Russian Fairy Tales: A Choice Collection of Muscovite...

When Satan heard what had taken place, he ordered that the peasant’s crust should be restored. So the demon who had stolen it “turned himself into a good youth,” and became the peasant’s hireling. When a drought was impending, he scattered the peasant’s seed-corn over a swamp; when a wet season was at hand, he sowed the slopes of the hills. In each instance his forethought enabled his master to fill his barns while the other peasants lost their crops.

[A Moravian version of this tale will be found in “Der schwarze Knirps” (Wenzig, No. 15, p. 67). In another Moravian story in the same collection (No. 8) entitled “Der böse Geist im Dienste,” an evil spirit steals the food which a man had left outside his house for poor passers by. When the demon returns to hell he finds its gates closed, and he is informed by “the oldest of the devils,” that he must expiate his crime by a three years’ service on earth.

A striking parallel to the Russian and the former of the Moravian stories is offered by “a legend of serpent worship,” from Bhaunagar in Káthiáwád. A certain king had seven wives, one of whom was badly treated. Feeling hungry one day, she scraped out of the pots which had been given her to wash some remains of rice boiled in milk, set the food on one side, and then went to bathe. During her absence a female Nága (or supernatural snake-being) ate up the rice, and then “entering her hole, sat there, resolved to bite the woman if she should curse her, but not otherwise.” When the woman returned, and found her meal had been stolen, she did not lose her temper, but only said, “May the stomach of the eater be cooled!” When the Nága heard this, she emerged from her hole and said, “Well done! I now regard you as my daughter,” etc. (From the “Indian Antiquary,” Bombay, No. 1, 1872, pp. 6, 7.)]

Sometimes the demon of the legenda bears a close resemblance to the snake of the skazka. Thus, an evil spirit is described as coming every night at twelve o’clock to the chamber of a certain princess, and giving her no rest till the dawn of day. A soldier—the fairy prince in a lower form—comes to her rescue, and awaits the arrival of the fiend in her room, which he has had brilliantly lighted. Exactly at midnight up flies the evil spirit, assumes the form of a man, and tries to enter the room. But he is stopped by the soldier, who persuades him to play cards with him for fillips, tricks him in various ways, and fillips him to such effect with a species of “three-man beetle,” that the demon beats a hasty retreat.

The next night Satan sends another devil to the palace. The result is the same as before, and the process is repeated every night for a whole month. At the end of that time “Grandfather Satan” himself confronts the soldier, but he receives so tremendous a beating that he flies back howling “to his swamp.” After a time, the soldier induces the whole of the fiendish party to enter his knapsack, prevents them from getting out again by signing it with a cross, and then has it thumped on an anvil to his heart’s content. Afterwards he carries it about on his back, the fiends remaining under it all the while. But at last some women open it, during his absence from a cottage in which he has left it, and out rush the fiends with a crash and a roar. Meeting the soldier on his way back to the cottage, they are so frightened that they fling themselves into the pool below a mill-wheel; and there, the story declares, they still remain.[485]

By way of a conclusion to this chapter—which might be expanded indefinitely, so numerous are the stories of the class of which it treats—we will take the moral tale of “The Gossip’s Bedstead.”[486] A certain peasant, it relates, was so poor that, in order to save himself from starvation, he took to sorcery. After a time he became an adept in the black art, and contracted an intimate acquaintance with the fiendish races. When his son had reached man’s estate, the peasant saw it was necessary to find him a bride, so he set out to seek one among “his friends the devils.” On arriving in their realm he soon found what he wanted, in the person of a girl who had drunk herself to death, and who, in common with other women who had died of drink, was employed by the devils as a water carrier. Her employers at once agreed to give her in marriage to the son of their friend, and a wedding feast was instantly prepared. While the consequent revelry was in progress, Satan offered to present to the bridegroom a receipt which a father had given to the devils when he sold them his son. But when the receipt was sought for—the production of which would have enabled the bridegroom to claim the youth in question as his slave—it could not be found; a certain devil had carried it off, and refused to say where he had hidden it. In vain did his master cause him to be beaten with iron clubs, he remained obstinately mute. At length Satan exclaimed—

As soon as the refractory devil heard these words, he was so frightened that he surrendered the receipt, which was handed over to the visitor. Astonished at the result, the peasant enquired what sort of bedstead that was which had been mentioned with so much effect.

“Well, I’ll tell you, but don’t you tell anyone else,” replied Satan, after hesitating for a time. “That bedstead is made for us devils, and for our relations, connexions, and gossips. It is all on fire, and it runs on wheels, and turns round and round.”

At this point, though much still remains to be said, I will for the present bring my remarks to a close. Incomplete as is the account I have given of the Skazkas, it may yet, I trust, be of use to students who wish to compare as many types as possible of the Popular Tale. I shall be glad if it proves of service to them. I shall be still more glad if I succeed in interesting the general reader in the tales of the Russian People, and through them, in the lives of those Russian men and women of low degree who are wont to tell them, those Russian children who love to hear them.