The history and context of Aleksandr Afanasev’s obscene Russian folktales | Hacker News Reader

The history and context of Aleksandr Afanasev’s obscene Russian folktales

laphamsquarterly.org

51 pointsprismatic16 comments

That bawdy tales circulated in the 19th century is something we know not only for Russians, but also from the dozens of peoples who live under Russian occupation. The word-lists compiled by 19th-century European linguists doing fieldwork in the Volga-Kama area or Siberia contain words like “whore”, “dick”, or even “clitoris” and we get some transcriptions of tales where all these words are put to use, revealing that life was not as prim and staid as one might assume.

In fact, due to Soviet-era and post-Soviet censorship where dictionaries compiled for these languages were usually forced to leave out the bad words, it is the 19th-century sources that we rely on for them.

>That bawdy tales circulated in the 19th century is something we know

Gadzooks!

Balzac?

Rabelais?

Chaucer?

Turn. Grave.

All French or English writers you list. The context of this HN post is 19th-century Russia.

Good catch, by logic, but you're wrong, in reality:

The mistake is mine, though. I did not make my point clear enough.

My intention, by saying gadzooks (a word from an earlier century, that I have read in historical novels, such as by Georgette Heyer - I'm not a scholar), was to express surprise, and to indicate that bawdy writing was not only from the 19th century, but existed much prior to that.

Hence the references I gave.

And they're not even very old. Bawdy writing probably existed from hundreds, if not thousands, of years earlier.

And bawdiness is human and global, dude, I mean, tovarisch ;-). No need to limit it to Russia.

The article's first paragraph is golden

Rudeness has consequences in fairy tales. Strangers met on the road may be more than they seem, so politeness is prudent. If a farmer is working his land and a passing old man asks what he’s sowing, he had better not answer, “I’m sowing cocks!” if he doesn’t want three-foot-tall phalluses sprouting in his field at harvest time. This is the lesson of “A Crop of Cocks,” one of more than a hundred obscene folktales compiled by the nineteenth-century Russian ethnographer Aleksandr Afanasev.

How times have changed. I imagine pristine specimens of the rare field cock would fetch a good sum these days.

For other veterans here from Slashdot, did this comment not evoke strong memories of the “Penisbird Enterprises” copypasta?

It makes me so sad that Russia has chosen to not be part of the western world going forward. Such a needless divorce created by Russia for what, so that they can kill their 'brotherly' slavic neighbors?

I always wanted to see the Hermitage. I have Russia adjacent ancestry (from talking to Russians online to try and trace it I was told I am jewish and not Russian and was then told in very crappy ways that the two are very much different). The old Russia literature is still great and of huge influence in the west and I am still very much interested in old Russia no matter that new Russia has chosen to extract themselves from the western world I live in and that embraced my great great grandparents when Russia rejected them.

Well, the Russians that I know who live here in Iowa have made no such decision.

The many nights that I have spent with them and the Ukrainians that have been drawn into their circle of friendship have an insoluble quality in the face of the catastrophic choices made by their countries.

"That's why we left."

Yes, I hope that these countries grow some political leadership that has more subtlety and ability to compromise.

No, my friends had nothing to do with the Holodomor, the ceding of Crimea, the unacceptable invasions, or the resistance.

These are stressful talks for friends. We try to avoid them.

Your two paragraphs seem to be at odds with each other. You’re interested in old Russia but upset they are not becoming homogenized by the West?

Also, the world didn’t wholesale reject US culture after the needless destruction of Iraq, Syria, Libya and friends (just some recent examples).

We're living through some unfortunate times. Eastern Europe is... becoming a much darker place.

As somebody who grew up in a crazily mixed family (Polish, Russians, Lithuanians, with relatives all over the globe) I am used to visiting everybody, getting insights into how real daily life feels in respective countries. I have a soft spot for polish family-centric traditionalism, lithuanian love for the countryside, russian intelligentsia culture.

And it's falling apart, all of it. I remember I promised my child that one day we'd get to see together the Peter's city, Hermitage, learn bits of lithuanian (which I still have some passive knowledge of), and go visit our numerous polish cousins, learn the history of the Old Town of Vilnius, all faces of it.

This will all pass. Take a look at YouTube. Plenty of westerners visiting (and even living in, raising their families) in those places still.

It's entirely possible to travel to Russia, and not even inconvenient if you're an American. The flights are a little longer, but the visas are generous (3 year, multi entry). The amazing museums remain open, and the people are more friendly and hospitable than you'd expect.

So go see the Hermitage. You probably need to spend more for the visa and transit through Turkey or Egypt, but odds are you aren't significant enough on the world stage to get picked up and harrassed for it. There's always been a split between what Putin is doing in his little tower in the Kremlin and what a normal person is doing walking through Kolomenskoye Park.

This is the book in English:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3186233-russian-secret-t...

Out of print and hard to find.

Naughty illustration on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Russian-Secret-Tales-Folktales-annota...

Some folklore tales attempt to teach moral lessons, but a pretty big fraction of them are pretty nihilistic: the "heroes" do some pretty horrible shit, and get away with it and even get praised for it.

In the case of the crop of cocks,the O.P. seems to think the farmer id being punished for his rudeness, but I think he's actually being rather polite. I think "I'm sowing cocks" is the delicate way of saying, "None of your Business, M[y] F[riend]."

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