between the character’s actions and his semantic characteristics5.

Therefore, it seems appropriate to distinguish between such levels as the level of actors, or figures (hero, saboteur, donor, helper, etc.), and the characters themselves, i.e., actors in their semantic definition. The main goal pursued in this article is to describe the dramatis personae of a fairy tale, regardless of the role they play in the plot.

Freedom in choosing performers of functions, which V. Ya. Propp wrote about, presupposes the presence of a certain set from which this choice is possible.

The range of characters in a fairy tale is not so large and sufficiently canonized6 to be unconditionally recognized as a “variable” quantity for which operations to isolate invariants are impossible. However, this uniformity is obvious only in cases where we are talking about stereotypical characters such as Ivan the Fool, stepdaughter, Koshchei, etc. This statement looks more problematic in relation to such moving figures, such as, for example, wonderful animals or objects. Meanwhile, V. Ya. Propp noted that “an assistant can be considered as a personified ability of the hero”7, and magical objects are only a special case of an assistant8. The enemy army can be defeated either by a “mighty hero”, or by a heroic horse, or by a wonderful club. And the hero, and the horse, and the club in this case personify the same quality - strength. You can get to the thirtieth kingdom by turning into a bird, as well as riding a winged horse; special devices can be used for the same purpose: belts, claws, a ladder, but it can also be a tree that miraculously grows to the sky. “If we compare,” V. Ya. Propp notes in this regard, “three cases: 1) the hero turns into a bird and flies away, 2) the hero sits on a bird and flies away, 3) the hero sees a bird and follows it, then here we have a split, a bifurcation of the hero"9 (my discharge. - E.N.). Similarly, the Serpent, Koschey or Yaga can either have the property of super-fast movement through the air, or for this they need special assistants (Koshey, like the hero, “was a shepherd for three days... for that Baba Yaga gave” him a wonderful horse, on which he is able to catch up with the hero - Af. 159) or a device (Baba Yaga “jumps at full speed on an iron mortar, drives with a pestle, covers the trail with a broom” - Af. 159). To escape pursuit, the hero needs to have a brush, which turns into an impenetrable forest; in order to catch up with the fugitive, the pest must gnaw a path through this forest, and for this he needs to get sharp teeth, which are often specially forged by a blacksmith.

This feature of a fairy tale suggests that all characters can be considered as personifications of certain properties or states.

How a character acts depends largely on what he represents10. A wide range of variants of fairy tales in which a hero of miraculous origin appears is constructed, for example, somewhat differently from the main plot scheme described by V. Ya. Propp. Here, a detailed description of the miraculous birth of the hero can be considered as a transfer to the beginning of the narrative of such an important compositional link as “receiving a miraculous remedy,” which usually follows after the “preliminary misfortune” and after the test of the hero by the donor; a number of fairy tales with such a miraculously born hero may not contain the element of “receiving a miraculous remedy” at all; it is present in the very characteristics of the miraculous hero-hero.

From this point of view, the narrative plan of a fairy tale itself can be considered as the unfolding in the plot of those semantic features that the character possesses. If the father is deceased and this sign is played out in the plot, then an episode follows in which he gifts his son; if the focus of the story is his old age or blindness, then his sons are sent for living water and rejuvenating apples; if his widowhood is recorded, the tale unfolds a plot about the incestuous persecution of a daughter or the second marriage of a father and the persecution of a stepdaughter by a stepmother.

The semantic characteristics that the characters are endowed with correspond, as we see, to the conflicts in which the characters take part. In other words, a character is the embodiment of those semantic features that create conflict situations and are played out within an episode or the entire plot.

The multifunctionality of the figures acting in fairy tales is partly explained by the fact that each character is endowed with several characteristics, each of which is correlated with both the system of actions and the system of states of the character, with his status (family, class, personal). The father incestuously pursues his daughter (i.e., plays the role of a saboteur) in a state of widowhood; he himself finds himself, as it were, in a situation of “lack,” which he tries to eliminate, intending to marry his own daughter. The same character (father) leaves a wonderful inheritance to his son or sons (acts as a donor), being in the status of an ancestor. Baba Yaga functions as a pest in AT 327 fairy tales, representing a variant of the forest demon, but helps in fairy tales like “Go there, I don’t know where”, finding herself in a kinship relationship with the “son-in-law” hero.

Since the functions are specified from the point of view of the hero, i.e., depending on the role, and semantic features can be correlated with any object, it seems appropriate, using this set of semantic oppositions specific to a fairy tale, to describe the character as a combination of these semantic features11.

Thus, we are talking about describing the characters of a fairy tale in the form of bundles of signs, identifying among these signs the values ​​of constants and values ​​of variables, as well as the rules for combining them. This problem can be solved at the inter-plot level.

As characters in a fairy tale, objects are considered that take part in the action and can play one or another role in it. The question of whether a given object acts or not is extremely important, since this attribute allows us to purely formally separate the “character” from the “thing”. Even in the same text, a person, an animal, and, finally, an object can act sequentially. Thus, in the fairy tale “The Magic Ring” (Aph. 191), the hero Martyn, the widow’s son, first acts on his own: he buys a dog and a cat with the money left by his father, saves a snake from the fire, receives a “miraculous ring” from it, marries the princess, who, having taken possession of ring, flies away to the thirtieth kingdom; After the disappearance of the princess, the hero is imprisoned in a stone pillar, and the baton of action is passed to his assistants - the dog and the cat: it is they who penetrate the thirtieth kingdom, obtain the stolen ring, force the “king over all crayfish” to help, when they drop the ring into the sea, deliver the ring to the owner; Then the “miraculous” power of the ring acts - twelve young men return the hero’s wife.

As we see, in a fairy tale, actions are performed by people, animals, and objects. But the same people, animals or objects appear sporadically in a fairy tale as a background against which the action unfolds, although they themselves do not participate in it. For example, a stove that invites a girl to pull out a pie and then hides her from her pursuers is acting (in this case, her role is the typical role of a donor-assistant who tests the hero and then helps him pass the main test), in contrast to a stove that serves the hiding place of Ivanushka the Fool in fairy tales like "Sivko-Burko". In the latter case, the stove is no longer a character, but turns out to be a sign of the local affiliation of another character - the Baker.

Not only objects, but also people can be a sign of some other character. So, in some versions of fairy tales like “Sivko-Burko”, the older brothers, who watched the younger brother’s feat, tell their wives about what they saw: “Well, wives, what a fine fellow he came, we have never seen such a thing!” The portrait was only missed after three logs. They saw where he came from, but didn’t see where he left! He’ll come again..." Ivan the Fool sits on the stove and says: “Brothers, wasn’t it me?” - “Where the hell should you be! Sit, you fool, on the stove and wipe your nose” (Af. 179). In other versions, wives are not mentioned; the story of the older brothers is addressed to Ivan the Fool himself. The wives in these tales do not perform any actions; they are a sign of the marital status of the older brothers, who, being married, do not participate in marriage trials, unlike other plot types, where the matchmaking rivalry between unmarried older and younger brothers becomes the mainspring of the story.

In a similar way, animals can appear in a fairy tale either as a kind of “thing” or act in a certain role: The little cow is a key character in fairy tales like AT 511, “cows have golden horns and tails” is one of the varieties of fairy tale curiosities and finally, the “herd of cows”, which Ivan Tsarevich’s unfaithful wife forces to graze (“Blind and Legless” - Af. 198), is a background attribute that emphasizes the low position of the hero.

All these considerations force us to consider the very fact that a character plays a role in the plot as its main feature. Therefore, setting ourselves the task of describing a system of characters based on their semantic characteristics, we will take into account only those of them that are important for the development of the plot, i.e., features that form a collision.

Temporarily abstracting from the classification of characters by roles, from dividing them into heroes, antagonists, false heroes, donors, etc., we must choose some characteristics that would be the most constant, independent of the intra-plot metamorphoses undergone by the character. Such a constant characteristic can be the names of the characters, which remain largely unchanged throughout the narrative.

The character's name, as a rule, is not indifferent to what actions he performs. It either contains those features that are played out in the plot, or the nomination occurs following the description of an episode, the meaning of which is fixed in the name and then, as if in a collapsed form, continues its existence in the plot. So, for example, a description of the miraculous birth of a hero or heroes is necessarily recorded in his name (Pokatigoroshek, Medvedka, Suchenko, Lutonya, etc.). Similarly, individual segments of the narrative serve as a detailed explanation of the features of the character’s name: the search for the death of Koshchei the Immortal or the tactics of fighting the Nine-Headed Serpent take on the character of detailed plot moves.

In the narration, there is a sequential (within the framework of the general plot formula of fairy tales) “playing out” of individual characteristics, fixed by the name of the character, and the events that happened to him are, as it were, preserved in the name.

Sometimes these events themselves do not appear not only in a given fairy tale, but also in the entire body of fairy tales. Russian fairy tales do not contain, for example, detailed descriptions of marriage with heavenly bodies or any ritual actions associated with the hearth. Nevertheless, they turn out to be extrapolated into the text due to the fact that they were recorded in the names of such characters as Zvezda, Solntseva Sister, Popyalov, Zapechnik, etc.

We are, however, not interested in these, which in themselves are extremely interesting, moments, but in the fundamental semantic features for the characters of a fairy tale, the material for identifying which can be names that reflect the natural classification of characters carried out by the fairy tale itself.

Usually the name records the character’s marital status (Ivan Devkin’s son, Nadzey Popov’s grandson, Martyn the widow’s son, etc.), his class, property and professional status (Tsarenko, Povarenko, Ivan Goly, etc.), his spiritual (Dunno, Ivan the Fool, Vasilisa the Wise, etc.) and bodily qualities (Beloved Beauty, Elena the Beautiful, Tiny Khavroshechka, Vanyusha Little One, One-Eye, etc.), as well as signs of local affiliation (Zatrubnik, Leshy, Gorynych, Lesynya ) and attribution to a certain element or color (Frost, Water, Studenets, Whirlwind, Chernushka, etc.).

Often, however, the very name of a character contains several signs at once: Princess White Swan (Af. 174), Storm-hero Ivan the Cow's Son (Af. 136), Vasilisa the Golden Braid, uncovered beauty (Af. 560), Serpent Gorynych ( Af. 204, 209), Miracle Yudo, sea lip (Af. 313), etc., or family relations are recorded in it simultaneously with class status: Tsarenko, i.e. the son of the king, a local characteristic simultaneously with class status status: Vodyanoi = Sea King, a class characteristic can serve as a synonym for a certain local location: a king, in contrast to a king, denotes a foreign ruler. As for the characters transforming in the process of plot development, they can even more so be described only as combinations of several semantic features.

The stability of the names does not allow them to include all the variety of attributes that the character possesses and which change in the process of his plot functioning. However, these attributes themselves realize the same areas of meaning that are identified on the basis of the analysis of the names of dramatis personae13.

Indeed, the dominant role in the set of semantic features that are endowed with the characters of a fairy tale is played by gender (the opposition male/female), age (old/young, adult/child); signs related to the individual qualities of the character (natural/wonderful, anthropomorphic/non-anthropomorphic); signs characterizing the character’s family status (parents/children, elder/younger, native/step-child, married/non-marital partner); signs that determine his class and property status (royal/peasant, chief/servant, master/servant, rich/poor), signs of local affiliation (domestic/female, belonging to one’s own or another kingdom, near or distant world). All these semantic features are present both in proper names and in common nouns, describing the internal and external characteristics of the character from the point of view of his individual, family, class and local states.

Let us consider the relationships of features within each of the selected groups.

Group I. Individual status.

The distribution of characters in this group is carried out using the following features: features of the internal world (the opposition natural/supernatural) and external appearance (the opposition anthropomorphic/non-anthropomorphic). These oppositions define the basic division of characters into supernatural beings, people, animals, plants and objects. The attributes anthropomorphic/non-anthropomorphic (zoomorphic, plant, amorphous) correlate only with the attribute supernatural, miraculous. Actually, this feature distinguishes animals, plants and objects as characters in a fairy tale from animals, plants and objects as attributes of the background: a wonderful mare, but a nag that Ivan the Fool kills; a wonderful gate that lets the stepdaughter through when she “poured butter under their heels” (Af. 103), but the gate in expressions like “the woman is waiting outside the gate” (Af. 98). Obviously, this explains the fact that with all the variety of animals, plants and objects that can appear in a fairy tale as characters, clear preference is given here to mythologized objects. Among domestic animals this is a goat, ram, horse, bull, cow, dog, cat, mouse, among animals - a bear, wolf, lion, among birds - a swan, duck, raven, falcon, eagle, dove or dove, the Firebird, Mogul bird, etc.; from insects - bees, mosquitoes, from plants - oak, birch, reeds, reeds.

Supernatural beings are represented based on the material of Russian fairy tales by a vast group of anthropomorphic characters (Yaga, Morozko, hero, sorcerer, demon, unclean, witch, sorceress, enchantress, etc.). It should be noted, however, that the appearance of supernatural beings is very often vague. Based on their names (Snake, Voron Voronovich, Whirlwind, etc.), one can conclude that they are non-anthropomorphic, however, the multi-headed Serpent of Russian fairy tales is often depicted as a horseman rather than a dragon, and Shmat-razum or Sura are invisible servants — generally as if devoid of flesh14.

The uncertainty of external appearance is compensated by the clear fixation of gender (male/female opposition) and age (adult/child and old/young oppositions) for the vast majority of fairy tale characters.

The non-marking of the gender of any character is extremely rare, in particular, the gender may not be recorded when it comes to a baby: a nanny takes a child into the forest to a lynx mother, replaced by a witch (AT 409), duckling children come to their father’s yard and the stepmother-witch (AT 403 B) and in some other plot types. Children here are more of an attribute of the mother, a sign of motherhood, and not an independent character. They appear in the “identification test” similar to a mark or a “cherished” object (ring, scarf), by which the desired character is recognized, but unlike them they carry information not about victory in the main test, but about “trouble”: about substitution, deception, deception, bewitchment (the only exception in this case is the motive of “searching for the culprit,” where children are proof that the living water and rejuvenating apples were obtained by the youngest of the brothers). It is significant that when the “information about the substitution” unfolds into a whole plot device (the stepmother seeks to kill the ducklings singing about their mother, among the ducklings there turns out to be the youngest one, the “little one” who manages to save himself and his brothers), i.e., young children act as an independent character, the fixation of gender is consistently carried out.

Almost all supernatural creatures have male and female versions: sorcerer - witch, sorcerer - sorceress, witch - devil (demon, unclean), Yaga - Morozko, hero - hero. With less certainty, they can be classified by age groups, although here too there is a quite noticeable tendency to contrast the old sorcerer, grandfather Ox, the old man “as big as a fingernail, with a beard as long as an elbow,” Copper forehead, Vodyanoy, Yaga with the young “heroes” Vernigora, Vernidub, Dugyne , Adopted son, etc.; a witch or sorceress is also usually "old", in contrast to the "young" sorceress or enchantress. People are clearly divided into age groups: old man - old woman, young man - girl, boy - girl.

Animals are also quite consistently endowed with signs of gender and age: honey - after all - a bear - a bear cub, a raven - a crow - a crow; lion - lioness - lion cub, horse - mare - foal, falcon, sparrow, eagle, but duck, dove, dove, swan.

Accordingly, when a person transforms into an animal, their gender correspondence is usually observed: snake, wolf, goat, falcon, eagle, raven - sworn princes; duck, swan, bear, lynx, etc. - princesses.

The age characteristic is very significant for the nature of the character’s functioning. The “old” usually act as testers or advisers, the “young” - in the role of the hero or his rivals, and for the child hero the range of actions is limited to the movement from “losing home” to “returning home”, while for an adult “loss family" is compensated by the "creation of a new family", i.e., by marriage15.

The absence of signs of gender and age in a group of characters represented by miraculous objects significantly narrows the scope of their functioning, limiting them to the role of a miraculous remedy and, less often, an assistant.

Further distribution of the characters of a fairy tale can be carried out using a system of signs that describe the modes of the internal and external states of the individual, as well as those associated with evaluative categories. These are the oppositions alive/dead, healthy/sick, sleepy/awake, whole/dismembered, true/transformed, visible/invisible, strong/weak, wise/foolish, kind/evil, beautiful/ugly, clean/dirty, big/small.

The opposition alive/dead permeates numerous situations in fairy tales, where the hero is threatened with death (the witch wants to fry the children, the snake swallows the heroes, the witch drowns her sister Alyonushka, turns the hero into stone) or a pest is punished (the hero executes his false wife, kills the Snake, puts him in the oven Yaga, sorcerer, etc.). This also includes the motif of “temporary death and revival.”

The dead is personified in anthropomorphic creatures of both sexes - the dead, ghouls, vampires (a dead hero; a girl rising from a coffin), in the form of birds (crows), body parts (skull, bones, death's head). The sign of the death of a character should often be the heart and liver - these receptacles of the soul, the center of life. The operators of killing and reviving are a wide group of magical objects: a needle, a hairpin, living and dead water, poison, a dead tooth or hair. We find a whole chain of incarnations of the external soul of Koshchei the Immortal in the motif of the search for his death (oak - chest - hare - duck - egg - needle).

Often, temporary death is equivalent to sleep (the sleeping princess), and sleep is given as temporary death (for example, the heroic sleep of a hero after defeating an enemy or formulas like “how long did I sleep” after being revived). The state of sleep, like the state of death, occurs as a result of the use of special operators: a sleeping potion, a pin, a charmed apple, it is induced by the Cat Bayun, a magic harp. The snakes turn into a crib, intending to tear the heroes apart “by poppy seed”; the witch (or her daughter Irina soft feather bed) invites the heroes, puts them to bed, and then throws them into the cellar or kills them.

