Reading Diary B: Russian Folktales

The Russian Folktales unit has kept me very entertained the past few days! Some of the stories I recognized from when my grandma told them to me as a child, but some of them were new to me. The variety in the tales was great! One thing that I liked about a lot of them is that I couldn't tell what would happen next. I'm usually good at predicting plot twists, but this time, some of these threw me for a loop!

I did notice that most of the stories dealt with death. It seems like death and/or transformations were important to convey to the people reading or hearing the stories. Death was also used in many of these stories to teach some sort of lesson. For example, The Shroud tells the story of a lazy girl that takes advantage of others in order to get what she wants. She takes things too far, however, and angers a dead person by taking their shroud and not returning it. In the end, she disappears and only her hair is left. Her death is brought about by her disobedience and laziness, two things that are never looked upon in a positive light.

(Tales involving death and cemeteries)

Another story about death that also provides a sort of lesson is The Dog and the Corpse. The dog in the story defends its owner from an angry corpse, but the owner abandons the dog. The dog, in turn, holds a grudge and tries to get back at its owner for abandoning it instead of helping defeat the corpse. It's sad that the dog has to die in the end, because it really was the owner's fault. The lesson that I got from this tale is that you shouldn't abandon someone when they are trying to protect you. Also, all of these stories paint a pretty bleak picture of Russia in the old days. It seems like the dead really didn't like to stay dead back then.