Russian Fairy Tales

Russian tales from Afanasyev with a scholar's commentary: the water king, the dead mother, Baba Yaga, the fool who married a princess, and the mythology behind them. Ralston translated and annotated them in 1873, the first serious English treatment of Russian folklore. His notes compare each story with its Slavonic and Indian cousins, and are often better reading than the introduction. Fifty-nine plates by painters including Venetsianov and Borovikovsky follow the tales through peasant weddings, reapers, and the turn of the seasons, the same world the stories came from.