Illness and health are embodied in objects such as fruits: rejuvenating apples, wonderful berries or pears that cause health or illness (horns grow from them, in this case the hero pretends to be a doctor); the princess’s illness may be the result of the fact that she is tormented at night by demonic creatures (devils, Serpents, Yaga), Princess Nesmeyana is sick, the hero’s unfaithful sister or mother pretends to be sick, sending him in search of a cure (dust from a wonderful mill; wolf, bear and lion milk).

The dead, sleepy, sick people require a certain service from other characters: the hero spends the night at his father’s grave, buries the dead man, saves a half-dead dog or cat from death, preserves and buries the bones of the dead man, from which a tree or bush (a branch or sliver) then grows such a tree can again turn into a revived hero).

This change of appearance when revived transforms the opposition alive/dead into the opposition whole/dismembered. The dismemberment of the body is identical to murder (the stepmother orders the stepdaughter’s wonderful cow to be slaughtered; the heroine is taken into the forest, where she is to be slaughtered and her heart and liver are brought as proof of her death), and the body collected from pieces becomes alive again after sprinkling it with healing and living water. Murder may consist of tearing the body into pieces: a witch is executed by tying her to the tail of a horse and scattering her body “across an open field”; the defeated Serpent is cut down, burned, and the ashes are scattered to the wind. Final, rather than temporary, death occurs only when a character is “scattered into a poppy seed” or burned. Until then, each of the surviving parts can, through a chain of transformations, again turn into a whole and living body or transfer its basic property to a new, so to speak, owner. For example, the murder of a wonderful boy is planned solely because the one who eats his heart will learn to unravel dreams; a wonderful chicken is cut, since it is known that “whoever eats its head will become a king, and its heart will become a rich man.”

The dismembered body is the source of numerous characters, since each part of it can function independently in the tale. Finist's feather from the clear falcon, brought by the father of his youngest daughter, turns into himself; The mare's head tests the stepdaughter; the death's head becomes the source of a miraculous pregnancy; hands serve; the finger comes to life and turns into a boy; a wing of a golden-finned bream, eaten by a maid, as well as its entire body, fried and served to the childless queen, cause the birth of miraculous heroes. Metonymy here becomes a consistent technique that allows the production of new characters: a pea, a berry, skin, skin, branch, rib, hair, wool - all these and many other parts of the body of a person, animal or plant cause the birth, resurrection, disappearance of a character, serve for his challenge (Sivko-Burko appears after the hero sets fire to the hairs left for him). Severed fingers, belts cut from the backs of false heroes, Snake tongues and other parts of the body serve as signs with the help of which the hero proves that it was he who accomplished the feat (defeated the Snake, obtained curiosities).

Quite a lot of collisions are grouped around self-mutilation: a man as big as a fingernail, a beard as big as an elbow, or Yaga mutilate his brothers; the princess orders Uncle Katoma's legs to be cut off; the maid cuts out the princess's eyes; the evil wife orders her sister-in-law's hands to be cut off, etc. The fairy tale is replete with characters who bear signs of mutilation (Kosoruchka, the blind, the fingerless). Characters marked with some kind of injury or, conversely, endowed with “extra” body parts, often have miraculous properties or are supernatural creatures (Dashing One-Eyed, Many-Headed Serpent, Three-Eyed, a horse with twelve wings, etc.).

The opposition true/transformed is associated with numerous forms of change in appearance, which either the character himself resorts to, or these changes are the result of bewitchment. The serpent turns into a golden goat, a beautiful youth; the princess turns herself and her husband into a well and a ladle, into a church and a priest; snakes turn into a garden, a well, a crib, a boy learns from a sorcerer to take the form of various animals, a horse or Gray wolf turns into a cage with a firebird, a horse, a beauty, the hero takes the form of a mosquito, a fly, etc. Baba Yaga imitates the voice of his mother , specially forging it at a blacksmith and making it look like the “subtle” voice of a person; a little boy exchanges his brothers' caps for those of the witch's daughters. There are many forms of camouflage. To recognize the desired object, special signaling objects (spangle, fly and other marks) are used.

The visible/invisible opposition is embodied in such characters as invisible servants: Nobody, Saura, Gurey, Murza, Shmat-razum, in the invisible hat.

Evaluative features, like modes of states, relate to the inner world of a character or to his appearance. Here, too, there are preferential correlations: in Russian fairy tales, anthropomorphic creatures are more often good or evil, wise or stupid,16 a person, an animal, and an object can be beautiful or ugly, big or small, clean or dirty.

The opposition good/evil is very significant for a fairy tale, since it is these signs that serve as the basis for dividing characters into heroes, those who are on his side (donor, helper) and his antagonists: an evil old woman, but a kind sorceress; the negative member of the opposition is personified in such anthropomorphic characters as Likho, the evil one. But basically this opposition marks the rules of behavior of the characters, that is, it is rather of a moral and ethical nature, which is associated with the leading role it plays in the preliminary test (the good hero spares the prisoner, feeds the hungry, helps the weak, the evil false hero of this does not make or receive a miracle cure).

The opposition wise/foolish is associated with such characters as a sage, an old sorcerer, a teacher, an expert, the Wise One, a wise child with the gift of resolving dreams (which translates him into the category of wonderful characters, since the “norm”, specially fixed by fairy-tale formulas, is the wisdom of old people: “Old people are cunning and shrewd” - Af. 222), but a stupid devil or a giant. Ivan the Fool is contrasted with his “smart” brothers or sons-in-law, and here the hero’s “stupidity” is one of the forms of his “low visibility.” Wisdom is often interpreted in fairy tales as cunning; “to make wise” means “to harm”: “Well,” the princess thinks, “when he’s got his legs back, then there’s no point in tricking him anymore” (Af. 199). Sometimes the hero also turns out to be cunning, and precisely in those situations when he himself harms his opponent: the smart Tereshechka pretends to be inept, ignorant, stupid and, by cunningly forcing Yaga to show him how to sit on a shovel, destroys the antagonist. Wisdom can also act as “witchcraft”, “knowledge” (cf. the motive of learning a wonderful skill from a forest sage or a competition in wisdom between a sorcerer and a hero, between a “wise” bride asking riddles and contenders for her hand).

The signs of strong/weak are parallel in some respects to wisdom/stupidity, defining the properties not of spiritual, but of physical strength. These signs are embodied in such characters as the hero, hero, strongman, but Zamoryshek; a heroic horse, but a lousy foal; army is a countless force, an army; in wonderful objects: strong and weak water, a wonderful club, a sword, a stick and a broom, a wonderful shirt in which the hero is invincible. The implementation of this opposition is the motive of testing strength: lift a stone or the head of the Serpent, throw a club, defeat the enemy in battle, tame a horse, withstand the bride’s handshake (“... for the first three nights she will torture your strength, lay her hand on her and begin to press very, very hard; You will never be able to bear it!" - Af. 199).

Evaluative features of beautiful/ugly, clean/dirty, big/small are often recorded in the name of a character: Anastasia the Beautiful, Vasilisa Krasa, Beauty the Beloved, Dunka the Embellished, Monster, Pan Pleshevich, Neumoyka, The Little Humpbacked Horse, Boy the Big Thumb, Little Man the Big Thing , Vanyusha the Little One, Tiny Khavroshechka, the Giant, etc. At the same time, the ugly, dirty turns out to be a temporary low visibility of the hero, “not promising”, which changes to positive as a result of miraculous help (“Vanyusha got into one ear, got out of the other and became so handsome that you can’t say it in a fairy tale or describe it with a pen”), or this is the result of deliberate dressing up in ugly clothes (pork cap, bull’s bladder, rags) or a prescribed ban (“no bathing for three years”). Small is also a low visibility of the hero , endowed with wonderful properties (wisdom, daring: “small, but daring”).

Group II. Family status.

Signs of marital status are built on top of signs of gender and age. This is clearly reflected in traditional formulas such as: “Whoever it is... come out here; if the person is old, you will be my dear father; if you are middle-aged, you will be a beloved brother; if you are my equal, you will be a dear friend” (Af. 222) or “ If a man is old, be my father, and an old woman, be my mother; if a man is young, be a dear friend, and a fair maiden, be my sister" (Af. 213). Indeed, “whoever the character is,” he is either a relative or in-law, or impersonates them, or turns out to be one. Therefore, almost all supernatural beings, people or animals, can be endowed with signs of family status.

As a matter of fact, father, mother, brother, sister, son, daughter, groom, bride, husband, wife, father-in-law - these are the main characters of a fairy tale. Almost any fairy tale begins with a description of a family (“Once upon a time there lived an old man and an old woman, they had a son, Ivashechka...”, “In a certain kingdom, in a certain state, there lived a man, and he had three sons...”, etc. ), in which, as a rule, there are parents and children. Parents are sometimes presented as childless, followed by a description of the miraculous birth of a child. Equally, children may turn out to be orphans (it is reported that their parents have died); There are options for openings in which the death of either the father or the mother is recorded.

If from the point of view of the plot all these situations were considered as variants of “preliminary trouble”, “absence”, “shortage”, then from the point of view of the tasks of describing the characters it is important to find out what characteristics distinguish relatives (father, mother, daughter, son, stepdaughter, orphan , stepmother) or relatives (father-in-law, father-in-law, husband, wife, fiancee, groom, son-in-law, daughter-in-law) from each other in order to understand why this or that character is capable of functioning in one or another role.

The nomenclature of kinship terms found in fairy tales is quite stable. Two generations are clearly contrasted: the generation of parents and the generation of children17.

Parents and children can be natural (father, mother, son, daughter) and step-children (stepmother, stepdaughter, stepson)18.

Relations between relatives of the same generation are determined by the following contrasts: for the generation of parents, this is the difference between the old father and mother, who often appear as a single character (“parents”, “old people”), and the young, who usually appear in a fairy tale as husband and wife ; for a generation of children, this is a contrast between older brothers and sisters and younger ones, and between siblings and stepbrothers.

A special group consists of childless parents and orphans (foundlings). In addition, there are special terms for recording non-family relationships (twin brothers, named brother or sister, godson).

The distribution of relatives is also carried out due to the same oppositions: the older generation is father-in-law, father-in-law, mother-in-law, mother-in-law, the younger generation is son-in-law, daughter-in-law, daughter-in-law. Within one generation, there are distinctions between close (husband, wife) and distant (brother-in-law, sister-in-law) relatives. Extra-family relationships are specifically recorded (extra- or pre-marital partners: cohabitant, lover, bride, groom). The absence of one of the spouses is marked in terms such as widow and widower.

It is the relationships of relatives or in-laws that determine the main conflicts of a fairy tale. These are, first of all, conflicts within the family between parents and children (an incestuous father expels his daughter; a cheating mother tries to harass her son; a stepmother pursues her stepdaughter), between siblings (older brothers or sisters compete with a younger brother or younger sister, relatives with their stepbrothers; brother incestuously pursues his sister or cuts off her hands at the behest of his wife; the sister kills her brother or tries to destroy him by conspiring with her lover) and between spouses (an evil wife tries to harass her husband; the husband, by the slander of envious people, expels his wife; the wife or husband leaves the spouse after breaking a taboo) .

These conflicts, as we see, are often based on the opposition of family and inherent relationships: a stepmother, a mother’s or sister’s lover, a brother’s wife bring discord into intrafamily relationships, being a source of antagonism between relatives; such is the nature of incestuous claims; Relationships between same-sex siblings are usually of the nature of sexual rivalry. Outside of this opposition, relationships within the family are of the nature of mutual assistance and support: parents love children; the father marries his daughter, marries his sons, leaves an inheritance; the deceased father rewards his youngest son with a wonderful horse, and the deceased mother helps her orphaned daughter; the son goes to get medicine for his sick father or saves his kidnapped mother from a violent marriage with the Serpent; brother goes to rescue his missing sister and older brothers; sister saves brother from a witch, etc., etc.

Relatives and in-laws make up the main core of the characters in a fairy tale, although figures such as Baba Yaga, the Serpent Gorynych, Koschey the Immortal, the winged horse or the swan girl seem more expressive and more specific to this genre at first glance. Meanwhile, Zmey-Gorynych kidnaps the girl as his wife; The sea king to whom the hero ends up is the father of his bride (“... and in the palace lives the father of the red maiden, the king of that underground side” - Af. 191); the chieftain, the Serpent, the clerk, the overseas prince - all of them are the “wrong” husbands of the main character’s mother (sister or wife) (fairy tales like “Animal’s Milk”); a servant, a witch's daughter, a water carrier, a general, etc. pose as the bride or groom, respectively; an enchanted princess, a pig's cover, a duck girl, a monster, a clear falcon, a snotty goat, and so on. At the end of the fairy tale they turn out to be the desired “betrothed”.

Signs of related or inherent status turn out to be important not only for relationships between people, but also for relationships between supernatural beings, between animals, and also both with humans.

In fairy tales about the adventures of a hero or heroine, the forest demon often uses terms of kinship or properties. Sending the stepdaughter to Morozko is framed as a trip to the groom (“Old man, take Marfutka to the groom; look, you old bastard, go straight ahead, and then turn off the road to the right, towards the forest, - you know, straight to that big pine tree that stands on a hillock, and give Marfutka for Frost" - Af. 95). Baba Yaga imitates her mother’s voice, luring Tereshechka to the shore, or turns out to be the mother of the hero’s wise wife (fairy tales like “Go there, I don’t know where”).

This tendency is so strong that it extends not only to the relationship of supernatural creatures and animals with humans (Koshey the Immortal, the Serpent - the heroine’s “temporary”, “wrong” husbands. The sea king is the hero’s father-in-law, the swan maiden is the bride, the frog princess is the wife, Baba Yaga - aunt, sorcerer - "imaginary father" or future father-in-law, Raven, Falcon - Shaurya, witch - mother-in-law, Student, Obedalo, Opivalo or Dubynya, Usynya, Vernigora, etc. - sworn brothers, etc.), but also on relationships within the world of non-anthropomorphic creatures.

Thus, grateful animals in fairy tales like “Animal’s Milk” put at the hero’s disposal not themselves, but their cubs: “Immediately she milked the milk and gave a bear cub in gratitude” (Af. 205). The magic mare, tamed by Ivanushka the Fool, pays him off by giving him her foal: “Well, good fellow, when you managed to sit on me, then take and own my foals” (Aph. 105). To revive the hero, the assistant sends Raven for living and dead water, but sending him, as a rule, is associated with pressure on his “parental feelings” - the Little Crow is brought into a helpless (captive, dead) state. The pursuit of the heroes in the Kalinov Bridge fairy tales is carried out by the wives (sisters, sisters-in-law) of the murdered Serpents. The goblin, Copper forehead in the fairy tales “The Wonderful Captive” often does not reward the hero himself, but invites his daughters to do this: “The goblin-man has three daughters; he asks the eldest: “What will you award to the king’s son for taking me out of the iron pillar?” released?" The daughter says: “I’ll give him a self-assembled tablecloth” (Aph. 123). The eagle, raised by the hero, burns down the houses of his sisters because they did not receive his savior well. Baba Yaga in fairy tales like “Tereshechka” has a daughter, whom she orders to fry the hero.

This is not how relationships are built between supernatural beings or animals and humans. The marriage relationship between them turns out to be “correct” when the applicant is a person. Such a marriage is presented as desirable and normal, although the hero is often subjected to difficult trials from the demonic bride and her relatives (primarily the father), who seek to destroy the applicant. When a demonic creature forcibly abducts a woman, marries her by mutual consent or through deception (the witch gives her daughter in marriage to the prince), such a situation is considered by the fairy tale as a conflict. Kinship relations between these groups of characters are assessed, as a rule, positively, even if this kinship arises on the basis of marital relations (Yaga-mother-in-law helps her daughter’s husband; animal sons-in-law save the hero).

Group III. Class status.

This group of characteristics of characters includes signs of class affiliation: Tsar (queen, prince, princess), Tsarenko, king (prince, princess), nobleman (Danila the nobleman), master, merchant, priest, peasant; profession or craft: soldier, archer, messenger (Marco-runner), gardener, hunter, hunter, shepherd, water carrier, general, clerk, cook (Cook), blacksmith, Kozhemyaka, as well as servant (maid), master, worker; property status: poor man (Vanka Golyi), rich man (Marco the rich), thief (Klimka the thief), debtor, etc.

The character's class status does not play as significant a role as family or individual status. The signs of this sphere of meaning serve only for additional distribution of some of the characters discussed above.

The most important division here should probably be considered the peasant/royal opposition, since a number of tales realize the contrast between the low class status of the character at the beginning of the tale and the high position that he achieves at the end (from a peasant's son to the king's son-in-law). However, this opposition forms a collision much less often than it might seem at first glance. If, for example, an evil wife pursues her husband because of his peasant origin (the “Magic Ring” type), then, not to mention the fact that the conflict itself is of a family nature (the wife pursues her husband) and is only additionally motivated by low origin spouse, this situation can also be interpreted as a recoding in social terms of the situation of antagonism between a wife of wonderful origin (hero, the Wise) and her “simple” husband (type 519 AT).
Part 15 - E.S. Novik. System of Russian fairy tale characters.
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Part 17 -
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Part 45 -
Part 46 -

Working on a fairy tale during reading lessons in elementary school

A fairy tale is the most favorite genre for all children. A fairy tale is a very favorable material for the development of coherent oral speech in mentally retarded children, because its compositional clarity and unambiguous logical connections create favorable conditions for conveying content. The school textbooks present all types of fairy tales:

Household;

Magical;

Tales about animals.

1. When preparing to read a fairy tale, it is important to organize visual and practical activities for children or conduct an appropriate conversation, so that students can correctly perceive the characters themselves and their actions.

2. Reading a fairy tale must be accompanied by showing a filmstrip, illustrations, applications, drawings, etc.

3. Since a fairy tale by nature is intended for oral reproduction, it is advisable that the teacher use the so-called reading-storytelling. With this presentation of the text, the intonation of colloquial speech is preserved, the storytelling is accompanied by appropriate facial expressions and gestures. Audio recording may be used.

