Morphology of the Folktale [antikvár]

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION The preparation of this second English edition of Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale had two major objectives. The first was to make some changes in the text of the first edition for the sake of completeness and uniformity. In this regard, note should be taken of one general convention adopted for the present edition: the expression narôdnaja skazka has been rendered as "folktale," voUébnaja skazka as "fairy tale," and the words skazka (noun), skazocnyj (adjective) simply as "tale." The chief departure from this practice is in regard to the title itself (Morfolôgija skazki), since a change here might have led to undue confusion. The morphology presented by the author is, of course, a morphology of the fairy tale specifically, and he is careful to make note of this fact in the Foreword and in Chapter II. Thus the title of the work is, unfortunately, somewhat unclear. It is evident from the text that the unqualified word skazka is used by Propp both in the sense of tale in general and in the sense of fairy tale, depending upon context. The reader must infer the appropriate meaning in each instance. The second major objective was to update the author's numerical references to tales contained in the collection Narôdnye russkie skazki by A. N. Afanâs'ev, so that they would correspond to the sequential enumeration of texts which was adopted for the fifth (1936-1940) and sixth (1957) editions of that fundamental work. Propp's basic corpus of material, tales numbered 50 to 151 in the earlier editions (with letters designating similar texts, e.g. 140a, b, c, etc.) and cited by him, are consequently numbered 93 to 270 in the last two editions of Afanâs'ev and in the present works. A list of pertinent correspondences between the newer and older numbers is provided in Appendix V. The updating of the numerical references, however, required that many of them be checked against the tales themselves, as the original text of Morfolôgija skazki contains a number of obvious misprints and other inconsistencies, especially in regard