Russian Magic Tales

"Oh, the Chandler volume is simply wonderful. The Russian tradition is very interesting because some of the things I was saying before don’t quite apply – the tradition does seem to be sui generis in some respects. I remember reading somewhere that there are more unique fairytales in Alexander Afanasyev’s collection, published in Russian in the 19th century, than there are in any of the other comparable collections. Some scholars do this “tale type” classification – which I’m not too keen on – by which, for example, “Sleeping Beauty” is listed as “AT-134”, but what this work does build to show is thatb the Russians have the most single stories of any of the cultures studied. That’s partly to do, probably, with the isolation of certain districts. Around the Pole, you get a lot of similar tales circulating – from the Finns, the Lapps, and the Japanese – there are echoes across the Polar region; but there are still some truly isolated pockets in Russia, with tales that are found nowhere else. You also get some very, very, very unusual ones in Iceland. Oh, there are some very strange tales indeed in Iceland. There’s one that, in fact, Angela Carter included in her Virago Book of Fairytales (1992), and it features a relationship that to my knowledge is unique: an Eskimo hunter goes off hunting, leaving behind his new bride with his mother. The two women are alone and so isolated that, after a while, the mother-in-law starts to look at her charge differently. She’s very pretty, she finds…. She falls in love with her. I think not even the Greek myths got round to that one. One of the things I like about the genre is that it is a common language so that people can pick it up and use it – it’s like a tune, like “Greensleeves”; you may recognize it as “Greensleeves” at the same time as recognizing that it’s a completely different, new way of doing “Greensleeves” – one with a jazz riff, or something. Some of the classic jazz numbers are really in themselves something that surpasses the original, in a way. I’d put Carter’s “The Werewolf”, based on “Little Red Riding Hood”, in that category. The same with her “Beauty and the Beast” – she’s created unsurpassed variations that have become standards in their own right. Yes, and interestingly she changed a lot in her career. She moved away from subversion. Some of the tales in The Bloody Chamber are just full of an absolute spit-in-your-eye kind of rebel tough-talk as well as sexual delinquency with a very specific feminist agenda, and I wonder what she would have made of that herself now. What has happened to sexuality and to young women, and attitudes around pornography and how one might use it in this way or that, is considerable and one wonders what she would have thought of it all. I would love to know, for instance, what she thought of Fifty Shades of Grey – for her it would have been like looking in a horribly distorted mirror. Quite apart from the fact that the writing in that book is terrible, the S & M relationship is one that Carter had herself investigated a lot. She does stage escapes, of course, so that Carter’s relationships never resolve into submission. That’s an important point. “There are still some truly isolated pockets in Russia, with tales that are found nowhere else – and you get some very, very, very unusual ones in Iceland” But, as I said, she moved away from subversion and over the arc of her writing life she moved on to the idea that you could mobilize a story to create something more than that. Certainly her last two novels, Nights at the Circus (1984) and Wise Children (1991), use folk motifs to talk about common culture, tolerance, the new multiculturalism, and the new multi-ethnic culture. There is humour in them, too, but the resolve at the end of Nights at the Circus, in which there is this emphatic resolution of love between the heroine, “Fevvers” and the journalist Jack Walser – that’s not the old subversive Carter."