4. When analyzing a fairy tale, you should not focus on the fact that something in it is fiction, otherwise the charm of the fairy tale will disappear. After working out the content of the fairy tale, its full analysis, the fairy tale should be read by role.

5. The retelling of a fairy tale should be very well prepared. It should look like telling a fairy tale, close to the text, using words and expressions peculiar to it. A short fairy tale is reproduced in full, a long fairy tale in parts. You can retell using a verbal outline, a picture outline, filmstrip frames, slides, illustrations, in a chain, based on specific words.

Like no other, Russian fairy tales provide rich material for the development of creative abilities, cognitive activity, and self-discovery of personality. Fairy tales are of particular interest to children. Equally attractive to them is the development of action, associated with the struggle of light and dark forces, and wonderful fiction, and idealized heroes, and a happy ending.

Unfortunately, very often this creative potential inherent in Russian folk tales is not revealed in literary reading lessons, since the study of fairy tales in most cases comes down only to clarifying the characters of the characters and determining the storyline of the fairy tale; as a result, the integrity of her artistic world is destroyed and her special charm disappears.

It is important to show children what a fairy tale consists of, how it “puts together”, to give an idea of ​​the characters, the system of events and the role of the fairy tale characters in them, the richness of visual means and the imagery of folk speech, which will contribute to the development of students’ imagination and creativity. Behind the exciting fantastic plot, behind the variety of characters, you need to help the child see the main thing that is in a folk tale - the flexibility and subtlety of meaning, the brightness and purity of colors, the poetry of the folk word. This problem finds its solution only in an integrated approach to the study of Russian folk tales in school.

The idea of ​​an integrated approach to the study of a fairy tale, the principle of its holistic analysis have not yet become generally accepted in methodology. In numerous publications we find some interesting observations regarding the images of heroes, plot, language of a fairy tale, and indications of the effectiveness of using certain techniques for studying it. However, these comments remain scattered and, without being consolidated into a system, cannot ensure the productive movement of children under the guidance of a teacher towards comprehending the deeply metaphorical meaning of the text being read.

A holistic analysis of fairy tales allows us to consider all the nuances of the artistic structure in close connection with the content of the work and thereby contributes to a higher level of understanding of its ideological content, visual features and artistic merits.

Work on the system of images of a fairy tale at the initial stage of training, as a rule, is limited to the analysis of the system of characters, but over time it should, if possible, include the analysis of images of other scales - from image details to the image of the fairy-tale world as a whole.

Work in this direction consists of several stages:

Determining the types of characters by the role they play in a fairy tale and their characteristics; creating their verbal portrait (taking into account the content and function of image details - portrait details, landscape sketches, the objective world, etc.);

Summarizing the selected material about the main characters, compiling their full characteristics; finding significant connections between images in the plot of a fairy tale;

Determining the specifics of a fairy tale through the features of its system of images.

When working with a system of images, it is necessary to teach children to determine the role of each of them in the plot of a fairy tale, to characterize it in terms of its fairy-tale function. The typology of fairy-tale characters created by V.Ya. will help your child understand the colorful, wonderful world of a fairy tale. Proppom. As is known, the scientist identified seven types of actors according to their functions:

Pest (antagonist),

Donor,

Wonderful helper

Kidnapped hero (requested item),

Sender,

False hero.

The elementary school student encounters all these characters in a fairy tale, so it is necessary to know their characteristics.

It is also important to teach children to find in the text, name and imagine magical creatures and magical objects, which together form the basis of the wonderful world of a fairy tale, to determine, when analyzing the corresponding episodes of the text, the meaning of the miracles performed by these characters, the function of good or evil that they carry. To do this, it is advisable to compile an auxiliary card index - the “Card Index of Magic Items”.

The work of studying the plot consists of several stages:

Understanding the main motives of the plot, discovering cause-and-effect relationships between them;

Determination of individual functions - actions of characters characteristic of a number of fairy tales;

Identification of so-called “plot milestones”, or plot elements (commencement, development of action, turning point, climax, denouement);

Correlating each element of the plot with the characters, actions and actions of the heroes.

Compositional features of fairy tales

Essential for distinguishing a fairy tale from a fairy tale of another genre are its compositional features: the isolation of the fairy tale action, triple repetitions, typical fairy tale beginnings and endings, a special space-time structure, etc. Therefore, when studying fairy tales, you need to pay attention to their composition.

The following main areas of work with children in this regard can be identified:

To form in children an idea of ​​traditional beginnings and endings as an integral part of the artistic construction of a fairy tale, characterized by convention and informative richness; to develop the ability to see the specific beginning of a fairy tale - the “beginning” - and the end that is favorable for the positive heroes - the “ending”;

To form children’s understanding of such a characteristic technique in constructing a fairy tale as triple repetitions; teach them to find repetitions in the text of a fairy tale and determine in each specific case their function and role in the development of the plot and images of the heroes of the fairy tale;

To form an idea of ​​the conventions of fairy-tale space and time (the chronotope of a fairy tale); teach children to see the spatio-temporal framework of a fairy tale, to determine the features of fairy-tale space and time in connection with the development of the plot action of the fairy tale.

When working on the beginning and ending of fairy tales, children must grasp their repetition from fairy tale to fairy tale and at the same time their variation and diversity.

Language formulas of a fairy tale

Working on the language of a fairy tale is no less important than studying its system of images, plot or composition, since it contributes to the disclosure of the content of the fairy tale, the most complete perception of fairy-tale images, understanding of the accuracy, brightness and expressiveness of folk speech, the development of children’s speech, and the enrichment of their vocabulary , introduction to artistic creativity. It should be emphasized that this work is not a separate stage of the lesson, but should be organically included in all types of classes.

Introduction3

1. The need for fairy tales. The role of fairy tales in the moral and aesthetic education of children

2. Tales of Pushkin

3. Education with Pushkin’s fairy tales

Conclusion

Literature

Literature, in particular fairy tales, largely contributes to the “elimination of emotions” and the satisfaction of the spiritual needs of the individual.

The psychological origins of children’s attachment to fairy tales, which satisfy certain needs of childhood, and the possibility of “living out emotions” are interestingly described by the famous American psychologist and psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim. He states: “Children need fairy tales” (that’s the title of his monograph), because they are necessary food for personality development.

Fairy tales evoke intense attention in a child to enchanting descriptions of miracles and extraordinary events, and have a strong emotional impact. The child asks himself: who am I? Where did it come from? How did the world come into being? How did people and animals appear? What is a sense of life? These vital questions are not conceptualized by the baby in the abstract. He thinks about his own protection and refuge. Are there any other good forces around him besides his parents? And the parents themselves - are they a good force? What is happening to himself? Fairy tales provide answers to these burning questions.

Many psychologists and teachers note how persistently children demand the repetition of a fairy tale with the same details and details, without changing the slightest detail, even the intonation when telling it. Children remain conservative when it comes to fairy tales for quite a long time. The child wants the fairy tale to be told in the same words as the first time; he is pleased to recognize these words, assimilate them in the original sequence, to experience the same feelings and in the same order as when he first met them. According to B. Bettelheim, this stereotypical behavior gives the child confidence that this time everything will end well.

Children's anthropomorphic consciousness endows toys, animals, and various objects with certain human characters, based on their “appearance” or “behavior” and drawing an analogy with the appearance and behavior of real people. So in a fairy tale, a person can turn into an animal or a stone and vice versa. The more reliable the fairy tale seems to the baby.

The child needs his fears to be personalized. Dragons, monsters, and witches in fairy tales represent difficulties, problems that need to be overcome. Resolving fairy tale conflicts helps to overcome fear, because the imagery of fairy tales suggests to the child the possibility of victory over his own timidity. Education, which is based on the idea of ​​keeping a child away from evil and scary things, leads to mental depression, but not to overcoming dangers and fears.

Fairy tales, regardless of the gender and age of their characters, are of great psychological importance for children of different ages, boys and girls, since they facilitate the change of identification depending on the problems that concern the child. For example, at first a child, reading a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, identifies himself with Gretel, led by Hansel; later, a grown-up girl identifies herself with Gretel, who defeated the witch.

The child easily enters a fairy-tale setting that is unusual for him, instantly turning into the Korolevich, and at the same time just as freely switches to prosaic everyday life. The kid intuitively feels that fairy tales are unreal, but at the same time admits that this could happen in reality. This is how the duality of a child’s literary experiences is manifested: the feeling of the fabulous in the real, ordinary and the real in the fabulous, magical.

In addition to the expectation of the extraordinary, wonderful, magical, childhood is characterized by one more need. A child wants to imitate the strong, brave, dexterous, intelligent adults around him, but he does not always succeed. In a fairy tale, everything is possible. A little boy (girl), brave and resourceful, emerges victorious from all trials. He can fly to distant lands to the thirtieth kingdom and defeat the dragon with three heads. A child’s big and small dreams come true in the world of a fairy tale, which he empathizes with when he listens to or tells his own version of it. In other words, the baby seems to realize his unconscious desires, which are not always fulfilled in life.

However, the world of a fairy tale provides not only the realization of unsatisfied desires. The decisive role here is played by the motive of achieving equality or, using psychological terminology, the motive of compensation. B. Bettelheim told the following incident. A five-year-old boy, after listening to the fairy tale about Hans, the slayer of giants, asked his mother if there were giants. While my mother was considering a comforting answer, he concluded: “But there are adults, and they are like giants. A cunning little boy can outwit them.” Fairy tales give the child confidence that in the end he can defeat the giants, and as an adult, the same giant, he will be equal in strength to him.

Because of their socially dependent position, children often experience all kinds of grief, their aspirations, intentions, and actions fail, which is usually compensated by the child in his dreams and imagination. The fairy tale creates an excellent basis for this compensatory need, leading everything to a happy ending. Fairy tales are full of characters and situations that can give impetus to the processes of identification and identification, with the help of which a child can indirectly realize his dreams, compensate for his imaginary or real shortcomings. The fact is that a child’s vision of the world, the way of thinking of children and the psychological specificity of fairy tales are characterized by close kinship in their attraction to opposites and extremes. Fairy-tale images are not ambivalent, as is typical of human characters in real life. There, one brother is stupid, the other is smart, one sister is hardworking and diligent, the other is lazy, etc. In fairy tales, only extremely strong and very weak, incredibly brave and unbearably cowardly heroes, giants and dwarfs, fight. Polarities, “white” and “black” tones, also predominate in children’s perception and evaluation of literary works. This is why “children need fairy tales,” because in their best examples, according to V. A. Zhukovsky, they are morally pure and do not leave behind a “bad, immoral impression.” Thanks to fairy tales, a child develops the ability to empathize, have compassion and rejoice, without which a person is not a person. For the goal of storytellers is “to cultivate humanity in a child - this marvelous ability of a person to worry about other people’s misfortunes, to rejoice at the joy of another, to experience someone else’s fate as one’s own.”

The best fairy tales are social at their core.

Another thing is that none of the genres of children's literature should be placed on a pedestal. It should not suppress other types of literature. In literature, as in real life, there must be harmony, a reasonable combination of all the constituent elements. Children need imagination, but they also need knowledge of reality.

Researchers have yet to analyze the social, psychological and pedagogical functions of fairy tales, their cultural, ethnographic and literary essence, because these issues have so far been resolved only in an initial approximation.

For teachers it is especially significant problem of aesthetic education children based on fairy tale material. Fiction, including fairy tales, as a figurative reflection of the world, requires special qualities of perception from the reader: creative imagination, developed observation; feelings of figurative words, author’s position and harmonious integrity of the work; understanding the internal psychological motives of the behavior of literary characters. These qualities together constitute a special type of perception - aesthetic. Aesthetic perception develops as a result of wide acquaintance with fiction, mastery of the necessary knowledge, accumulation of experience and life impressions. That’s why serious, thoughtful work with fairy tales is so important from the very beginning of a child’s introduction to literature.

V. A. Sukhomlinsky paid much attention to this work. He emphasized that “a fairy tale is an active aesthetic creativity that captures all spheres of a child’s spiritual life, his mind, feelings, imagination, will. It begins already in storytelling, its highest stage is dramatization.”

Creativity, in our case “fairytale”, is based on play. Maximum enrichment of work with a fairy tale with elements of play activity will lay a deeper foundation for literary education, facilitate the child’s transition from kindergarten to school, and create the foundation for his further education and development.

A child’s acquaintance with a fairy tale begins with an expressive reading of it by an adult. The nature and content of subsequent work are determined by the literary work itself, the age of the children, and their level of development. The teacher chooses one method or resorts to a combination of different methods, depending on the tasks that he sets for himself.

Let's consider the main methods of working with children (V. A. Zaporozhets, F. A. Sokhin, L. E. Zhurova, V. I. Leibson).

I. Focused observation

1. The teacher, parents, together with the children, can consider by what means the storyteller achieves the appropriate impression (pictures of nature, descriptions of heroes, their actions, humorous passages, dramatic plot twists). Children's retelling of what they read and individual episodes will add the necessary emphasis to the essence of the experience.

2. Verbal drawing by children after reading the text of the characters, settings, and “interior” of the fairy tale.

3. Children draw illustrations for the text they read. Accompanying the examination of finished works with verbal stories and explanations. Modeling fairy-tale characters from available materials, making carnival masks, costumes (costumes for a gnome, Baba Yaga, Vodyanoy, Ghost are not very complicated. And “magic attributes”: a bunch of keys, a broom, a witchcraft book are generally easy to make). After drawing, sculpting, and making costumes, you can have a discussion about illustrations and crafts.

4. Selection of the most suitable music for the fairy tale (individual fragments), taking into account the location of the action (mill pond, forest, ancient castle, etc.) and the nature of the action.

II. Comparison

1. Comparison game (“Who is like whom? What is like what? Who’s comparison is more accurate, and who’s is the most unexpected and at the same time accurate?”).

2. Comparison of illustrations by different artists for the same text.

3. Comparing what you read in order to update the reading experience. For example, you can invite children to compare the fairy tales of O. Preusler and answer the following questions: what do these fairy tales have in common? What is the difference? What do the heroes of fairy tales have in common? What other fairy tales do they remind you of?

III. Recognition and reproduction of stylistic features

1. Recognizing the author by style. For example, a characteristic feature of O. Preusler's fairy tales is humor, sly, good-natured and at the same time, so to speak, “realistic.” Children will be able to determine its authorship after the teacher reads several humorous passages.

2. Children’s recognition of illustrations for a previously read book or recognition of the place in the book to which the illustrated illustration belongs, which makes it possible to feel the author’s style, develops aesthetic memory and actualizes what has been read.

3. Dramatization. Acting out scenes from a fairy tale, perhaps in the form of a quiz. Viewers can guess which hero this is, from which fairy tale.

4. Literary theater. Synthetic and free form, including dramatization, expressive reading, demonstration of drawings and crafts, listening to musical works (fragments), exhibition of the writer’s books.

IV. Experiment with artistic image

1. Narration on behalf of one of the heroes of the work. The traditional retelling of what has been read is modified in this case due to the possibility of playing different roles. In his retelling, the child takes into account the hero’s speech characteristics, his character, and relationships with other characters in the book.

2. Heroes among us (“Herbe came to visit us”, “Peter Pan at our home”, etc.). Fairy tale characters are transferred to a modern setting and react to everything that happens in accordance with their characters. The task, in addition to imagination, develops a sense of humor and actualizes the reading experience.

3. Speculation about the hero’s fate. This task involves developing the author’s idea, conjecturing the hero’s further activities within the framework of the circumstances described in the book. If the previous task has a humorous, even parody character, then here everything is designed for children's imagination, “getting used to” the image.

V. Evaluation and Judgment

1. My favorite hero. Even the little ones are able, remembering what they heard, to convincingly prove the merits of their hero and convince listeners.

3. Thematic conversations (individual or collective) about what was read (“What events are discussed in the fairy tale? Have similar events occurred in other fairy tales? Where does the action take place? Is this place familiar from other fairy tales?”).

4. Conversation (individual or collective) about literary heroes. The purpose of the conversation is to develop artistic associations (“Which hero from previously heard fairy tales is the hero of the new fairy tale similar to? How do those heroes (hero) differ from the one just learned and what are their similarities?”).

3. Conversation about the genre (“What other fairy tales do you know? Which fairy tales do you love more: about modernity or about the past? What fairy tales dedicated to our modern times do you know? What fairy tales do you remember where only animals act? Where are the wonders of technology shown? What fairy-tale films and performances do you remember?”).

6. Conversation about the author. After preliminary work, the teacher can talk about Russian storytellers (K. Paustovsky, A. Platonov, V. Bianchi, I. Tokmakova, R. Pogodin, E. Uspensky) and foreign ones (H. K. Andersen, A. Lindgren, O. Preusler, D. Rodari, T. Jansson, etc.). It is good to preface a story about a foreign storyteller with a story about his country. It is useful to note the features of creativity born of a folk tale, and at the same time the elements of innovation. You can report on monuments dedicated to fairy-tale heroes and authors of fairy tales, and on memorable places associated with their names (monuments “Peter Pan” in London, “Nils Holgerson with Wild Geese” in Tokyo, “Wild Swans” in Odense, “Pinocchio” - in Collodi, “The Little Mermaid” and two monuments to Andersen in Copenhagen; Andersengrad near St. Petersburg, Disneyland in the USA, Andersen House Museum in Odense, S. Lagerlöf House Museum on her estate Morbakka, Pushkin Mountains, Treblinka, where I died Korczak, etc.).

7. The funniest fairy tale. The funniest episode (“What other funny books do you remember?”). The same conversation can be held about the most terrible, saddest book - in any case, the child develops literary-associative thinking and a certain taxonomy of what he read arises: according to the similarities and differences of characters, authors, according to the similarity of the impressions received from the books. Along with this, the ability to highlight a specific episode in a book is developed.

