The Annotated Afanas′ev Library

Designed and edited by: David J. Birnbaum (djbpitt+tales@pitt.edu) and David Galloway (galloway@hws.edu)
With the assistance of Audrey Wood
Last modified: 2008-04-12
Location: http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~tales/aa/
Main Fairy Tale Course Page: http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~tales/

Copyright © 2004–08 by David J. Birnbaum and David Galloway. All rights reserved. See note below concerning use of the materials posted here.

Contents

• Texts
  • Tales from Народные русские сказки А. Н. Афанасьева
  • Other Folkloric and Literary Texts
    • Annotated Texts
    • Metrical Analysis of Poetry
• Instructions
• Technology
• Acknowledgements

Texts

Tales from Народные русские сказки А. Н. Афанасьева.

Russian page references are by volume and page and refer to the commonly available Народные русские сказки А. Н. Афанасьева. Москва: Наука 1984 (although for copyright reasons we used the 1957 edition as our source). English page references are to Russian Fairy Tales. Collected by Aleksandr Afanas′ev. Translated by Norbert Guterman. New York: Pantheon. 1973.

Other Folkloric and Literary Texts

Annotated Texts

Metrical Analysis of Poetry

Contributors: David J. Birnbaum (DJB), Hillary Brevig (HB), Elena Filipova (EF), Sibelan E. S. Forrester (SESF), David Galloway (DG), Jon-Michel Seman (JMS), Audrey Wood (AW)

Instructions

How to Use These Pages

This site contains annotated versions of the Russian text of several folk tales collected by A. N. Afanas′ev, as well as selected other materials. They are designed according to the following principles:

1. The texts are intended primarily for use in a one-credit (one-hour-per-week) add-on module for what is otherwise an English-language general-education course about Russian Fairy Tales, although the scholarly and linguistic apparatus may be of interest to other readers with some knowledge of and interest in Russian language and culture.
2. The goal of this module is to help students develop proficiency in reading Russian folk tales and related texts. The module is taught in English and concentrates specifically on reading proficiency, which is to say that it is a content-based reading course, rather than a general-purpose language course. We view its integration with our English-language general-education course in Russian Fairy Tales as an example of “language across the curriculum,” where students develop reading proficiency in Russian while reading the same types of materials in Russian as they would otherwise read in English. In other words, the reading activity combines the development of reading proficiency with the acquisition of knowledge that is part of the students’ general (not language-specific) studies.
3. The texts contain two types of annotation: linguistic and cultural.
   1. Linguistic annotations concentrate on lexical, grammatical, or pragmatic issues that may be difficult for students of Russian. Glosses are provided only for unusual or uncommon words, which are frequent in fairy tales of any tradition, and students at early stages of Russian-language study will probably also need to consult a dictionary. Linguistic commentary concentrates on explaining the meaning of the specific text, and does not provide detailed grammatical descriptions that go beyond the actual textual citations.
   2. Cultural annotations assume that users will be taking or will already have taken the general-education course in Russian Fairy Tales taught in English. For this reason, not all fairy-tale or folkloric concepts are discussed in the annotations.
4. Page references are provided to English-language versions of the texts, where available, but students who wish to develop Russian reading proficiency should not read the English text alongside the Russian, since it is easy to stop concentrating on the Russian text without realizing that one is doing that. In some cases, particularly early in the course, instructors might advise students to read the tale in English first, and then to close the English edition and read the Russian text. Students who wish to test their reading ability without referring to the linguistic or cultural notes can slide the dividers between frames to adjust the layout. The English translations on the site are our own, and may differ from those in the Pantheon edition.
5. Copyright for all annotations and other original materials belongs to the contributors and editors. Anyone is welcome to link to the site, and to incorporate the materials posted here into academic courses, but any such use must include an acknowledgement and a link to the original site (http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~tales/aa/).

If Your Browser Does Not Display the Pages Properly

Some browsers with incomplete or faculty Unicode support have exhibited two sets of problems with these files:

1. You may see what appears to be extra spacing after the character ′ (in the name Afanas′ev or elsewhere).
2. You may see question marks instead of either the ′ character or some of the Russian letters (either in the body of the text or in the title bar at the top of the browser window).

You can usually fix this problem by ensuring that your operating system is up to date (e.g., Microsoft Windows 2000 or XP, Mac OSX) and using one of the following free browsers:

• For PCs:
  • Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0.2800.1106 or later (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/)
  • Mozilla 1.7.1 or later (http://www.mozilla.org)
  • Mozilla Firefox 0.9.2 or later (http://www.mozilla.org)
  • Netscape 7.1 or later (http://channels.netscape.com/ns/browsers/default.jsp)
  • Opera 7.5.3 or later (http://www.opera.com/)
• For Macs:
  • Netscape 7.1 or later (http://channels.netscape.com/ns/browsers/download.jsp)
  • Safari 1.2 or later (http://www.apple.com/safari/)

Technology

It is not necessary to know anything about the technology underlying the site to access the files. For those who are interested, though, all materials used to produce the site are accessible for download:

1. Each tale is edited in a single XML file, with filenames such as a102.xml.
2. The DTD for the tales is aa.dtd . (If your browser refuses to display this file, either select View -> Page Source or right-click, download, and view it on your local system.)
3. The HTML files that constitute the representation of each tale are generated by applying four XSLT transformations. The stylesheets are main.xsl (generates the top-level page that contains the other three, e.g., a102_main.html), text.xsl (generates the main text page for each tale (e.g., a102_text.html), ling.xsl (generates the linguistic annotation frame for each tale, e.g., a102_ling.html), and commentary.xsl ( generates the cultural commentary frame for each tale, e.g., a102_commentary.html). Note that although you can view the individual frames in their own windows, the links will not work properly; to view the files for a tale, load the top-level page and let it load the frames).
4. The stylesheets are applied to the XML source with the help of a batch file called generate.bat . This batch file invokes the Saxon XSLT processor to generate the HTML output. For example, to generate the four HTML files for a102.xml, run generate a102. A second batch file, process.bat , runs generate.bat on all of the files that are more or less completed. (I use Instant Saxon 6.5.3 under Microsoft Windows 2000, but any conformant XSLT 1 processor on any platform should work.)

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Sibelan E. S. Forrester, Helena Goscilo, Jason Merrill, Wendell Piez, Elizabeth Shaw, and Jeanmarie Rouhier-Willoughby for comments and suggestions.