Afanasyev, Aleksandr (1826–71), Russian folklorist. Born in a provincial Russian town, he studied law at Moscow University, worked in state archives, and published numerous essays on Russian history and culture. From the 1850s his attention shifted towards Slavic mythology, and he started collecting and publishing Russian folklore. From 1855 to 1863 he published his world‐famous collection Russian Fairy Tales, in eight volumes, along with Russian Folk Legends in 1859 and Russian Fairy Tales for Children in 1870. Besides fairy tales, Afanasyev collected folk songs, proverbs, and parables. His major scholarly work, The Poetic Views of Slavic Peoples on Nature, was published in three volumes in 1865–9.
The significance of Afanasyev's contribution to the study of folklore is primarily his systematic collection, description, and classification of material. His Russian Fairy Tales, including 600 texts and variants, are still today the most comprehensive work on East Slavic folk tales, widely acknowledged internationally. At the time of its publication, it was superior to any similar West European collection. Although he lacked predecessors in Russia, Afanasyev was familiar with the work of European collectors, such as the Brothers Grimm, Asbjørnse38n and Moe, J. M. Thiele, the Czech Bozena Nemcova, the Serbian Vuk Karadzic, and took into consideration their positive results as well as evident shortcomings. His collection carries references to a number of European counterparts.
Afanasyev was very careful with variants and tried to preserve the peculiarities of oral speech and dialects and their specific grammatical and syntactic structures, avoiding variants supplied by servants and educated people. He was very critical of his colleague Ivan Khudyakov and his collection Russian Fairy Tales (1860), which retold folk tales in a bookish language and made no effort to disentangle the many obscure places in his oral sources. Afanasyev took the Grimms' Kinder‐ und Hausmärchen as a model, the Russian translation of which he reviewed in 1864. As a comparatist, he was especially interested in parallels between Slavic and Germanic folk tales.
Afanasyev himself collected folk tales from different sources, starting with his home town and province, but he made use too of the scarce previous publications of the archives of the Russian Geographic Society, founded in 1845, as well as amateur collectors all over Russia. He also made some careful extractions from old chapbooks. His goal was to find genuine texts, free from contaminations and fusions. Unlike the Grimm Brothers, he rejected retelling, polishing, or literary revisions. Thus, unlike the Grimms' collection, Afanasyev's was a purely scholarly publication, not addressed to a wide readership. However, further editions, selections, and adaptations have indeed reached a mass audience of adults as well as children.
After the publication of the first volume of Russian Fairy Tales, Afanasyev received a great deal of support from collectors and folk‐tale lovers. One of his most significant informants was Vladimir Dal, the famous author of The Dictionary of the Living Russian Language (1863–6), who supplied Afanasyev with over a thousand transcripts of folk tales, of which Afanasyev used about 150. Texts in Afanasyev's collection originate from over 30 Russian provinces, three Ukrainian, and one Belorussian. He also proposed scholarly strategies for collecting, transcribing, editing, and publishing oral sources, as well as criteria for using reliable informants. He was criticized for his views, especially since the Russian literary establishment doubted that illiterate Russian peasants were capable of telling coherent stories. Many critics also questioned the artistic merits of Russian folk tales as compared to European. Still, the collection was widely appreciated by scholars in Russia and abroad.
Afanasyev not only collected, but studied his material. The second edition of Russian Fairy Tales, which appeared posthumously in 1873, was annotated and classified according to recent scholarly theories. As his foremost objective, Afanasyev envisioned the study of the mythological origins of folklore, consistent with the position of the so‐called mythological school of comparative folklore studies (the Grimm Brothers, in Russia Fyodor Buslayev). He was fascinated by the scope of material which this approach offered, and in his own work he managed to widen the perspective still further, incorporating folklore genres such as the heroic epic, ritual folklore, etc.
The classification of fairy tales, which Afanasyev compiled for his collection (animal tales, magic tales, humorous tales, satirical tales, anecdotes, etc.) is, with some minor amendments, still used by folklorists. A complete collection of Russian Fairy Tales was reprinted six times, most recently in 1984, and many volumes of selections have been published. It has been translated into all major languages. The standard edition in English was published in New York in 1945, translated by Norbert Guterman and with an introduction by Roman Jakobson.
In his edition for young readers, Russian Fairy Tales for Children, Afanasyev included 29 animal tales, 16 magic tales, and 16 humorous tales from his collection, carefully adapting the language, substituting standard Russian for dialectisms, and excluding everything not suitable for children. However, even this edition was criticized because many fairy tales had trickster heroes and depicted the triumph of cunning. The collection has been reprinted over 25 times and illustrated by the most prominent Russian and Soviet artists.
Both Afanasyev's scholarly studies and his collections were subjected to severe censorship in Tsarist Russia. Russian Folk Legends, although passed by censors, was banned soon after it appeared; the church viewed the collection as blasphemous and obscene. The volume was reprinted by the Free Russian Publishers in London. In fact, these stories of Adam and Eve, Noah, the prophets, Jesus and his disciples contain a bizarre mixture of Christian and pagan views as well as clear social satire. The ban complicated the publication of the last two volumes of Russian Fairy Tales in which Afanasyev was obliged to delete the most offensive passages, according to censors' orders. The deleted material, together with other tales marked by Afanasyev as ‘unprintable’, was published anonymously in Switzerland, presumably in 1872, under the title Russian Forbidden Tales (the Russian word ‘zavetny’ can also mean ‘sacred’, which stresses the much‐discussed links between the sacral and the obscene in archaic thought). It contained 77 tales and about 20 variants, mostly humorous, but also some magic and animal tales. They were omitted from the main collection not only because of their open obscenity and eroticism, but also because of their anticlerical attitude: many portrayed priests and monks in an unfavourable light. The collection was published in French as Contes secrets russes in 1912.
Bibliography
- Bremond, Claude, and Verrier, Jean, ‘Afanassiev et Propp’,
Littérature , 45 (February 1982). - Pomeranceva, Erna, ‘A. N. Afanas'ev und die Brüder Grimm’,
Deutsches Jahrbuch für Volkskunde , 11 (1963).
— Maria Nikolajeva