The teacher can also organize various games, quizzes, “fairy tale hours,” and set up a “room” or “corner” for fairy tales. St. Petersburg librarian M. Gamova talks about an interesting experience (Differentiated guidance in children’s reading. - L., 1983. - P. 59). Her library has a Lost and Found Bureau, which stores items from fairy-tale characters that children have made on their own. The Bureau holds quizzes for kindergarten students who come on excursions to the library. It immediately became clear which characters children love. The luckiest ones were Dunno and Buratino, since the “Bureau” brought a lot of Dunno’s blue hats, “golden” keys and Buratino’s caps. In “The Bureau” there is Baba Yaga’s broom, Little Red Riding Hood’s basket, and a snowflake from “The Snow Queen.”

The exciting game “Building a Museum of Fairy Tales” was invented by employees of the Moscow House of Children’s Books. Children, under the guidance of teachers, first chose a house for the museum, naming a peasant hut and royal chambers, a tower and a gingerbread house, an ice palace, even a mitten and an empty pot. It was important that every child, when offering something, knew what fairy tale it was from. Then the guys determined what would grow around the museum (turnip, seven-flowered flower, scarlet flower, tulips, roses, etc.), what bodies of water would be in the garden (milk river with jelly banks, sea-ocean, stream with living and dead water), what magical creatures will settle there (Ryaba the Hen, Gorynych the Serpent, the Little Humpbacked Horse, the three little pigs). Then the children decorated the museum, selected portraits of the characters in the mirror (based on the fairy tales “Alice Through the Looking Glass” by L. Carroll, “The Snow Queen” by H. C. Andersen, “The Tale of the Dead Princess...” by A. Pushkin); magical items for display cases (magic wand, flying carpet, self-assembled tablecloth, running boots, mortar and broom, magic pot, magic lamp, musical snuffbox). Children and museum attendants were appointed - little magical people (elves, Carlson, Pinocchio, Snow White, Nils, Cipollino, Thumbelina, etc.), they even thought about what they would feed the museum curators (juvenile apples, turnips, ax porridge, nectar, dew , bread, pie). This is how the children got involved in creativity.

Each fairy tale can be played out many times. The features of the literary text and the level of development of children will tell you how to play, what to play and what tasks to solve. It is only important to remember that working with a fairy tale is long and painstaking. You cannot expect immediate results from her. L. S. Vygotsky wrote: “Art is rather an organization of our behavior for the future, a setting forward, a demand that may never be realized, but which makes us strive beyond our life for what lies beyond it.

Therefore, art can be called a predominantly delayed reaction, because between its action and execution there always lies a more or less long period of time.”

2 . Tales of Pushkin

Pushkin wrote fairy tales in the Russian folk spirit throughout almost his entire career, from 1814 to 1834. They are sharply divided into two groups: early (before 1825) and late. Our idea of ​​Pushkin's fairy tales, as an important and serious area of ​​his poetry, applies only to his later fairy tales (“The Tale of the Priest,” “About the Bear,” “About Tsar Saltan,” “About the Fisherman and the Fish,” “About the Dead Princess.” " and "About the Golden Cockerel").

Pushkin's early fairy tales, as well as poems on fairy-tale plots ("Bova", "Tsar Nikita and His Forty Daughters") are completely devoid of the genuine nationality characteristic of Pushkin's mature work. In them we will find neither an expression of the feelings and interests of the people, the peasantry, nor a conscious assimilation and processing of the forms and techniques of oral folk art. Pushkin only uses individual elements of folk poetry in them: a fairy-tale plot or motif, the names of fairy-tale characters, individual turns of folk style and language. Almost all Russian writers of the 18th and early 19th centuries used folk art in a similar way.

Oral folk poetry accompanied the entire life of a peasant, from birth to death, from a lullaby to a funeral lament. Everywhere people sang songs and told fairy tales. The coachmen sang on the way, songs were heard during work and on holidays, in round dances and at weddings, they sang and told stories at winter gatherings. The entire life of the people, their sufferings and joys, their struggle, their historical memories - all this was expressed in folk poetry, in songs, epics, fairy tales, legends passed on from generation to generation, updated or created for the first time.

Writers of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Since childhood, we have been surrounded by this element of folk poetry. Naturally, it penetrated into their own creativity. Almost all poets wrote imitations of folk songs or fairy tales, regardless of their social and political views: Sumarokov, Derzhavin, Radishchev, Karamzin, Delvig, Zhukovsky, Katenin, and many others. But out of the entire rich and varied sea of ​​folk poetry, noble writers of that time reproduced almost exclusively themes and plots that did not affect the social contradictions of serfdom: lyrical love songs and fairy tales. Sometimes, as in Pushkin’s early fairy tales and poems (or in Radishchev’s “Bova”), folk images were used to create crudely erotic paintings and plots.

Pushkin's transition in the mid-20s. his approach to realism was accompanied by a deep interest in the people. Youthful lyrical complaints about the fate of the serf peasant (“Will I see, friends, an unoppressed people?”), romantic bitter complaints about the lack of revolutionary sentiments among the people (“Graze, peaceful peoples! // The cry of honor will not awaken you”) are now replaced by a close and insightful the study of the people, their life and needs, their “soul”. This study was facilitated by the poet's stay in exile in Mikhailovskoye in the closest communication with peasants and servants. Unlike the Decembrists, Pushkin tries to get closer to the people, to understand their interests, dreams, and ideals. As a poet, he knows that all the feelings and thoughts of the people are expressed in his poetic work. And Pushkin began to carefully study folk poetry. He writes down songs and folk rituals, makes his nanny again tell her fairy tales, familiar to him since childhood - now he perceives them differently, looks for expressions of the “folk spirit” in them, thus making up for the “shortcomings of his damned upbringing” http://www.rvb.ru/pushkin/03articles/03_2fables.htm - cc1#cc1.

Pushkin is not limited to the task of passively studying folk poetry: he strives to penetrate into it, creatively master its content and form, learn to create the same songs and fairy tales that nameless folk poets created. And he succeeded so much that until recently, some of his works in the folk spirit (for example, “Songs about Stenka Razin”) were taken by researchers to be recordings of genuine folk songs. Unlike all his predecessors, Pushkin in his “imitations” concerns, first of all, social and political themes of people’s life. He writes three “Songs about Stenka Razin,” “the only poetic face of Russian history,” as Pushkin called him in one letter. He also touches on serious social issues in his fairy tales.

Pushkin’s two ballads based on folk stories were a kind of stepping stone to folk tales: about a girl who publicly exposed the villains of robbers (“The Groom,” 1825), and about terrible retribution against a peasant who, out of cowardice, violated his moral duty (“The Drowned,” 1828).

From 1830 to 1834, Pushkin wrote five folk tales in verse, but one (“About the Bear”) remained unfinished. These tales for the first time introduced into literature genuine folk poetry that was not adapted to the interests of the noble reader, that is, not only entertaining, fantastic adventures of heroes or the love experiences of a “red maiden” and a “good fellow.” Pushkin’s fairy tales touch on a social theme (about a greedy priest and a farm laborer who punished him, about a peasant who is oppressed the more, the more benefits he delivers to his oppressors), they talk about the moral ideals of the people (“The Tale of the Dead Princess”), etc. P.

The most significant departure of Pushkin's fairy tales from the type of folk tale was the poetic form that the poet gave to this prosaic folk genre, just as in “Eugene Onegin” he turned the traditional prose genre of the novel into a “novel in verse.”

Pushkin created two types of fairy tales. In some (“The Tale of the Priest”, “The Tale of the Bear” and “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish”), Pushkin strives to reproduce not only the spirit, plots and images of folk art, but also folk forms of verse (song, proverb, raesh), language and style. The tales of the priest and the bear are written in truly folk verse, “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish” is a verse created by Pushkin himself and close in its structure to some forms of folk verse. The poet here seems to be reincarnated as a folk storyteller. We will not find in these tales a single word, not a single turn of phrase that is alien to truly folk poetry.

The remaining three tales (“About Tsar Saltan”, “About the Dead Princess”, “About the Golden Cockerel”) are written in a more “literary” way - in literary, uniform verse (tetrameter trochee with paired rhymes); Pushkin sometimes uses purely literary poetic expressions and phrases in them, although in their general spirit, motives and images they completely retain their folk character.

Pushkin knew well that many fairy tales or individual motifs exist in the oral works of different peoples and pass, changing, from one to another. Therefore, like a real folk storyteller, when it was necessary, he took this or that motive, details of the plot from foreign folklore, miraculously turning them into truly Russian ones. He introduced a lot of his own into fairy tales: he changed the folk plot in his own way, simplified or complicated it, introduced his own images (goldfish, Swan Princess, etc.).

In his fairy tales, Pushkin used elements of other genres of folk poetry - songs, spells, lamentations. Such, for example, is the spell of Guidon, addressed to the wave, or the prince Elisha - to the sun, moon and wind, reminiscent of Yaroslavna’s lament from “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”.

Pushkin's fairy tales are not a simple translation of genuine fairy tales into verse, but a genre that is complex in its composition. Pushkin appears in them both as a reconstructor of a folk tale spoiled in oral folk transmission, and as an equal participant in its creation.

But understood in their meaning by contemporaries, underestimated by later criticism, Pushkin’s fairy tales were accepted by the people. One of Pushkin’s fairy tales (“About the Fisherman and the Fish”) was recorded from the words of a folk storyteller as a purely folk tale.

3. Education with Pushkin’s fairy tales

Pushkin names feelings in his fairy tales. After doing some research, we were convinced that modern “children do not know the names of feelings”; “Of the rich palette of feelings, they mainly notice the extreme ones: love - hatred, joy - grief.” But there is pity, sympathy, envy, etc., etc. and in Pushkin, every line, there is a whole palette of emotions, feelings, moods. “Pushkin’s poetry, including his fairy tales,” writes I.I. Tikhomirova, “is the best educator of feelings. Let us pay attention to the wealth of verbal terms contained in fairy tales that express feelings in the form of nouns: sadness, grief, admiration, melancholy, anger.

Among the terms, the reader will find a whole collection of various verbs that convey emotional states and their manifestations: “to get mad,” “to get scared,” “to beg,” “to marvel,” “to submit,” “to amuse,” “to get angry,” “to become angry,” etc. The author also conveys feelings through metaphors (“sadness and melancholy is eating me up”), exclamations (“oh, and they both burst into tears”), epithets (“with a sad thought on her face,” “kind word,” “grumpy woman,” “angry share”, “astonished eyes”, “encouraged soul”), comparisons (“and the queen over the child is like an eagle over the eaglet”, “like a bitter widow”, “performs like a peahen”), appeals (“my light, sunshine”, “you are my dear brothers”, “oh you, little girl!”), adverbs (“grinning on the sly”, “shouted loudly”, “good-naturedly cheerful”) Each of the highlighted words and combinations can become material for conversation with child readers about the complex and multifaceted sphere of human feelings... An important role in the language of feelings belongs, oddly enough, to silence and it is necessary to draw the attention of children. His positive characters are usually silent. They express their feelings with restraint, in few words: Guidon is quiet like a stormy day, Elisha is looking for his bride in spiritual grief, the princess who finds herself in someone else’s house meekly speaks about her experiences. In contrast, negative characters are noisy, their feelings are uncontrollable, their intensity is brought to the point of passion, often accompanied by abuse (“You fool, you simpleton”) or physical action (“She beats them, drags them by the chuprun”).”

Conclusion

A fairy tale is a whole direction in fiction. Over the long years of its formation and development, this genre has become a universal genre, covering all phenomena of the surrounding life and nature, achievements of science and technology.

Just as a folk tale, constantly changing, absorbed the features of a new reality, a literary fairy tale has always been and is inextricably linked with socio-historical events and literary and aesthetic trends. The literary fairy tale did not grow out of nowhere. It was based on a folk tale, which became famous thanks to the records of folklorists.

Literature

1. Boyko In Pushkin’s magical land - M., 2003

2. Vysochina E.I. The image is carefully stored. Pushkin’s life in the memory of generations. - M.: Education, 1989.

3. Gordin A. Pushkinsky Reserve. - M.: Art, 1956.

4. Magazine “Peasant Woman”, No. 6/98.

5. Kunin V.V. The life of Pushkin, told by himself and his contemporaries. - M., 1987.

6. Lotman Yu.M. Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. - L.: Education, 1982.

7. Rusakov V.M. Respected for the name. - M.: Soviet Russia, 1987.

8. Skatov.N.N. Pushkin.- L.: Children's literature, 1991.

9. Tikhomirova I.I. Education with Pushkin's fairy tales. // Preschool education No. 2.6/1998

10. Tytyanov Yu.N. Pushkin. - M.: Book, 1983.

Vygotsky L. S. Psychology of art. - M., 1968. - P. 315.

V. Bettelheim Children's fairy tale. / Per. Maximova. – M., 1980.

Chukovsky K.I. From two to five. - M., 1963. - P. 226.

Sukhomlinsky A.I. Izbr. ped. op. -M., 1979. - T. 1. - P. 183.

Psychology of art. - M., 1968. - P. 322

The characters in fairy tales about animals are the most developed. It is no coincidence that we easily notice any substitution of characters in plots and perceive it as a violation of tradition. In tales about animals, each image receives an individual development. The most common characters in fairy tales about animals are the fox and the wolf. This is explained by the fact that, firstly, people most often had to deal with them in economic activity; secondly, these animals occupy the middle in the animal kingdom in size and strength; finally, thirdly, thanks to the previous two reasons, a person had the opportunity to get to know them very closely. But no less often there are other characters in fairy tales - wild and domestic animals - bear, hare, ram, dog, fish, cat, insects, etc. Each of the characters is an image of a very specific animal or bird. The characteristics of the characters are based on observations of the habits, demeanor of the animal, and its appearance. Also, in the images of animals, parallels are drawn with human qualities: animals speak and behave like people. This combination also led to the typification of the characters of animals, which became the embodiment of certain qualities: the fox - cunning, the wolf - stupidity and greed, the bear - gullibility and slow-wittedness, the hare - cowardice. So fairy tales acquired an allegorical meaning: animals began to mean people of certain characters. Animal images became a means of moral teaching, and then social satire. Fairy tales about animals not only ridicule negative qualities (stupidity, laziness, talkativeness), but also condemn the oppression of the weak, greed, and deception for profit. However, there is hardly any reason to believe that all animal images depict human traits. The uniqueness of the image of an animal in fairy tales lies precisely in the fact that the human features in it never completely supplant the animal features. No matter how developed the allegory is in fairy tales of this type, one can also find examples in them in which it is difficult to detect allegory. The well-known tale of the fox and the black grouse contains a clear allegory; it is obvious from a number of details: the fox, for example, tells the black grouse about the decree requiring that the black grouse should not fly into a tree, but walk on the ground. But in the fairy tale “The Bear is a Lime Leg” or in the fairy tale “The Wolf and the Little Goats” there is probably no allegory. These tales captivate not with allegory, but with the depiction of action. In fairy tales about animals, the “man-animal” analogy does not allow the tale to omit either the qualities of a person or the qualities of an animal. This is the uniqueness of fairy tales, this is the special aesthetic effect. And it is precisely in the interweaving, intersection of animal and human in the unexpected contact of these essentially different plans (conventional and real) that the effect of the comic in an animal fairy tale lies. In moral terms, two main ideas of animal fairy tales can be distinguished: the glorification of camaraderie, thanks to which the weak defeat the evil and strong, and the glorification of victory itself, which brings moral satisfaction to the listeners. The wolf is often stupid, but this is not his main feature: he is cruel, ferocious, angry, greedy - these are his main qualities. He eats a poor old man's horse, breaks into the animals' winter quarters and disrupts their peaceful life, and wants to eat the kids. Peaceful animals, even if they are stupid, achieve victory: the ram fools the wolf, the sheep and the fox defeat the wolf. The fox wants to eat a rooster, a black grouse. But if she, together with other animals, opposes the wolf, then she receives a positive assessment, if she herself harms others, she receives a negative assessment.

The wolf in fairy tales traditionally represents greed and malice. He is often portrayed as stupid, so he is often fooled by more cunning characters in fairy tales, such as the Fox. The contrast between these two strong animal characters occurs in many fairy tales, and in almost all of them the wolf, being slow-witted and short-sighted, allows himself to be deceived again and again. However, in ancient cultures the image of a wolf was associated with death, so in fairy tales this animal character often eats someone (“The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats”) or disturbs the quiet life of animals (“The Winter of Animals”).

A dexterous, strong and fearless bear acquires a manner of clumsiness, clumsiness and slow-wittedness. These qualities were attributed to him in order to ridicule him as an enemy of the peasant. The scary stopped being scary. In the fairy tale “The Bear is a Lime Leg,” the bear is neither stupid nor gullible, as we are accustomed to seeing him in other fairy tales. The tale echoes untouched ancient beliefs. The bear did not leave a single insult unavenged. He takes revenge according to all the rules of the tribal law: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. But this is rather an exception. After all, in animal tales the bear most often appears as a simpleton. But in more ancient sources, the bear is shown as a friend or brother of a person, enters into a marriage with a woman, has a son who belongs to the human collective, fights evil spirits, and brings wealth to a person. The bear has a dual nature: it is the owner of both the forest and a creature closely related to man.

