Fairy Tales (Russian: Сказки, Skazki) is the title under which the short narrative prose of the Russian painter, writer, philosopher and public figure Nicholas Roerich (Nikolai Konstantinovich Roerich, 1874–1947) has been gathered and reissued in Russian since the late twentieth century. The collection brings together parables, legends and tale-like essays that Roerich wrote mainly in the 1900s–1920s. It is not a children’s book in the conventional sense. Its pieces draw on Russian epic song (bylina), Scandinavian saga, Finnish rune, Eastern legend and religious-ethical teaching.
Author and Background
Nicholas Roerich was best known internationally as a painter, stage designer and archaeologist. He was also a prolific writer of poetry, essays, diary prose and short fiction. His literary output includes the verse collection Flowers of Morya (Tsvety Morii), which was published by the Berlin publishing house Slovo in 1921 and is described as his only poetry collection. His essays and diary-leaves later appeared in English-language volumes issued in New York, including Adamant, Altai–Himalaya, Heart of Asia, Shambhala, Realm of Light and The Invincible.
Roerich’s tales belong to the earlier, Russian phase of his literary work. They emerged from his interest in folklore, archaeology and medieval Russian and Northern European culture, and from the same cultural milieu as his paintings on pagan Slavic and Scandinavian themes.
Publication History
The tales were first printed in periodicals. According to the Siberian Roerich Society’s edition, most of the small-form tales and parables appeared in the periodical press between 1910 and 1920. Two lifetime book publications are also recorded. The first is the volume Skazki i pritchi (“Tales and Parables”), published in Petrograd by Svobodnoe iskusstvo in 1916. The second is the jubilee volume Roerich, issued in 1916 for the twenty-fifth anniversary of his creative career. It contained essays by Baltrushaitis, Benois, Remizov, Gidoni and Yaremich, together with tales and parables by Roerich himself.
The best-known single piece of this period, Neotpitaya chasha (“The Unquaffed Chalice” or “The Undrunk Cup”), carries the imprint Smentsovo, 1916. Its central image presents Russia as a full, healing spring: “Rus stands like an unquaffed chalice,” as the text has it. A later edition of the tales describes it as a prose poem about the beauty of the Russian land and the love of it, in which Russia appears as a healing chalice filled with fairy-tale power.
Modern editions
Under the title Skazki, the material has been republished by several Russian presses.
- Amrita-Rus, 2007, in the series Zhemchuzhiny mudrosti (“Pearls of Wisdom”). It runs to 208 pages and carries ISBN 978-5-9787-0015-2. This edition opens with a preface and then presents the tales in sequence.
- Siberian Roerich Society (ITs Rossaziya), 2016, issued as Skazki. Legendy. Pritchi (“Tales. Legends. Parables”) in a hardcover volume of 296 pages. This is a larger, four-part anthology.
- Knigovek, 2017, titled Skazki i pritchi. Altai–Himalaya (“Tales and Parables. Altai–Himalaya”), in the series Perom i kistyu (“With Pen and Brush”). It combines the tales and parables with essays written during the Trans-Himalayan expedition of 1923–1928.
Contents
The 2007 Amrita-Rus edition lists a sequence of titles that includes “Neotpitaya chasha,” “Detskaya skazka,” “Grimr Viking,” “Vozhd,” “Marfa posadnitsa,” “Starinnyi sovet,” “Velikii klyuchar” and “Lyut Velikan”. Further titles in the same collection include “Zamki pechali,” “Tsaritsa Nebesnaya,” “Zaklyatiya,” “Goroda pustynnye,” “Znameniya,” “Strakhi,” “Klady” and “Zhalnik”. Another bibliographic listing identifies “Vozhd” as a tradition concerning Genghis Khan (the chieftain Temuchin) and notes that “Tsaritsa Nebesnaya” relates to a church mural.
The larger Siberian edition arranges its material in four parts:
- Short tales and parables, mostly first printed in periodicals between 1910 and 1920.
- Individual essays and “diary leaves,” written either in the manner of a parable or on the basis of folk tradition.
- Legends of the Holy Land, scattered through many of Roerich’s literary works and gathered by the compilers into a unified whole for the first time.
- Short parables, apocrypha, tales and instructive stories, episodes from the artist’s own life, and fragments or retellings of other literary sources.
Themes and Character
The editorial description of the Amrita-Rus volume notes that Roerich’s tales are unusual in both content and structure. It states that in turning to Russian epics, Scandinavian sagas, Finnish runes, Eastern legends and various religious and ethical teachings, he above all sought to reveal facts of the unity of humanity’s spiritual roots from ancient times. This idea of a shared cultural and spiritual inheritance runs through Roerich’s thought generally. In his preface to the Russian volume that corresponds to The Invincible, which is itself titled “Fairy Tales,” he argues that familiar tales and epics can become bridges of understanding between peoples. He gives the examples of Vasilisa the Beautiful, the City of Kitezh and the Song of Igor, and states that such stories and images should be made broadly accessible rather than confined to costly editions.
Several individual tales are distinguished in the editorial commentary of the Siberian edition:
- “Lyut Velikan” is based on folklore: the poetic tale was heard and recorded by the artist on a journey through the Valdai district.
- “Grimr Viking” is a parable of Scandinavian setting. Its meaning is expressed in the words “in happiness there is no friend,” the bitter conclusion reached by the Viking hero. The commentary reads it as a study of how envy can prevent even close people from rejoicing in a friend’s good fortune.
- “Vse tikho” (“All Is Quiet”) is a parable in which a teacher explains to his pupils the meaning of the precept of creative love: one must not remain in silence and inaction when all around is thundering in collisions.
- “Gora suzhdyonnaya” is an essay in which an example taken from life leads to a reflection on the harm of premature and mistaken judgments.
Readers’ reactions to the collection have varied. One reviewer on the Labirint bookshop site found the style heavy and doubted that the pieces are “fairy tales” at all. The same reviewer observed that they are written chiefly in the spirit of epic songs and parables, and only rarely as reflections. The pieces are better understood as a literary-philosophical genre of their own. They combine folklore motifs with ethical instruction and with the poetic prose characteristic of Roerich’s writing.
Place in Roerich’s Legacy
The tales form one strand of Roerich’s literary legacy alongside his poetry, travel essays and diary prose. They also relate to the themes of the legends he later collected during his Central Asian expeditions, such as those of Shambhala and Gesar Khan, which appear in the English-language volumes Shambhala and Himalayas—Abode of Light. Because Russian editions regularly combine the early tales with these later legends and parables, the title Skazki functions in modern publishing as a broad label for Roerich’s short narrative work rather than for a single fixed text.
