A vital difference between old folktales and new.
Another thing that struck Bardelys about the Russian fairy tales is how gentle they were. The hapless (but moral and goodhearted) heroes and heroines of these tales never fight for their rights – they never oppose evil or tyranny with brute strength. Indeed, they never even contest their more arrogant siblings’ maltreatment of them.
Instead, the heroes of these tales succeed through cleverness and (even more often) through the assistance of some magical, semi-divine helpers. These helpers act as cosmic instruments of karma or the will of heaven. There is no sense of Christianity behind the tales that Bardelys had read so far; they might as well have been told by pagans as by pious devout devotees of the Russian Orthodox Church. (This might be quite true: the original composers of these yarns might well have lived outside Russia or before Christianity came to Russia – or even before Christianity itself was born.)
He was struck likewise by the contrast of these tales with modern day fantasy tales, which almost universally appeal to brute force (or magical force, which is equated with physical, brute strength in the symbolic language of these tales) as the one true means that the good can use to overcome the evil.
In this also, Bardelys could see the difference between tales that arise out of a population that is truly oppressed and those that arise out of a bourgeois mentality of a dominant, even ruling class. The poor – the truly poor and oppressed – must tread lightly when complaining of any ill-treatment they suffer. If they speak too openly or too loudly, they risk the knock at the door, the boot in the face, the long trip to the prison camp, or torment and death. The ruling class on the contrary is only too eager to assert its rights and carry a big stick.
Alas, he thought, not only is literacy failing, but freedom is also dwindling, so that in future what will be popular are the new representatives of these old oral folktales, with all their simplicity, their escapist happy endings, their gentleness, their cleverness, and their inability to address directly the injustice and grinding oppression the ruling class has in store for all of us.
(Composed by dictation Sunday 28 September 2008)