There is a very noticeable ambivalence towards the fox. She is a robber, godfather, bear and drag, but smarter and more cunning than all the other animals, which cannot but arouse a certain sympathy. The aesthetic image also gives it liveliness and agility: an elegant skin, an elegant muzzle, a bright tail. The fox seems to be a cunning, insidious, cunning animal, whose cunning gains an advantage over other animals stronger than it - over the wolf and the bear. But despite all this, she easily manages to maintain good relations with all those deceived. Another characteristic feature of hers is, of course, hypocrisy. In fairy tales, the fox has a number of nicknames: godmother-fox, little sister-fox, Patrikeevna fox, Lizaveta Ivanovna, etc. In addition, in the animal world of fairy tales, there is a special type of hero - a trickster, a rogue and a deceiver, who is most often represented by her. This is a stable image in which cunning, a tendency to deception and tricks dominate. The fox will do anything to get what she wants - she will pretend to be weak and helpless, and use all her charm and eloquence. In Russian fairy tales, the trickster is contrasted with a simpleton character. It could be a wolf, whom the fox successfully fools, a rooster (“Cat, Rooster and Fox”), or a weak hare, whom she drives out of her hut (“The Fox and the Hare”). Initially, in the myth, it was his unusual behavior that contributed to the creation of the world and the acquisition of knowledge. Unlike the myth, the trickster fox is often punished for his misdeeds, especially when he attacks weak, helpless heroes. For example, the Fox in the fairy tale “The Fox with a Rock” runs away and hides in a hole.

System of Russian fairy tale characters

The question of the possibility of a systematic approach to the study of dramatis personae was raised in the works of V. Ya. Propp “Morphology of the Fairy Tale” and “Historical Roots of the Fairy Tale”1. In "Morphology of a Fairy Tale" the idea of ​​considering a character as a bundle of functions was first voiced. However, the diachronic interpretation of a single fairy tale plot, carried out in “The Historical Roots of a Fairy Tale,” led to some rearrangement of emphasis: the researcher’s main attention turned out to be directed to the analysis of how the heritage of myth is reinterpreted by a fairy tale, how native mythological characters are transformed into fairy-tale characters.

This article attempts to describe the system of characters in the form in which they are presented in the fairy tale itself, regardless of the “roots” that gave birth to them. The material for analysis was the fairy tales from Afanasyev’s collection.

A systematic description of the characters in a fairy tale involves identifying invariant forms, mechanisms of shape formation and mechanisms of shape change. The central task in this regard is to clarify the question of whether the cliché of a fairy tale is limited to the “constancy of functions”, whether this constancy is the only basis that allows us to bring into the system such elements of a fairy tale as the forms and attributes of characters.

Insisting on the uniformity of functions, on the fundamental unity of the plot formula of a fairy tale, V. Ya. Propp was inclined to believe that “the nomenclature and attributes of the characters represent the variable values ​​of the fairy tale”2. Therefore, when analyzing characters, the researcher proposed to proceed from “constant,” repeating and independent narrative units, which are the functions of the characters.

Meanwhile, just as the same functions can be performed by different characters3, so the same character can play a wide variety of roles:

The serpent kidnaps the princess (Aph. 129)4 - a pest.

The serpent gives the hero a flying carpet (Aph. 208) - the donor.

The serpent revives the dead hero (Af. 208) - assistant.

The serpent claims the hand of the princess (Aph. 124) - a rival.

The serpent is the sworn prince (Aph. 276), the hero-victim (or the “ultimate fairy-tale value” - the groom).

The wife takes away her husband’s wonderful helper (Aph. 199) - a pest.

The wife gives her husband a wonderful ball and towel (Af. 212) - the giver.

The wife helps her husband escape from the Sea King (Af. 219) - assistant.

The wife regains her lost husband (Aph. 234) - heroine.

The hero receives his wife as a reward for his exploits - the ultimate fairytale value.

The classification of characters by role is also complicated by the fact that the functions are given in relation to the hero, while both the hero and, for example, the saboteur can act in the same way: the Serpent kidnaps the Tsar’s daughter, Ivan Tsarevich, with the help of the Gray Wolf, kidnaps the Tsar’s daughter; the stepmother slaughters her stepdaughter's cow, the children themselves slaughter the wonderful bull; snakes turn into tempting objects, Vasilisa the Wise wraps herself and the groom in a lake, a ladle, etc.

The independence of functions from the performing character also has a downside - the relative independence of the character from the functions he performs, the absence of direct correlations between the character’s actions and his semantic characteristics5.

Therefore, it seems appropriate to distinguish between such levels as the level of actors, or figures (hero, saboteur, donor, helper, etc.), and the characters themselves, i.e., actors in their semantic definition. The main goal pursued in this article is to describe the dramatis personae of a fairy tale, regardless of the role they play in the plot.

Freedom in choosing performers of functions, which V. Ya. Propp wrote about, presupposes the presence of a certain set from which this choice is possible.

The range of characters in a fairy tale is not so large and sufficiently canonized6 to be unconditionally recognized as a “variable” quantity for which operations to isolate invariants are impossible. However, this uniformity is obvious only in cases where we are talking about stereotypical characters such as Ivan the Fool, stepdaughter, Koshchei, etc. This statement looks more problematic in relation to such moving figures, such as, for example, wonderful animals or objects. Meanwhile, V. Ya. Propp noted that “an assistant can be considered as a personified ability of the hero”7, and magical objects are only a special case of an assistant8. The enemy army can be defeated either by a “mighty hero”, or by a heroic horse, or by a wonderful club. And the hero, and the horse, and the club in this case personify the same quality - strength. You can get to the thirtieth kingdom by turning into a bird, as well as riding a winged horse; special devices can be used for the same purpose: belts, claws, a ladder, but it can also be a tree that miraculously grows to the sky. “If we compare,” V. Ya. Propp notes in this regard, “three cases: 1) the hero turns into a bird and flies away, 2) the hero sits on a bird and flies away, 3) the hero sees a bird and follows it, then here we have a split, a bifurcation of the hero"9 (my discharge. - E.N.). Similarly, the Serpent, Koschey or Yaga can either have the property of super-fast movement through the air, or for this they need special assistants (Koshey, like the hero, “was a shepherd for three days... for that Baba Yaga gave” him a wonderful horse, on which he is able to catch up with the hero - Af. 159) or a device (Baba Yaga “jumps at full speed on an iron mortar, drives with a pestle, covers the trail with a broom” - Af. 159). To escape pursuit, the hero needs to have a brush, which turns into an impenetrable forest; in order to catch up with the fugitive, the pest must gnaw a path through this forest, and for this he needs to get sharp teeth, which are often specially forged by a blacksmith.

This feature of a fairy tale suggests that all characters can be considered as personifications of certain properties or states.

How a character acts depends largely on what he represents10. A wide range of variants of fairy tales in which a hero of miraculous origin appears is constructed, for example, somewhat differently from the main plot scheme described by V. Ya. Propp. Here, a detailed description of the miraculous birth of the hero can be considered as a transfer to the beginning of the narrative of such an important compositional link as “receiving a miraculous remedy,” which usually follows after the “preliminary misfortune” and after the test of the hero by the donor; a number of fairy tales with such a miraculously born hero may not contain the element of “receiving a miraculous remedy” at all; it is present in the very characteristics of the miraculous hero-hero.

From this point of view, the narrative plan of a fairy tale itself can be considered as the unfolding in the plot of those semantic features that the character possesses. If the father is deceased and this sign is played out in the plot, then an episode follows in which he gifts his son; if the focus of the story is his old age or blindness, then his sons are sent for living water and rejuvenating apples; if his widowhood is recorded, the tale unfolds a plot about the incestuous persecution of a daughter or the second marriage of a father and the persecution of a stepdaughter by a stepmother.

The semantic characteristics that the characters are endowed with correspond, as we see, to the conflicts in which the characters take part. In other words, a character is the embodiment of those semantic features that create conflict situations and are played out within an episode or the entire plot.

The multifunctionality of the figures acting in fairy tales is partly explained by the fact that each character is endowed with several characteristics, each of which is correlated with both the system of actions and the system of states of the character, with his status (family, class, personal). The father incestuously pursues his daughter (i.e., plays the role of a saboteur) in a state of widowhood; he himself finds himself, as it were, in a situation of “lack,” which he tries to eliminate, intending to marry his own daughter. The same character (father) leaves a wonderful inheritance to his son or sons (acts as a donor), being in the status of an ancestor. Baba Yaga functions as a pest in AT 327 fairy tales, representing a variant of the forest demon, but helps in fairy tales like “Go there, I don’t know where”, finding herself in a kinship relationship with the “son-in-law” hero.

Since the functions are specified from the point of view of the hero, i.e., depending on the role, and semantic features can be correlated with any object, it seems appropriate, using this set of semantic oppositions specific to a fairy tale, to describe the character as a combination of these semantic features11.

Thus, we are talking about describing the characters of a fairy tale in the form of bundles of signs, identifying among these signs the values ​​of constants and values ​​of variables, as well as the rules for combining them. This problem can be solved at the inter-plot level.

As characters in a fairy tale, objects are considered that take part in the action and can play one or another role in it. The question of whether a given object acts or not is extremely important, since this attribute allows us to purely formally separate the “character” from the “thing”. Even in the same text, a person, an animal, and, finally, an object can act sequentially. Thus, in the fairy tale “The Magic Ring” (Aph. 191), the hero Martyn, the widow’s son, first acts on his own: he buys a dog and a cat with the money left by his father, saves a snake from the fire, receives a “miraculous ring” from it, marries the princess, who, having taken possession of ring, flies away to the thirtieth kingdom; After the disappearance of the princess, the hero is imprisoned in a stone pillar, and the baton of action is passed to his assistants - the dog and the cat: it is they who penetrate the thirtieth kingdom, obtain the stolen ring, force the “king over all crayfish” to help, when they drop the ring into the sea, deliver the ring to the owner; Then the “miraculous” power of the ring acts - twelve young men return the hero’s wife.

As we see, in a fairy tale, actions are performed by people, animals, and objects. But the same people, animals or objects appear sporadically in a fairy tale as a background against which the action unfolds, although they themselves do not participate in it. For example, a stove that invites a girl to pull out a pie and then hides her from her pursuers is acting (in this case, her role is the typical role of a donor-assistant who tests the hero and then helps him pass the main test), in contrast to a stove that serves the hiding place of Ivanushka the Fool in fairy tales like "Sivko-Burko". In the latter case, the stove is no longer a character, but turns out to be a sign of the local affiliation of another character - the Baker.

Not only objects, but also people can be a sign of some other character. So, in some versions of fairy tales like “Sivko-Burko”, the older brothers, who watched the younger brother’s feat, tell their wives about what they saw: “Well, wives, what a fine fellow he came, we have never seen such a thing!” The portrait was only missed after three logs. They saw where he came from, but didn’t see where he left! He’ll come again..." Ivan the Fool sits on the stove and says: “Brothers, wasn’t it me?” - “Where the hell should you be! Sit, you fool, on the stove and wipe your nose” (Af. 179). In other versions, wives are not mentioned; the story of the older brothers is addressed to Ivan the Fool himself. The wives in these tales do not perform any actions; they are a sign of the marital status of the older brothers, who, being married, do not participate in marriage trials, unlike other plot types, where rivalry in matchmaking between unmarried older and younger brothers becomes the mainspring of the narrative.

In a similar way, animals can appear in a fairy tale either as a kind of “thing” or act in a certain role: The little cow is a key character in fairy tales like AT 511, “cows have golden horns and tails” - one of the varieties of fairy tale curiosities and finally, the “herd of cows”, which Ivan Tsarevich’s unfaithful wife forces to graze (“Blind and Legless” - Af. 198), is a background attribute that emphasizes the low position of the hero.

All these considerations force us to consider the very fact that a character plays a role in the plot as its main feature. Therefore, setting ourselves the task of describing a system of characters based on their semantic characteristics, we will take into account only those of them that are important for the development of the plot, i.e., features that form a collision.

Temporarily abstracting from the classification of characters by roles, from dividing them into heroes, antagonists, false heroes, donors, etc., we must choose some characteristics that would be the most constant, independent of the intra-plot metamorphoses undergone by the character. Such a constant characteristic can be the names of the characters, which remain largely unchanged throughout the narrative.

The character's name, as a rule, is not indifferent to what actions he performs. It either contains those features that are played out in the plot, or the nomination occurs following the description of an episode, the meaning of which is fixed in the name and then, as if in a collapsed form, continues its existence in the plot. So, for example, a description of the miraculous birth of a hero or heroes is necessarily recorded in his name (Pokatigoroshek, Medvedka, Suchenko, Lutonya, etc.). Similarly, individual segments of the narrative serve as a detailed explanation of the features of the character’s name: the search for the death of Koshchei the Immortal or the tactics of fighting the Nine-Headed Serpent take on the character of detailed plot moves.

In the narration, there is a sequential (within the framework of the general plot formula of fairy tales) “playing out” of individual characteristics, fixed by the name of the character, and the events that happened to him are, as it were, preserved in the name.

Sometimes these events themselves do not appear not only in a given fairy tale, but also in the entire body of fairy tales. Russian fairy tales do not contain, for example, detailed descriptions of marriage with heavenly bodies or any ritual actions associated with the hearth. Nevertheless, they turn out to be extrapolated into the text due to the fact that they were recorded in the names of such characters as Zvezda, Solntseva Sister, Popyalov, Zapechnik, etc.

We are, however, not interested in these, which in themselves are extremely interesting, moments, but in the fundamental semantic features for the characters of a fairy tale, the material for identifying which can be names that reflect the natural classification of characters carried out by the fairy tale itself.

Usually the name records the character’s marital status (Ivan Devkin’s son, Nadzey Popov’s grandson, Martyn the widow’s son, etc.), his class, property and professional status (Tsarenko, Povarenko, Ivan Goly, etc.), his spiritual (Dunno, Ivan the Fool, Vasilisa the Wise, etc.) and bodily qualities (Beloved Beauty, Elena the Beautiful, Tiny Khavroshechka, Vanyusha Little One, One-Eye, etc.), as well as signs of local affiliation (Zatrubnik, Leshy, Gorynych, Lesynya ) and attribution to a certain element or color (Frost, Water, Studenets, Whirlwind, Chernushka, etc.).

Often, however, the very name of a character contains several signs at once: Princess White Swan (Af. 174), Storm-hero Ivan the Cow's Son (Af. 136), Vasilisa the Golden Braid, uncovered beauty (Af. 560), Serpent Gorynych ( Af. 204, 209), Miracle Yudo, sea lip (Af. 313), etc., or family relations are recorded in it simultaneously with class status: Tsarenko, i.e. the son of the king, a local characteristic simultaneously with class status status: Vodyanoi = Sea King, a class characteristic can serve as a synonym for a certain local location: a king, in contrast to a king, denotes a foreign ruler. As for the characters transforming in the process of plot development, they can even more so be described only as combinations of several semantic features.

The stability of the names does not allow them to include all the variety of attributes that the character possesses and which change in the process of his plot functioning. However, these attributes themselves realize the same areas of meaning that are identified on the basis of the analysis of the names of dramatis personae13.

Indeed, the dominant role in the set of semantic features that are endowed with the characters of a fairy tale is played by gender (the opposition male/female), age (old/young, adult/child); signs related to the individual qualities of the character (natural/wonderful, anthropomorphic/non-anthropomorphic); signs characterizing the character’s family status (parents/children, elder/younger, native/step-child, married/non-marital partner); signs that determine his class and property status (royal/peasant, chief/servant, master/servant, rich/poor), signs of local affiliation (domestic/female, belonging to one’s own or another kingdom, near or distant world). All these semantic features are present both in proper names and in common nouns, describing the internal and external characteristics of the character from the point of view of his individual, family, class and local states.

Let us consider the relationships of features within each of the selected groups.

Group I. Individual status.

The distribution of characters in this group is carried out using the following features: features of the internal world (the opposition natural/supernatural) and external appearance (the opposition anthropomorphic/non-anthropomorphic). These oppositions define the basic division of characters into supernatural beings, people, animals, plants and objects. The attributes anthropomorphic/non-anthropomorphic (zoomorphic, plant, amorphous) correlate only with the attribute supernatural, miraculous. Actually, this feature distinguishes animals, plants and objects as characters in a fairy tale from animals, plants and objects as attributes of the background: a wonderful mare, but a nag that Ivan the Fool kills; a wonderful gate that lets the stepdaughter through when she “poured butter under their heels” (Af. 103), but the gate in expressions like “the woman is waiting outside the gate” (Af. 98). Obviously, this explains the fact that with all the variety of animals, plants and objects that can appear in a fairy tale as characters, clear preference is given here to mythologized objects. Among domestic animals this is a goat, ram, horse, bull, cow, dog, cat, mouse, among animals - a bear, wolf, lion, among birds - a swan, duck, raven, falcon, eagle, dove or dove, the Firebird, Mogul bird, etc.; from insects - bee, mosquito, from plants - oak, birch, reed, reed.

Supernatural beings are represented based on the material of Russian fairy tales by a vast group of anthropomorphic characters (Yaga, Morozko, hero, sorcerer, demon, unclean, witch, sorceress, enchantress, etc.). It should be noted, however, that the appearance of supernatural beings is very often vague. Based on their names (Snake, Voron Voronovich, Whirlwind, etc.), one can conclude that they are non-anthropomorphic, however, the multi-headed Serpent of Russian fairy tales is often depicted as a horseman rather than a dragon, and Shmat-razum or Sura are invisible servants - in general, as if devoid of flesh14.

The uncertainty of external appearance is compensated by the clear fixation of gender (male/female opposition) and age (adult/child and old/young oppositions) for the vast majority of fairy tale characters.

The non-marking of the gender of any character is extremely rare, in particular, the gender may not be recorded when it comes to a baby: a nanny takes a child into the forest to a lynx mother, replaced by a witch (AT 409), duckling children come to their father’s yard and the stepmother-witch (AT 403 B) and in some other plot types. Children here are more of an attribute of the mother, a sign of motherhood, and not an independent character. They appear in the “identification test” similar to a mark or a “cherished” object (ring, scarf), by which the desired character is recognized, but unlike them they carry information not about victory in the main test, but about “trouble”: about substitution, deception, deception, bewitchment (the only exception in this case is the motive of “searching for the culprit,” where children are proof that the living water and rejuvenating apples were obtained by the youngest of the brothers). It is significant that when the “information about the substitution” unfolds into a whole plot device (the stepmother seeks to kill the ducklings singing about their mother, among the ducklings there is a younger one - a “little one” who manages to save himself and his brothers), i.e., young children act as an independent character, the fixation of gender is consistently carried out.

