5 1871 October, the
He died of consumption at the age of 45. Alexander Afanasyev — a collector of folklore, publisher of “Russian Folk Tales”.
A fairy tale, as the creation of an entire people, does not tolerate the slightest intentional deviation from goodness and truth; it demands the punishment of every untruth.
Was born in Voronezh province In 1826, her mother died early. The care of seven children fell to her father, a district attorney. He instilled in her a love of reading:
Secretly from your father <> you go to the mezzanine, where the bookcases were located, and in the winter in an unheated room, shivering from the cold, you read greedily
He enrolled in the law department of Moscow University. In 1848, against the backdrop of revolutions in Europe, the Minister of Education arrived on an inspection tour. Uvarov. He reviewed talented students and candidates (graduates). Afanasyev gave a lecture on the role of autocracy in the establishment of serfdom. Afterward, he was unable to find work for a year.
The lecture provoked several comments from the minister, which, however, I did not immediately agree with.
He found a job at the Main Moscow Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. For 13 years, he was able to comfortably support his family and conduct research into law, history, literature, and folklore. From 1855 to 1863, he published eight volumes of Russian folk tales—the most complete collection of over 600.
The censors found adult content in the children's version:
Some promote outrageous ideas, such as in the fairy tale “Truth and Falsehood,” which proves that “it’s hard to live by truth in this world <> for truth you’ll end up in Siberia.”
Having summarized the comments and articles on the collected tales, he published a study on Slavic mythology, "Poetic Views of the Slavs on Nature." He was criticized for his anti-historicism and for detaching the interpretation of some myths from their everyday basis. He responded:
Mythology is the same science as the science of antediluvian animals: it recreates a whole organism from the scattered remains of antiquity.
Despite the fact that "Poetic Views" cites forgeries and hoaxes, and places gods generally considered fictitious (Belobog, Vazila, Lada) alongside genuine ones, Afanasyev's works remain popular with both the general public and some researchers. They are also popular among pseudoscientists writing about Slavic mythology.
In 1860, he published "Russian Folk Legends," but the collection was withdrawn from sale by censors (the stories about saints diverged from the views of the Russian Orthodox Church). He smuggled the manuscript of "Treasured Tales," which contained erotic content, to Europe. It wasn't published in Russia until 1992.
What's so shameful? Stealing is shameful, but saying something is okay, everything is allowed.