The Pantheon Anthology of Russian Fairy Tales

"These books are all linked! I should’ve put something like the Collins Guide to British Hedgerows in so that you could tease out the link for me. I think what I said about my experience of the Odyssey and being in that play would apply to this book of fairy tales, too. There’s just the most gorgeous energy – the texts are just so fully charged. I came to them in my twenties when I had this totally surprising thirst for those sorts of stories. I just suddenly wanted to read nothing but fairy tales. I didn’t know that quote – that’s excellent. Maybe that’s it. I was finally old enough. And I think I was struggling with the English national identity at that time, and it was when I discovered things like Rachel Carson and environmental writers like Annie Dillard. I think I was looking for a kind of pre-Shakespearean, or pre-Enlightenment English storytelling voice, so I was reading all those old Everyman anthologies of English fairy tales, and I found in them a kind of – I guess it’s kind of Homeric – but a kind of swagger to the portrayal of evil. Imagine if the British novel, for example, was just shed of all its 18th century bumf about who was eating what and who was hunting what, and all the comedy of manners and all the stuff that has built up and led us to Martin Amis, or whatever the British novel is these days. It was like going back to a medicine box of two-dimensional things that you can slide on and off, like Good Son and Bad Son. It felt like a cool drink of water after a lot of sawdust. “It’s as though a nasty grandpa has selected these tales, and he’s chosen those that are most weird, most dark, most problematic ” And then the Russian ones I landed on because I was reading my way around the world – so I’d done the African ones, the Norse ones, the Irish ones. I loved the Canadian ones. And then when I landed on the Russian ones, it coincided with an obsession with the Soviet era, and I just felt that, if you had to put one collection in a space capsule, you’d put those in, because they had this sickness, this real darkness to them. They offer up this sort of symbolic menu, and the whole has grown orally, handed around as if by some really fantastically nasty grandpa – like my grandpa who used to cut teeth out of orange peel and put them in and sneak outside the window to frighten us, and he’d tell us M R James ghost stories at night. It’s as though he has selected these Russian tales, and he’s chosen those that are most weird, most dark, most problematic – especially for us now, armed with all the political correctness and issues that we’re armed with. So, yeah, I found them tricky and funny, and also I really love that they have this kind of Monty Python feel about them – some of them end before they’re finished. They have a sort of buffoonish surrealism about them that is annoying for a modern reader. Some of them just stop dead; others you think have a highly developed conventional narrative where the prince has to go and free the princess but the king is getting in the way and so on – and then, out of nowhere, there’s a massive fire and they all die. I mean, what a way to end it! There’s a certain looseness to them, too, which I find incredibly appealing, partly because there’s this sense that there’s a European tradition but that in England, somehow, it got lost. We became very mannered; there’s something slightly self-satisfied about our story-telling traditions to do with this sort of feedback loop of conversations about the English novel. And we therefore started to miss that older tradition. I think that’s why so many people in England seem to have fallen for Elena Ferrante – what they’re identifying with is a Mediterranean sensibility towards, for example, matriarchal familial relations or domesticity. I felt with those Russian fairy tales that there was something in them that I had been really needing; I’d been needing some of their Baltic sickness, I’d been needing some of their un-coy, straightforward violence. It links back to Riddley Walker , doesn’t it? There are always these puppet shows rolling into town, and every week a new show comes but they’re all kind of the same. And then these ones come that are a little more surprising, a little darker. I think, if you’re always feeding your hunger as a reader, there are very few things that have satisfied me as the Russian tales did. And there are so many of them in this collection, so you can just read and read and read. Oh yeah, they’re like a palate cleanser. Yeah, and he’s also self-conscious about being a character. He’s had all these roles – he’s been a play-thing for so many different peoples: in some cultures he’s a very serious trickster, in others he’s a rock ’n’ roll tattoo. With this huge amount of material to pick and choose from, what would he say was most crow-like? The thing with reading too many fairy tales is that you make yourself slightly sick and insensitive. And Crow, in the novel, has chosen this unique opportunity to do something different, something that interests him – i.e. look after motherless children – and he has to somehow wrangle with all these different versions of himself. So it’s like when he shits on the kid’s lego and the kid is like: ‘Hey! That’s rude!’ And Crow can only say: ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, it’s the Russian fairy tales that make me shit on your Lego…!’ It’s like he’s still drunk from all those Russian tales. I think with Hughes it would be difficult. I could choose a book like Moortown Diary and have a perfectly nice chat with you about why it’s a really amazing book of British poetry, and we could talk about landscape and farming and class and man’s relationship to the land. But it’s not a book I’d take to my desert island. Whereas Hughes’s Letters I probably would. I find them revelatory. But then again, why wouldn’t I have chosen Emily Dickinson? Because that’s a book I’ll never stop reading and I don’t feel I’ve ever read properly and I don’t think there’s any answer to. I can tell myself why I think someone like Russell Hoban is a brilliant writer and those explanations are contextual observations – because of what he did in relation to other writers of the time; because of what he did as an expat; because of his drawings, etc – but with Dickinson the landscape of the conversation would just be infinite. There’s no one more interesting to me. So in a way it wouldn’t be so good to talk about. I’m on my knees with Dickinson. I can’t handle how good she is; I can’t believe anyone has been able to do with the brain what she did. Maybe I should’ve chosen Dickinson…."