Almost all supernatural creatures have male and female versions: sorcerer - witch, sorcerer - sorceress, witch - devil (demon, unclean), Yaga - Morozko, hero - hero. With less certainty, they can be classified by age groups, although here too there is a quite noticeable tendency to contrast the old sorcerer, grandfather Ox, the old man “as big as a fingernail, with a beard as long as an elbow,” Copper forehead, Vodyanoy, Yaga with the young “heroes” Vernigora, Vernidub, Dugyne , Adopted son, etc.; a witch or sorceress is also usually "old", in contrast to the "young" sorceress or enchantress. People are clearly divided into age groups: old man - old woman, young man - girl, boy - girl.

Animals are also quite consistently endowed with signs of gender and age: honey - after all - a bear - a bear cub, a raven - a crow - a crow; lion - lioness - lion cub, horse - mare - foal, falcon, sparrow, eagle, but duck, dove, dove, swan.

Accordingly, when a person transforms into an animal, their gender correspondence is usually observed: the snake, wolf, goat, falcon, eagle, raven are sworn princes; duck, swan, bear, lynx, etc. - princesses.

The age characteristic is very significant for the nature of the character’s functioning. The “old” usually act as testers or advisers, the “young” - in the role of the hero or his rivals, and for the child hero the range of actions is limited to the movement from “losing home” to “returning home,” while for an adult “loss family" is compensated by the "creation of a new family", i.e., by marriage15.

The absence of signs of gender and age in a group of characters represented by miraculous objects significantly narrows the scope of their functioning, limiting them to the role of a miraculous remedy and, less often, an assistant.

Further distribution of the characters of a fairy tale can be carried out using a system of signs that describe the modes of the internal and external states of the individual, as well as those associated with evaluative categories. These are the oppositions alive/dead, healthy/sick, sleepy/awake, whole/dismembered, true/transformed, visible/invisible, strong/weak, wise/foolish, kind/evil, beautiful/ugly, clean/dirty, big/small.

The opposition alive/dead permeates numerous situations in fairy tales, where the hero is threatened with death (the witch wants to fry the children, the snake swallows the heroes, the witch drowns her sister Alyonushka, turns the hero into stone) or a pest is punished (the hero executes his false wife, kills the Snake, puts him in the oven Yaga, sorcerer, etc.). This also includes the motif of “temporary death and revival.”

The dead is personified in anthropomorphic creatures of both sexes - the dead, ghouls, vampires (dead hero; girl rising from the coffin), in the form of birds (crows), body parts (skull, bones, death's head). The sign of the death of a character should often be the heart and liver - these receptacles of the soul, the center of life. The operators of killing and reviving are a wide group of magical objects: a needle, a hairpin, living and dead water, poison, a dead tooth or hair. We find a whole chain of incarnations of the external soul of Koshchei the Immortal in the motive of the search for his death (oak - chest - hare - duck - egg - needle).

Often, temporary death is equivalent to sleep (the sleeping princess), and sleep is given as temporary death (for example, the heroic sleep of a hero after defeating an enemy or formulas like “how long did I sleep” after being revived). The state of sleep, like the state of death, occurs as a result of the use of special operators: a sleeping potion, a pin, a charmed apple, it is induced by the Cat Bayun, a magic harp. The snakes turn into a crib, intending to tear the heroes apart “by poppy seed”; the witch (or her daughter Irina soft feather bed) invites the heroes, puts them to bed, and then throws them into the cellar or kills them.

Illness and health are embodied in objects such as fruits: rejuvenating apples, wonderful berries or pears that cause health or illness (horns grow from them, in this case the hero pretends to be a doctor); the princess’s illness may be the result of the fact that she is tormented at night by demonic creatures (devils, Serpents, Yaga), Princess Nesmeyana is sick, the hero’s unfaithful sister or mother pretends to be sick, sending him in search of a cure (dust from a wonderful mill; wolf, bear and lion milk).

The dead, sleepy, sick people require a certain service from other characters: the hero spends the night at his father’s grave, buries the dead man, saves a half-dead dog or cat from death, preserves and buries the bones of the dead man, from which a tree or bush (a branch or sliver) then grows such a tree can again turn into a revived hero).

This change of appearance when revived transforms the opposition alive/dead into the opposition whole/dismembered. The dismemberment of the body is identical to murder (the stepmother orders the stepdaughter’s wonderful cow to be slaughtered; the heroine is taken into the forest, where she is to be slaughtered and her heart and liver are brought as proof of her death), and the body collected from pieces becomes alive again after sprinkling it with healing and living water. Murder may consist of tearing the body into pieces: a witch is executed by tying her to the tail of a horse and scattering her body “across an open field”; the defeated Serpent is cut down, burned, and the ashes are scattered to the wind. Final, rather than temporary, death occurs only when a character is “scattered into a poppy seed” or burned. Until then, each of the surviving parts can, through a chain of transformations, again turn into a whole and living body or transfer its basic property to a new, so to speak, owner. For example, the murder of a wonderful boy is planned solely because the one who eats his heart will learn to unravel dreams; a wonderful chicken is cut, since it is known that “whoever eats its head will become a king, and its heart will become a rich man.”

The dismembered body is the source of numerous characters, since each part of it can function independently in the tale. Finist's feather from the clear falcon, brought by the father of his youngest daughter, turns into himself; The mare's head tests the stepdaughter; the death's head becomes the source of a miraculous pregnancy; hands serve; the finger comes to life and turns into a boy; a wing of a golden-finned bream, eaten by a maid, as well as its entire body, fried and served to the childless queen, cause the birth of miraculous heroes. Metonymy here becomes a consistent technique that allows the production of new characters: a pea, a berry, skin, skin, branch, rib, hair, wool - all these and many other parts of the body of a person, animal or plant cause the birth, resurrection, disappearance of a character, serve for his challenge (Sivko-Burko appears after the hero sets fire to the hairs left for him). Severed fingers, belts cut from the backs of false heroes, Snake tongues and other parts of the body serve as signs with the help of which the hero proves that it was he who accomplished the feat (defeated the Snake, obtained curiosities).

Quite a lot of collisions are grouped around self-mutilation: a man as big as a fingernail, a beard as big as an elbow, or Yaga mutilate his brothers; the princess orders Uncle Katoma's legs to be cut off; the maid cuts out the princess's eyes; the evil wife orders her sister-in-law's hands to be cut off, etc. The fairy tale is replete with characters who bear signs of mutilation (Kosoruchka, the blind, the fingerless). Characters marked with some kind of injury or, conversely, endowed with “extra” body parts, often have miraculous properties or are supernatural creatures (Dashing One-Eyed, Many-Headed Serpent, Three-Eyed, a horse with twelve wings, etc.).

The opposition true/transformed is associated with numerous forms of change in appearance, which either the character himself resorts to, or these changes are the result of bewitchment. The serpent turns into a golden goat, a beautiful youth; the princess turns herself and her husband into a well and a ladle, into a church and a priest; snakes turn into a garden, a well, a crib, a boy learns from a sorcerer to take the form of various animals, a horse or Gray wolf turns into a cage with a firebird, a horse, a beauty, the hero takes the form of a mosquito, a fly, etc. Baba Yaga imitates the voice of his mother , specially forging it at a blacksmith and making it look like the “subtle” voice of a person; a little boy exchanges his brothers' caps for those of the witch's daughters. There are many forms of camouflage. To recognize the desired object, special signaling objects (spangle, fly and other marks) are used.

The visible/invisible opposition is embodied in such characters as invisible servants: Nobody, Saura, Gurey, Murza, Shmat-razum, in the invisible hat.

Evaluative features, like modes of states, relate to the inner world of a character or to his appearance. Here, too, there are preferential correlations: in Russian fairy tales, anthropomorphic creatures are more often good or evil, wise or stupid,16 a person, an animal, and an object can be beautiful or ugly, big or small, clean or dirty.

The opposition good/evil is very significant for a fairy tale, since it is these signs that serve as the basis for dividing characters into heroes, those who are on his side (donor, helper) and his antagonists: an evil old woman, but a kind sorceress; the negative member of the opposition is personified in such anthropomorphic characters as Likho, the evil one. But basically this opposition marks the rules of behavior of the characters, that is, it is rather of a moral and ethical nature, which is associated with the leading role it plays in the preliminary test (the good hero spares the prisoner, feeds the hungry, helps the weak, the evil false hero of this does not make or receive a miracle cure).

The opposition wise/foolish is associated with such characters as a sage, an old sorcerer, a teacher, an expert, the Wise One, a wise child with the gift of resolving dreams (which translates him into the category of wonderful characters, since the “norm”, specially fixed by fairy-tale formulas, is the wisdom of old people: “Old people are cunning and shrewd” - Af. 222), but a stupid devil or a giant. Ivan the Fool is contrasted with his “smart” brothers or sons-in-law, and here the hero’s “stupidity” is one of the forms of his “low visibility”. Wisdom is often interpreted in fairy tales as cunning; “to make wise” means “to harm”: “Well,” the princess thinks, “when he’s got his legs back, then there’s no point in tricking him anymore” (Af. 199). Sometimes the hero also turns out to be cunning, and precisely in those situations when he himself harms his opponent: the smart Tereshechka pretends to be inept, ignorant, stupid and, by cunningly forcing Yaga to show him how to sit on a shovel, destroys the antagonist. Wisdom can also act as “witchcraft”, “knowledge” (cf. the motive of learning a wonderful skill from a forest sage or a competition in wisdom between a sorcerer and a hero, between a “wise” bride asking riddles and contenders for her hand).

The signs of strong/weak are parallel in some respects to wisdom/stupidity, defining the properties not of spiritual, but of physical strength. These signs are embodied in such characters as the hero, hero, strongman, but Zamoryshek; a heroic horse, but a lousy foal; army is a countless force, an army; in wonderful objects: strong and weak water, a wonderful club, a sword, a stick and a broom, a wonderful shirt in which the hero is invincible. The implementation of this opposition is the motive of testing strength: lift a stone or the head of the Serpent, throw a club, defeat the enemy in battle, tame a horse, withstand the bride’s handshake (“... for the first three nights she will torture your strength, lay her hand on her and begin to press very, very hard; You will never be able to bear it!" - Af. 199).

Evaluative features of beautiful/ugly, clean/dirty, big/small are often recorded in the name of a character: Anastasia the Beautiful, Vasilisa Krasa, Beauty the Beloved, Dunka the Embellished, Monster, Pan Pleshevich, Neumoyka, The Little Humpbacked Horse, Boy the Big Thumb, Little Man the Big Thing , Vanyusha the Little One, Tiny Khavroshechka, the Giant, etc. At the same time, the ugly, dirty turns out to be a temporary low visibility of the hero, “not promising”, which changes to positive as a result of miraculous help (“Vanyusha got into one ear, got out of the other and became so handsome that you can’t say it in a fairy tale or describe it with a pen”), or this is the result of deliberate dressing up in ugly clothes (pork cap, bull’s bladder, rags) or a prescribed ban (“no bathing for three years”). Small is also a low visibility of the hero , endowed with wonderful properties (wisdom, daring: “small, but daring”).

Group II. Family status.

Signs of marital status are built on top of signs of gender and age. This is clearly reflected in traditional formulas such as: “Whoever it is... come out here; if the person is old, you will be my dear father; if you are middle-aged, you will be a beloved brother; if you are my equal, you will be a dear friend” (Af. 222) or “ If a man is old, be my father, and an old woman, be my mother; if a man is young, be a dear friend, and a fair maiden, be my sister" (Af. 213). Indeed, “whoever the character is,” he is either a relative or in-law, or impersonates them, or turns out to be one. Therefore, almost all supernatural beings, people or animals, can be endowed with signs of family status.

As a matter of fact, father, mother, brother, sister, son, daughter, groom, bride, husband, wife, father-in-law - these are the main characters of a fairy tale. Almost any fairy tale begins with a description of a family (“Once upon a time there lived an old man and an old woman, they had a son, Ivashechka...”, “In a certain kingdom, in a certain state, there lived a man, and he had three sons...”, etc. ), in which, as a rule, there are parents and children. Parents are sometimes presented as childless, followed by a description of the miraculous birth of a child. Equally, children may turn out to be orphans (it is reported that their parents have died); There are options for openings in which the death of either the father or the mother is recorded.

If from the point of view of the plot all these situations were considered as variants of “preliminary trouble”, “absence”, “shortage”, then from the point of view of the tasks of describing the characters it is important to find out what characteristics distinguish relatives (father, mother, daughter, son, stepdaughter, orphan , stepmother) or relatives (father-in-law, father-in-law, husband, wife, fiancee, groom, son-in-law, daughter-in-law) from each other in order to understand why this or that character is capable of functioning in one or another role.

The nomenclature of kinship terms found in fairy tales is quite stable. Two generations are clearly contrasted: the generation of parents and the generation of children17.

Parents and children can be natural (father, mother, son, daughter) and step-children (stepmother, stepdaughter, stepson)18.

Relations between relatives of the same generation are determined by the following contrasts: for the generation of parents, this is the difference between the old father and mother, who often appear as a single character (“parents”, “old people”), and the young, who usually appear in a fairy tale as husband and wife ; for a generation of children, this is a contrast between older brothers and sisters and younger ones, and between siblings and stepbrothers.

A special group consists of childless parents and orphans (foundlings). In addition, there are special terms for recording non-family relationships (twin brothers, named brother or sister, godson).

The distribution of relatives is also carried out due to the same oppositions: the older generation is father-in-law, father-in-law, mother-in-law, mother-in-law, the younger generation is son-in-law, daughter-in-law, daughter-in-law. Within one generation, there are distinctions between close (husband, wife) and distant (brother-in-law, sister-in-law) relatives. Extra-family relationships are specifically recorded (extra- or pre-marital partners: cohabitant, lover, bride, groom). The absence of one of the spouses is marked in terms such as widow and widower.

It is the relationships of relatives or in-laws that determine the main conflicts of a fairy tale. These are, first of all, conflicts within the family between parents and children (an incestuous father expels his daughter; a cheating mother tries to harass her son; a stepmother persecutes her stepdaughter), between siblings (older brothers or sisters compete with a younger brother or younger sister, relatives with their stepbrothers; brother incestuously pursues his sister or cuts off her hands at the behest of his wife; the sister kills her brother or tries to destroy him by conspiring with her lover) and between spouses (an evil wife tries to harass her husband; the husband, by the slander of envious people, expels his wife; the wife or husband leaves the spouse after breaking a taboo) .

These conflicts, as we see, are often based on the opposition of family and inherent relationships: a stepmother, a mother’s or sister’s lover, a brother’s wife bring discord into intrafamily relationships, being a source of antagonism between relatives; such is the nature of incestuous claims; Relationships between same-sex siblings are usually of the nature of sexual rivalry. Outside of this opposition, relationships within the family are of the nature of mutual assistance and support: parents love children; the father marries his daughter, marries his sons, leaves an inheritance; the deceased father rewards his youngest son with a wonderful horse, and the deceased mother helps her orphaned daughter; the son goes to get medicine for his sick father or saves his kidnapped mother from a violent marriage with the Serpent; brother goes to rescue his missing sister and older brothers; sister saves brother from a witch, etc., etc.

Relatives and in-laws make up the main core of the characters in a fairy tale, although figures such as Baba Yaga, the Serpent Gorynych, Koschey the Immortal, the winged horse or the swan girl seem more expressive and more specific to this genre at first glance. Meanwhile, Zmey-Gorynych kidnaps the girl as his wife; The sea king to whom the hero ends up is the father of his bride (“... and in the palace lives the father of the red maiden, the king of that underground side” - Af. 191); the ataman, the Serpent, the clerk, the overseas prince - all of them are the “wrong” husbands of the mother (sister or wife) of the main character (fairy tales like “Animal’s Milk”); a servant, a witch's daughter, a water carrier, a general, etc. pose as the bride or groom, respectively; an enchanted princess, a pig's cover, a duck girl, a monster, a clear falcon, a snotty goat, and so on. At the end of the fairy tale they turn out to be the desired “betrothed”.

Signs of related or inherent status turn out to be important not only for relationships between people, but also for relationships between supernatural beings, between animals, and also both with humans.

In fairy tales about the adventures of a hero or heroine, the forest demon often uses terms of kinship or properties. Sending the stepdaughter to Morozko is framed as a trip to the groom (“Old man, take Marfutka to the groom; look, you old bastard, go straight ahead, and then turn off the road to the right, to the forest, - you know, straight to that big pine tree that stands on a hillock, and give Marfutka for Frost" - Af. 95). Baba Yaga imitates her mother’s voice, luring Tereshechka to the shore, or turns out to be the mother of the hero’s wise wife (fairy tales like “Go there, I don’t know where”).

This tendency is so strong that it extends not only to the relationship of supernatural creatures and animals with humans (Koshey the Immortal, the Serpent - the heroine’s “temporary”, “wrong” husbands. The sea king is the hero’s father-in-law, the swan maiden is the bride, the frog princess is the wife, Baba Yaga - aunt, sorcerer - “imaginary father” or future father-in-law, Raven, Falcon - Shaurya, witch - mother-in-law, Student, Obedalo, Opivalo or Dubynya, Usynya, Vernigora, etc. - sworn brothers, etc.), but also on relationships within the world of non-anthropomorphic creatures.

