Page:Russian Wonder Tales.djvu/19



Russian skazki (skazatz = to tell) are the mass of folk-tales distributed widely throughout all the Russias. Handed down, by constant repetition, from generation to generation, a possession common to peasant's hut and Prince's palace from a time when history did not exist, they are to-day, from Archangel to the Black Sea, and from Siberia to the Baltic, almost as much a part of the life of the people as the language itself. Their adventures are linked to a hundred phrases in common parlance; their heroes peer from every page of Slavonic literature; and the delver in historic débris finds each stratum sown thick with skazka shards to the very bedrock of legend.

To the casual eye, the skazki, aside from their unfamiliar nomenclature, do not seem to differ greatly from the tales of other peoples. The wild and wonderful machinery has all the artifices which belong to the mass of folk-lore owned in common by the Indo-European group of nations. Here, however, the superficial resemblance