Go I Know Not Whither and Fetch I Know Not What

April 19, 2012 8:09 AM

What are some good books about/based on Slavic mythology and folk tales?

Anything goes, really: contemporary novels, collections of folk tales, (prose) translations of bylyny, whatever. I'm less interested in the historical/sociological aspect, and more in the actual narrative myths and tales. No dry academic tomes, please. Lively academic tomes are okay. I can read Russian, but not well.

Books I already know about:
Orson Scott Card's Enchantment
Alexander Afanasyev's Russian Folk Tales anthology.
Catherynne M. Valente's Deathless

posted by griphus to Writing & Language (9 answers total)

I assume you've seen that awesome Myths Retold website, yes? If you check his russian/slavic myths tags, I think he mentions the books he's referencing for most of them.
posted by elizardbits at 8:19 AM on April 19, 2012

There's a minor subgenre of Slavic-inspired fantasy in English. Scroll down to "Russia." This mythos is obviously more ubiquitous in Russian-language books, but they're harder to find and you may have to deal with (normally very high-quality) OCRed text from lib.rus.ec.
posted by Nomyte at 8:24 AM on April 19, 2012

As a not-very-helpful addendum, you may soon run into the need to distinguish folkloric narratives (i.e., folktales with mythic motifs) from reconstructed mythology and contemporary neo-pagan practice. Note that the actual mythology of pre-modern Slavic tribes is poorly attested and little understood, but there is rather a lot of willingness on the part of non-scholars to "reconstruct" it into something as systematic and regular as (what we think of as) the Greek and Roman pantheons.
posted by Nomyte at 8:32 AM on April 19, 2012

This may be of interest — I'm gradually putting together an FPP about the great Soviet rotoscoped cartoons of the 1950s and 1960s. Many of them are based on folktale narratives. Some are subtitled, but they may be easier for someone whose Russian is a bit rusty.
posted by Nomyte at 8:49 AM on April 19, 2012

I'm not sure if Tea Obrecht's The Tiger's Wife would count, but she's certainly influenced by Slavic folklore and incorporates these weird, dark, beautiful folk tales into a plot about a woman practicing medicine in an unnamed Balkan nation.
posted by zoomorphic at 10:05 AM on April 19, 2012

Neil Gaiman's American Gods has some characters from slavic mythology
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 12:50 PM on April 19, 2012

I really liked The True Story of Hansel and Gretel: a Novel of War and Survival by Louise Murphy
posted by oomny at 1:20 PM on April 19, 2012

Sacred Texts has a Sagas and Legends page which (if you scroll down) contains about a dozen out-of-copyright books of Slavic legends and folktales. A bunch of them are aimed at kids but hey, free and online. Not Slavic, but geographically nearby, John Colarusso's Nart Sagas from the Caucasus contains lots and lots of interesting folktales. Russian Folk Belief, by Linda Ivanits, is non-fiction but written in a pretty straightforward way and the last section is transcribed/translated folktales.

If you're doing Russian-language searches it might help to focus on specific provinces; in the nineteenth century there were a fair number of (sometimes amateur) folklorists like Afanasyev roaming the Russian countryside recording songs and stories. A look at the folklore section of a bookstore like Panorama of Russia will turn up tons of collections like these. (As I'm sure you can guess, you want to look for the collections of stories rather than the academic studies, which would definitely be hit or miss in terms of readability.)
posted by posadnitsa at 3:37 PM on April 19, 2012

Oh, also if you can stand reading nineteenth-century Russian with all the damn hard signs everywhere (I generally can't), do a search for "skazki" or "byliny" (in Cyrillic) on Google books, and restrict it to free Google eBooks. You will turn up a lot of the nineteenth-century collections I was talking about.
posted by posadnitsa at 3:42 PM on April 19, 2012