Thus, grateful animals in fairy tales like “Animal’s Milk” put at the hero’s disposal not themselves, but their cubs: “Immediately she milked the milk and gave a bear cub in gratitude” (Af. 205). The magic mare, tamed by Ivanushka the Fool, pays him off by giving him her foal: “Well, good fellow, when you managed to sit on me, then take and own my foals” (Aph. 105). To revive the hero, the assistant sends Raven for living and dead water, but sending him, as a rule, is associated with pressure on his “parental feelings” - the Little Crow is brought into a helpless (captive, dead) state. The pursuit of the heroes in the Kalinov Bridge fairy tales is carried out by the wives (sisters, sisters-in-law) of the murdered Serpents. The goblin, Copper forehead in the fairy tales “The Wonderful Captive” often does not reward the hero himself, but invites his daughters to do this: “The goblin-man has three daughters; he asks the eldest: “What will you award to the king’s son for taking me out of the iron pillar?” released?" The daughter says: “I’ll give him a self-assembled tablecloth” (Aph. 123). The eagle, raised by the hero, burns down the houses of his sisters because they did not receive his savior well. Baba Yaga in fairy tales like “Tereshechka” has a daughter, whom she orders to fry the hero.

This is not how relationships are built between supernatural beings or animals and humans. The marriage relationship between them turns out to be “correct” when the applicant is a person. Such a marriage is presented as desirable and normal, although the hero is often subjected to difficult trials from the demonic bride and her relatives (primarily the father), who seek to destroy the applicant. When a demonic creature forcibly abducts a woman, marries her by mutual consent or through deception (the witch gives her daughter in marriage to the prince), such a situation is considered by the fairy tale as a conflict. Kinship relations between these groups of characters are assessed, as a rule, positively, even if this kinship arises on the basis of marital relations (Yaga-mother-in-law helps her daughter’s husband; animal sons-in-law save the hero).

Group III. Class status.

This group of characteristics of characters includes signs of class affiliation: Tsar (queen, prince, princess), Tsarenko, king (prince, princess), nobleman (Danila the nobleman), master, merchant, priest, peasant; profession or craft: soldier, archer, messenger (Marco-runner), gardener, hunter, hunter, shepherd, water carrier, general, clerk, cook (Cook), blacksmith, Kozhemyaka, as well as servant (maid), master, worker; property status: poor man (Vanka Golyi), rich man (Marco the rich), thief (Klimka the thief), debtor, etc.

The character's class status does not play as significant a role as family or individual status. The signs of this sphere of meaning serve only for additional distribution of some of the characters discussed above.

The most important division here should probably be considered the peasant/royal opposition, since a number of tales realize the contrast between the low class status of the character at the beginning of the tale and the high position that he achieves at the end (from a peasant's son to the king's son-in-law). However, this opposition forms a collision much less often than it might seem at first glance. If, for example, an evil wife pursues her husband because of his peasant origin (the “Magic Ring” type), then, not to mention the fact that the conflict itself is of a family nature (the wife pursues her husband) and is only additionally motivated by low origin spouse, this situation can also be interpreted as a recoding in social terms of the situation of antagonism between a wife of wonderful origin (hero, the Wise) and her “simple” husband (type 519 AT).

The same can probably be said about fairy tales where the hero is a soldier19, an archer, a groom, a shepherd, which parallel the stories about a heroic hero freeing a girl, or about a younger brother whose exploits his older brothers are trying to appropriate for themselves. For the heroine, the substitution of a maid for the princess (AT 533 A) finds its counterpart in the substitution of the witch's daughter for the true wife.

In most texts, the peasant and the royal are independent, rather local, spheres, within each of which the plot develops. This, apparently, gave rise to the traditional division of fairy tales into “royal” and peasant tales.”

Relations within the peasant environment almost completely coincide with relations within the family. The royal sphere, in addition to the fact that it is subordinated to the general “family orientation” of the fairy tale genre as a whole, has its own additional divisions. Here it is quite easy to distinguish a group of main and non-main (subordinates). The former include the royal family, the latter - the royal associates (boyars, Duma, minister, governor, general). In addition to the king's henchmen, the sphere of the royal house also includes servants (servant, footman, servant, mother, uncle, maid, etc.). The relationship between the king's henchmen and the king's servants is of a subordinate nature (cf. "... the bride with her nannies and mothers and the king with his ministers" - Af. 191).

Strictly speaking, only belonging to the royal family serves as a sign of the high status of the character; all other class divisions hierarchically divide the characters into main and subordinates, masters and servants: a minister, governor or general are subordinate to the king; They, in turn, are subordinate to the archer, soldier, groom, etc., under whose mask the hero of the fairy tale often hides.

The division between masters and servants can also be seen in the group of characters not associated with the royal court. The goblin, Baba Yaga are often depicted as the “masters” of animals: “The old woman came out onto the porch, shouted in a loud voice, and suddenly - out of nowhere! - all sorts of animals came running, all sorts of birds flew in...” (Af. 112). Yaga is served by a cat, a birch tree, and a gate, which, for their kind attitude towards them, go over to the side of their stepdaughter (Af. 103). It is precisely as a “servant” that a wonderful helper is sometimes described. The father hands over a wonderful horse to Ivan the Fool with the words: “And you, horse, serve him as you served me” (Af. 179); Shmat-mind is called the “invisible servant”; Uncle Katoma is a wonderful servant, bequeathed to Ivan Tsarevich by his parents, etc. The role of the king as a “master” is especially clearly visible when it comes to the “main thing” in the animal kingdom (snake King, bird King, King over all crayfish and etc.).

The opposition rich/poor serves as an option for high or low status. Often the happy ending to Morozko's stepdaughter tales is that she receives a "rich dowry" or marries a "rich man." The wonderful property of some magical helpers or objects is that they bring wealth: a self-shaking wallet, a self-assembled tablecloth, a horse scattering gold, a chicken carrying semi-precious stones, etc.

The distribution of characters according to their professional affiliation or craft is usually associated with the place of their activity. Maids, mothers, uncles, guards, cooks, cooks, cattlemen, etc. are localized around the royal choir; shepherd, gardener, swineherd, water carrier, farm laborer - in the garden and in the field; tailor, shoemaker, goldsmith, carpenter, shipbuilder, mason, butcher, innkeeper, etc. - in the city; hunter, hunter are associated with the forest.

The profession of a blacksmith stands apart in a fairy tale. This character is most closely associated with the miraculous: he forges wonderful weapons for heroes, forges a “subtle voice” or teeth for Yaga, makes copper, iron and tin rods, with the help of which only one can pacify a demonic creature (bayun cat, sorceress, ferocious horse etc.), while representatives of other professions are mainly busy in a fairy tale with their usual craft.

True, the craft itself can have the character of a “wonderful skill” in a fairy tale, and a number of characters represent precisely this ability. This includes carpenters who build an airplane ship, a wonderful palace or a bridge in one night; gardeners planting a wonderful garden; shoemakers and tailors making outlandish outfits. All these “workers” are close in their role in the plot to the “wonderful object”, i.e. they are a kind of anthropomorphized tools (cf. the wonderful ax “a blunder - a ship came out” - Af. 212 and completely similar to it in function " carpenters-workers" who appear at the call of the mistress - Af. 224). Indicative in this regard are cases when the very existence of a character depends entirely on his craft: old seamstresses will live until they break a chest of needles and sew up a chest of threads.

Another group of characters who embody a miraculous skill are such “artists” as the walker, the archer, and the astrologer.

The main characters in a number of fairy tales are also “craftsmen”: a wise wife embroiders a wonderful carpet; the stepdaughter is weaving a cloth “so thin that you can thread it through a needle instead of a thread” (Af.104); The frog princess bakes better bread than other daughters-in-law. The soldier turns out to be the “master” of playing cards, dancing or playing the harp.

The ability to dance, play musical instruments, and play tricks belongs to the category of those that are often classified in fairy tales as “cunning science.” Musicians, guslars, buffoons approach wonderful, supernatural characters capable of bewitching, bewitching, inducing sleep, or, conversely, making people dance until they go crazy and half to death. Musical instruments have the same ability (samogud gusli, which induces an irresistible sleep, violin, balalaika, drum, pipe, etc.), which make up a significant part of the arsenal of wonderful objects in a fairy tale. Interesting in this regard is the connection between buffoons, guslars, etc. with the motif of the “invisible presence”: the hero of the fairy tale in the second turn often hides under their mask at the feast; during the dancing of the frog princess or the singing of the Snotty Goat, the true appearance of these disguised characters is revealed20.

Craftsmen, handicraftsmen, hard workers are contrasted with “lazy”, “careless”: the stepmother’s own daughters “all they knew was to sit at the gate, look at the street, and Tiny Khavroshechka worked for them, sheathed them, spun and weaved for them” (Af . 100).

Among representatives of various professions, as well as among representatives of the class hierarchy, there are main and assistants: master, elder, owner, but worker, assistant, apprentice. Under the mask of the latter, the hero of a fairy tale also sometimes hides: “At that time, Ivan Tsarevich comes to his state, hires himself as a worker from one old man and sends him to the Tsar” (Af. 130), or: “Here Ivan Tsarevich walks around the bazaar; the shoemaker comes towards you... “Take me as your apprentice...” (Aph. 129).

The workers in the fairy tale are contrasted with tramps: the tavern's goal, wretched people, wanderers, beggars, drunkards, robbers (the chief among the latter is the ataman). Tramps in fairy tales are often endowed with supernatural powers (most often miraculous knowledge); a beggar tells the hero where to find a magic horse, passersby tell a cure for infertility, a wonderful hero is found among the tavern's goli, etc. Perhaps this is due to the lack of strict spatial confinement for these characters (cf. a wonderful stove, a crib or a forge in a field , the supernaturalness of which is also connected with the fact that they are “out of place”).

Group IV. Localization.

The concentration of most of the collisions of a fairy tale around the path leads to the fact that the plot scheme corresponds to a fairly stable sequence: a house and a road and a forest and another kingdom21.

Considered in a paradigmatic aspect, these locus "s fall into two groups: one's place (dwelling: hut, palace; one's kingdom) and someone else's place (road, another kingdom, someone else's home). The necessity of one's place, at least as a starting point, creates the opportunity to identify groups of characters according to their local location.

Relatives stay in the house. This is either a hut where a peasant family lives, or a palace inhabited, in addition to the royal family, by the king’s associates and servants22.

A field or road is the place of residence of such characters as beggars, walking stones, in the field there is a wonderful stove, a crib, an apple tree, Sivko-burko also lives here, fellow travelers, shepherds, etc. can be met.

The forest is the location of a fairly large group of forest demons (Baba Yaga, Leshy, Morozko, the Bear), their “servants” (mice, cat, dog, etc.), helpful animals (Gray wolf, wonderful “hunt”, she-bear, lioness , she-wolf, etc.).

Another kingdom appears in fairy tales in three main versions: the royal palace, the “animal” kingdom and the distant “thirtieth” kingdom (upper and lower: underground, underwater, on a mountain, etc.). This is the place of potential marriage partners.

The closer royal palace, in the courtyard of which there is a mansion with the princess imprisoned in it, as a “house” suggests the presence of the princess’s father in it (= the king testing the suitors), and as a “palace” - boyars, servants, musicians at the feast and etc.

The more distant “animal” kingdom is the location of wonderful marriage partners. It can appear in a forest version, where a hunter aims at a bird, which then becomes his wonderful wife (fairy tales like “Go there, I don’t know where”), in a palace version, in which an enchanted marriage partner is placed (a blackened princess, a prince turned into a monster, the maiden king is the keeper of living water and rejuvenating apples, a hero, etc.), in the version of the underwater or underground kingdom, where the hero meets a duck or swan girl, or where he ends up in search of a missing wife (husband). Here the hero will have to undergo a test from the father of his “totemic” betrothed - the Sea King, the King of the Unbaptized Forehead, and so on. In addition, the hero’s “wonderful sons-in-law” arrive from this “animal” kingdom, take his sisters as wives and become his “sworn brothers” (Eagle, Falcon, Raven), as well as a wonderful groom - Finist the clear falcon.

The even more distant “thirtieth” kingdom is the place of localization of the main “opponents” - the Serpent Gorynych, Koshchei, Whirlwind, who forcibly abduct women from “our” world as concubines, and their rationalized variants (devils, overseas princes, infidels).

Thus, the characters discussed in the previous sections are confined to certain, “their” places. Moreover, these “places” themselves serve not only as attributes (forest animals are contrasted with domestic animals, sea reptiles and fish are opposed to birds of the air; cf. above, about the distribution of servants and artisans at the place of their activity), but are also embodied in a series of special characters. Getting into someone else's locus is associated with the need to overcome the boundary between parts of the fairy-tale space, one of the main features of which is the discreteness of its individual “places”.

First of all, this applies specifically to the border areas of fairy-tale space, personified in a vast group of watchmen and guardians.

The privacy of a dwelling can be represented in the form of a natural fence (fence, wall), but even they often function in a fairy tale precisely as a character: gates and doors themselves may or may not allow a “stranger” into the home; the walls are often equipped with buzzing strings, warning the owners of an alien entering the palace; the hut on chicken legs turns only after the spell formula is pronounced. The “house” can also be guarded by special guards: at the entrance to the chambers of the twelve-headed serpent there are “huge pillars instead of gates, and chained to them... two terrible lions” (Aph. 131); the royal palace is guarded by guards, guards, guards, etc.

Not only the dwelling itself, the house, but also the entire “kingdom” appears as closed in a fairy tale, and this applies both to the kingdom of the hero and to the “other kingdom”23. The border of the “kingdoms” is also personified both in the form of anthropomorphic creatures and guard animals, and in the form of objects and “places”. For example, “at the turn” of the kingdom of the red maiden, from whom “cursing water pours from her feet,” “a wild man stands - as tall as a forest, as thick as a large shock, holding a stocky oak tree in his hands” (Af. 173); A yaga or witch guards the kingdom of the Tsar-Maiden; The serpent guards the entrance to the “other kingdom”; this entrance can be blocked with a stone, which only a hero can lift (Aph. 128); in the same role as a fence, an obstacle, a mountain, river or forest acts (cf. the transformation of a towel into a river, a comb into a dense forest, blocking the path of the pursuer).

The closed “house” and “kingdom” in the fairy tale are contrasted with open places. This is primarily an open field and a road. The peculiarity of these locus is that this border strip does not belong to anyone. “Own” and “alien” kingdoms have a house as their center (“in some kingdom” there is a hut or a palace, in the forest there is a hut, a dugout, etc.). etc., in the underwater kingdom - a castle or mansion), the inhabitants of which are the “masters” of this locus. The road and the open field have no owners24, and the character located in these locuses is deprived of “his” place, delocalized and either has unlimited freedom of movement or is looking for shelter. A house never appears as such a shelter; at best, it is a tent , which usually cannot serve as a reliable shelter: a little man or Yaga freely penetrates it and maims his brothers; the hero easily kidnaps a girl from a tent. You can hide in a field only in places that are fundamentally different from an ordinary home: in a forge, in the oven, under an apple tree covering the fugitive with its branches; finding them “out of place”, dislocalization is qualified by the fairy tale as a supernatural property25 and transforms them from everyday objects into characters.

The same can be said about delocalized characters, for whom the road is their usual habitat. These are tramps, fellow travelers, guides, guides, who, not being the “masters” or “guardians” of a certain locus, have the ability to overcome the boundaries of fairy-tale space. Belonging to the space of the “road”, they are a kind of personifications of the path.

Not only anthropomorphic creatures, but also animals or objects can appear as objects that personify the path: a ferryman by the river, Usynya, a giant, helping to cross the river or sea; geese-swans, an eagle, a Mogul bird, a winged horse, a Gray wolf, delivering the hero to the thirtieth kingdom or bringing him into the “white world”; a ball or ball indicating the way to another kingdom; a magical ship or boat, running boots, wonderful shoes, a flying carpet, a chariot, a plant growing to the very sky, various kinds of tools and devices: belts, chains, claws, which “they put on their hands and feet themselves” (Aph. 128 ), etc.

Being placed in a closed or open locus, being in one's own or someone else's space determines the spatial status of the character. The princess imprisoned in a high mansion or an inaccessible castle, the children hidden in a dugout are completely isolated from “strangers.” Being in a protected place, these characters, however, are deprived of the possibility of independent movement, in contrast to the characters of open space, who do not have their own place, are delocalized: homeless, exiled, vagabonds.

Of particular interest is the local status of a character in which, having found himself in a foreign place, he is unable to leave it, i.e., a prisoner. Both the hero of a fairy tale, put, for example, in prison (Aph. 120), and an alien from another world can be captured: a goblin-man is imprisoned in an iron pillar (Aph. 126); in a wonderful closet there is a chained Serpent, Koschey or a winged sorceress; the flying heroic horse - a character for whom open space is his “home” - is placed in a deep basement or dungeon.

Sometimes delocalization in a fairy tale is associated with captivity: the queen and the child “up to their elbows in gold, with a bright moon on their foreheads” are expelled, having previously been imprisoned in a barrel and set sail on the sea.

Not only people, animals or objects have the ability to change place in a fairy tale, but also the locus themselves: the fellows from the ring move the palace from their kingdom to someone else’s and back (Aph. 191); the “alien” thirtieth kingdom, folded in the form of a golden one, silver or copper egg, moves to the hero’s “own” world.

The distribution of characters into groups, made above, is based on the opposition of the main four semantic spheres: individual (I), family (II), class (III), spatial (IV).

However, these areas of meaning form a certain hierarchy in the fairy tale; they are, as it were, nested within each other. The divisions of space are determined by the main coordinates: “external” space (state, kingdom, forest, road) and “internal” space (palace, hut). The “dwelling” in turn serves as a container (i.e., something “external”) for the family; it, in turn, “accommodates” the individual with his “external” (body) and “internal” characteristics. Such is the relationship between the container and the contents, and the starting point, personified, for example, in a pea or an egg, is a container whose contents can unfold again: the pea turns into a person, the egg into a kingdom.

Being a personification of a certain semantic sphere, the character of a fairy tale is endowed, as already noted, with features that realize not just one, but several or even all four areas of meaning at once. The characters included in group I are specified as relatives or in-laws (II), may receive additional class characteristics (III) and are localized in a specific place in the fairy-tale space (IV). For example, Pokatygoroshek, who in terms of individual status has the signs of a “mighty” hero, as a miraculously born son finds himself placed in the semantic sphere of the family, which, in turn, is interpreted as peasant or royal, i.e. interpreted in a certain class key and included in the space of his own world, opposed to the “alien” world of the Serpent, who kidnapped his sister and killed Pokatygoroshka’s brothers. Similarly, the Serpent - a supernatural demonic creature (I) - acts in the status of an “wrong” marriage partner (II) and is the king or master (III) of the distant thirtieth kingdom (IV).

This “deployment” of the signs of individual status allows us to consider the character of a fairy tale not only as a separate bundle of signs, but as one of the links in the chain of inter-plot transformations.

For example, Baba Yaga, interpreted in individual status as a “supernatural female being of the older generation,” can be defined in terms of her family status as Yagishna’s mother or the hero’s mother-in-law; from the point of view of class status - as “the mistress of all creatures”; from the point of view of spatial location - like a character in the forest. The witch will differ from her by one attribute, who, while retaining all these attributes, is localized not in the forest, but in “another kingdom.” The next link in this chain can be considered a sorceress who has the ability to “turn” a person into an animal and replaces the hero’s true bride or wife with her daughter, but is localized in “her kingdom.” The stepmother is a representative of the “stranger,” but within the family.

The mother, personifying area II and interpreted here as “the oldest direct female relative,” constitutes the next node in the chain of transformations. As an ancestor, she can act in the individual sphere of meaning as a deceased person (in this case, she endows her daughter with a wonderful helper or gives her wise advice). In other cases, she does not possess the signs of a supernatural being. Deprived of the signs of the “miraculous,” the mother, as the mistress of the Ataman or the Snake (“wrong” family status), can nevertheless create a situation of a “stranger” entering the “house” (fairy tales like “Animal’s Milk”). This case can be considered as a transition from the stepmother. Depending on the additional attributes that this character is endowed with, the following chain arises. The mother's family status may not be “wrong”, but “incomplete”: she is an “honest widow”, whose usual class status is peasant, and whose property status is poverty. Relationship status can also be “incomplete”: an old woman is depicted in a fairy tale as “childless” or having lost children. In this case, she becomes the mother of a miraculously born son, and her class affiliation varies (it is either a “poor old woman” or a “childless queen”). In all cases, the mother is localized in “her” kingdom.

The transitional link is the queen mother, for whom “beauty” and “youth” serve as signs of individual status. She is either kidnapped by the Serpent or replaced with the daughter of a witch. In both cases, the emphasis on young age transfers her from the class of mothers to the class of wives, who form the next node in the chain of transformations.

The wife (“younger female relative”), from the point of view of her individual status, can be characterized as “wise”, “wonderful” (inner world), inherited by the hero in the form of a bird, fish or frog (exterior). These signs bring us back to the group of supernatural characters who are contrasted with Yaga and her variants as younger than older. Indeed, a wonderful wife in some fairy tales is depicted as a witch, sorceress, or demonic creature seeking to destroy her husband. Both the “wise wife” and the “witch wife”, from the point of view of their initial spatial status, belong to a “foreign” place: a forest bird (Af. 212), a duck on the seashore (Af. 213), a raft with a golden ring caught from the river (Aph. 216), an overseas captive (Aph. 230), a frog from a swamp (Aph. 267), the mistress of a distant “other” kingdom (Aph. 198). A wise wife, in addition, is often depicted as a “skillswoman” (weaving, baking bread, etc.).

The “evil wife” can be considered as a transformation of a sorceress wife hostile to her husband in fairy tales like “Animal’s Milk” (Aph. 205), where, similar to the “unfaithful” mother, the hero’s wife conspires with her lover to destroy her husband, or in fairy tales “ Wonderful shirt”, in which the princess wife is trying to get rid of her husband of “simple”, “peasant” origin.

Much more often, however, the “younger female in-law” is portrayed in fairy tales as a premarital partner, that is, as a bride. The attributes of this class of characters, perhaps, most fully realize all four semantic spheres. In terms of individual status, the bride can be a demonic creature (winged sorceress, ghoul, witch, devil), testing the groom and seeking to destroy him; a wise sorceress helping her future husband pass tests with her father; a swan girl turned into an animal by a victim of the machinations of a pest; petrified, blackened or, conversely, a girl of “indescribable beauty.” From the point of view of class status, she can be either a royal daughter or a poor servant who helps the hero get rid of the persecution of an evil mother or sister; often she is the “mistress” of living water and rejuvenating apples, she has wonderful servants in her possession, she has a magic book, and so on. Spatially, the bride is usually removed: she is in the thirtieth kingdom, in the underwater world, placed in a high tower. Often she is a “captive”: chained to a stone on the seashore, imprisoned in a cursed castle, etc. Such “captivity” can also be interpreted in family terms: the girl turns out to be the Serpent’s concubine, from whom the groom frees her. In general, the bride's marital status is almost invariably fixed: she is a daughter or stepdaughter.

Thus, the semantic node “bride” can serve as a transition link to the next group of characters, represented by the “younger generation of relatives” (daughter, stepdaughter), and then “siblings” (sisters).

A similar chain is formed by male characters: sorcerer - father, father - husband, husband - groom, groom - son, sons - brothers, older brothers - younger brother, younger brother - soldier or servant, servant - baby animal ("hunt") etc. etc.

When describing inter-plot transformations, we dealt with the fragmentation of a holistic form into individual features that characterize its main status, to which are added individual features that characterize a given character in terms of its status in other semantic spheres and serve as additional attributes.

As one can see, for the characters of a fairy tale, signs of family and individual status are of greater importance, and class and local signs often serve as variants of these main spheres of meaning or complement them. This is quite consistent with the general orientation of the fairy tale towards resolving the personal fate of the hero. Its “biographical nature” leads to the fact that signs of family status are consistently played out in the plot and radiate to other areas. From this point of view, all the characters in a fairy tale are easily divided into two main groups: characters whose main characteristic is family status, and characters whose main characteristic is individual status, and predominantly family characteristics are supplemented by class ones, and individual ones by local ones, which in principle corresponds to the division of all characters into “mythical” and “non-mythical”. Such a hierarchy does not exclude the need to take into account all the features inherent in a given form, since only in this case it is possible to obtain such a chain of transformations when each link differs from the previous one in only one feature.

Expanding the set of signs of individual status by building on top of them signs of family, class and spatial areas of meaning makes it possible to “generate” an infinite number of character options from a limited number of elements. The “biographical nature” of a fairy tale leads, however, to the fact that the number of features that determine the direction of the plot functioning of a given character is reduced. Indeed, it is kinship and marriage that become the harmonizing mechanism that removes the contradictions between the natural and the miraculous (the taming of a demonic bride), the anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic (the disenchantment of a marriage partner turned into a beast), the living and the dead (kinship with a dead man as the basis for receiving help from him) etc. The concentration of the action of most fairy tales around the theme of marriage leads to the fact that a character is brought to the fore, who, according to his semantic characteristics, belongs to the younger generation, representing a potential marriage partner. Just as the functions are set in relation to the hero, so the semantic features turn out to be oriented towards the younger ones in the family. They are the group of characters who usually act as the hero.

Thus, we return to the consideration of the characters in a fairy tale, the invariant forms of which were identified by V. Ya. Propp in “Morphology of a Fairy Tale.” What role a character plays does not depend on the entire set of characteristics with which he is endowed, but only on certain ones that are sufficiently stable for a given character.

So, the role of the hero is played by the youngest in the family: a son (options - a teenager, a group of boys), a younger daughter, a stepdaughter or stepson, a younger brother or sister, twin brothers. The principle of division into “older” and “younger” also applies to characters who realize the class sphere of meaning: the parent/child relationship is parallel in this aspect to the master/servant relationship. Therefore, on the border with a short story tale, a hero appears - a soldier, a servant, a groom.

The characteristics of all other characters are set precisely in relation to the status occupied by the hero.

If the hero is the “younger”, then for the character acting as a donor, the characteristics of being older and “relating to the border” of his own and someone else’s world are mandatory. In the family sphere, “elders” are interpreted as “parent”, “ancestor”, in the individual sphere - as “old people”. Indeed, very often it is these characters who endow the hero with an assistant, and in the first case it is the “afterlife” donor (deceased parents), in the second - beggars, passers-by, i.e. characters representing the “road” to someone else’s world.

The role of an assistant is always played by a character belonging to the world of the supernatural. He becomes “his own” for the hero due to the fact that he “possesses”, “possesses” him, is his “master”. Therefore, a helper is usually a servant.

The desired marriage partner (bride, groom) is always localized in a “foreign” space for the hero, interpreted both as a “different kingdom”, and as a “different” class space (Ivanushka the Fool marries the princess), and as a “different” individual status ( zoomorphic, miraculous, supernatural).

The antagonist of the hero is the saboteur and the false hero.

A false hero or rival is an untrue hero: older brothers are close to the youngest in the family in their status as “children,” but are not true younger ones; the witch's daughter is similar in age to the heroine, but she is not a “real” princess, etc.

The pest is always a “stranger” character in relation to the hero, and as a “stranger” he can represent any of the signs: the “step-mother” harasses the stepdaughter; the “stranger”, “distant” groom-Snake kidnaps the princesses; forest demon (Yaga, cannibal) lures children, etc.

The hero-centricity of a fairy tale thus leads to the fact that the semantic features, with the help of which the characters were classified and the description of their inter-plot transformations, are assessed from the point of view of their relationship to the hero and turn out to be value indicators of his movement from a negative state to a positive one. The status of any character in one or more semantic spheres is assessed as “friend” or “alien,” “high” or “low” in relation to the status occupied by the hero. In this case, any of the statuses can be assessed positively or negatively. For example, the bride’s “witchcraft” is regarded as a positive quality in the hero’s wise wife and as a negative quality in a witch. If Baba Yaga in some fairy tales acts as a kidnapper of children, and in others as a giver, then this entirely depends on what status she is in relation to the hero: in the first case she is a “stranger”, in the second she turns out to be a “relative” " relationship with the hero (Yaga-mother-in-law) or is a “borderline” character who gives the hero temporary shelter.

This feature of a fairy tale makes the structure of characters capable of intra- and inter-plot transformations and makes it possible for semantically similar figures to play a wide variety of roles in the plot (for example, mother-donor, mother-saboteur, mother-victim, etc.), which is natural , significantly increases the variability of fairy tale collisions.

So, for the character’s intra-plot functioning, it is important not only what role he plays, but also what semantic features he is endowed with, since they correspond to the conflicts in which this character takes part. They are the ones that play out in the plot, thereby defining the forms of collisions. Killing, fighting, extermination are associated with such characteristics as strong/weak, alive/dead, whole/dismembered; exile, imprisonment - with the signs of homeless, free/captive; possession, receiving, stealing - with such as rich/poor, master/servant, etc.

The semantic features of a character not only determine the nature of fairy-tale collisions, they can change during the course of the plot due to the fact that the character is a bundle of features, that is, it is a multi-component formation that easily disintegrates and is just as easily assembled into a new one. This feature of the character’s structure makes it convenient for functioning according to the laws of fairy-tale storytelling, since it turns out to be well adapted to work in a plot built on the rhythms of losses and gains.

Notes

1 Propp V. Ya. Morphology of a fairy tale. L., 1.928; V. Ya. Propp. Historical roots of fairy tales. L., 1946.

2 Propp V. Ya. Morphology of a fairy tale. Ed. 2nd. M., 1969. P. 79. Further quoted from this edition.

3 Compare: "1. The king gives the daredevil an eagle. The eagle carries the daredevil to another kingdom (171).

2. Grandfather gives Suchenka a horse. The horse will carry Suchenko to another kingdom (132).

3. The sorcerer gives Ivan a boat. The boat takes Ivan to another kingdom (138).

4. The princess gives Ivan a ring. The fellows from the ring take Ivan to another kingdom (156)," - ibid. P. 23.

4 "Russian folk tales by A. N. Afanasyev in 3 volumes." M., 1958 (hereinafter - Af.).

5 Cf.: “The storyteller is completely free to choose the nomenclature and attributes of the characters. Theoretically, freedom here is complete... It must be said, however, that the people here do not make too much use of this freedom. Just as functions are repeated, so are the characters” (Propp V I. Morphology of a fairy tale. P. 102).

We noted some fairly stable correlations in the article: Meletinsky E.M. and others. Problems of structural description of a fairy tale // "Proceedings on sign systems" IV. Tartu, 1969. pp. 121-122.

6 Wed. remark of P. G. Bogatyrev, who noted the separation of fairy-tale fiction from specific beliefs, which leads to the fact that “supernatural and fantastic creatures who are the heroes of Russian fairy tales, such as Kashey the Immortal, the Serpent Gorynyach, Baba Yaga and others, do not play any role roles in folk Russian demonology. On the contrary, its usual characters - goblin, water, brownie - are only occasionally introduced into fairy tales... These characters appear in fairy tales only to replace legendary ancient characters; such a replacement is also limited to the name of the character, whose main features are usually not are modified" (Bogatyrev P. G. Questions of the theory of folk art. M., 1971. P. 287).

7 Propp V. Ya. Historical roots of a fairy tale. P. 150.

8 “So, a horse carries the hero to distant lands, but the same is achieved with the help of a flying carpet or walking boots... Of course, there are specific helpers and specific objects that cannot be interchangeable. But individual cases do not violate the principle of their morphological relationship.” (ibid., p. 173).

9 Ibid. P. 1.96.

10 Cf.: “...The significance of the character’s name and, consequently, his metaphorical essence unfolds into the action that constitutes the motive; the hero does only what he semantically means” (Freidenberg O. Poetics of plot and genre. Period of ancient literature. Leningrad, 1936 . p. 249).

11 On the peculiarities of the set of semantic oppositions in a fairy tale, in contrast to the main semantic oppositions in myths, see: Meletinsky E.M. and others. Problems of structural description of a fairy tale. pp. 100–105.

12 Cf.: “...the nature of the character in its ethically ambiguous manifestations determines his name, which replaces the external description, and this name becomes semantically extremely significant. The key semantic characteristics embedded in the name can be explicit or exist in the form of its “internal form”, that is, either in the form of hidden and not directly expressed semantic properties, or in the form of features that appear only in the process of various plot functioning" (Neklyudov S. Yu. Features of visual systems in pre-literary narrative art // Early forms of art. M., 1972. P. 200).

13 For example, the heroine, turned into a duck, returns to her former appearance after her duckling children sing a sad song under the window of her deceived husband, from which he learns about the substitution (Aph. 265). A white duck is not necessarily called a mother, however, motherhood is an obligatory attribute of the heroine of these fairy tales.

14 For more details about the features of the external appearance of characters in folklore, and in particular fairy tales, see: Neklyudov S. Yu. Features of the visual system in pre-literary narrative art. pp. 194–204.

15 Fairy tales about a young hero, thus, easily stand out as a completely separate group, for which the canonized end of “accession and wedding” is not necessary. These fairy tales also contain other points that distinguish them from other fairy tales: the hero here often resorts to cunning, which, generally speaking, is not typical for fairy tales; the place of testing is limited to the relatively “close” forest, and not the “distant” kingdom of the thirties; The tests that the young hero undergoes are also quite specific. This is, first of all, the task of returning to the parental home, avoiding the threat of being eaten by the forest demon (Yaga, Bear). The cannibalistic intentions of the main antagonists of the young hero in tales of type AT 327 parallel the swallowing of the boy with a wolf in tales of type AT 700 as a condition for his return home.

16 Wed. "smart" and "stupid" animals in an animal fairy tale.

17 The relationship between a grandfather (grandfather), grandmother (grandmother) and a grandson or granddaughter does not constitute a conflict. These terms are sporadically used to designate evil spirits (grandfather Satan, the devils are his grandchildren - Af. 1.53; grandfather the merman and his grandchildren-devils - Af. 151; The Sea King is the grandfather of the overseas princess testing the hero - Af. 136) or note the relationship between the miraculously born hero and his mother’s parents (Medvedka is called a grandson and calls his mother Repka’s father his grandfather - Af. 141; Nazdey Popov’s grandson is a wonderful hero born to a priest’s daughter from a dead head - Af. 143). In the latter case, we are talking about a wonderful hero and his adoptive parents.

18 In addition to direct ones, collateral Relatives (aunt, uncle, nephew, niece) sometimes appear in fairy tales, but these relationships have the same peripheral significance as the relationship of grandchildren with their grandparents.

19 A successful soldier in the role of a hero is more typical for a short story tale.

20 The ability to take on different forms and turn into animals is also interpreted in the fairy tale as “cunning science” (Aph. 208, 249, etc.). Given to learn the “craft” from a master (under whose mask a sorcerer is often hidden), the hero masters precisely the ability to disguise himself.

21 This “direct” order is maintained in the overwhelming majority of plot types, with the exception, perhaps, of a number of fairy tales in which the heroes are young children, whose movement ends with a return from the “forest” to the “home.” There are other variants of reduced forms, for example, the fairy tale “Kroshechka-Khavroshechka”, where spatial movements are carried out within the boundaries of “a hut and a field and a rich house.”

22 It is significant that if the “house” is located in the forest or in another kingdom, that is, it appears in the variants of a forest hut, a forest house, a palace, then the characters living in it are consistently endowed with signs of family status: Yaga has a daughter Yagishna, the devil has or the Sea King has daughters, the eagle has sisters.

23 Compare: “...the brave fellow made his way to his land and was not afraid of her (the witch - E.N.): she did not dare to jump here...” (AF. 171).

24 Wed. a sown field belonging to a peasant, which is “closed”, fenced and forms part of “his” kingdom. The invasion of the wonderful mare, the Firebird and other “magical thieves” is regarded as sabotage, ruin, and theft.

25 Wed: the heroine (Pig's Cover) discovered by the royal hunters in a hollow tree is called “a wonderful miracle, a wondrous marvel” (Aph. 290).

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