W R S Ralston – författare

The stories are taken from the collections published by Afanasief, Khudyakof, Erlenvein, and Chudinsky."STORIES contained in the following pages are taken from the collections published by Afanasief, Khudyakof, Erlenvein, and Chudinsky. The South-Russian collections of Kulish and Rudchenko I have been able to use but little, there being no complete dictionary available of the dialect, or rather the language, in which they are written. Of these works that of Afanasief is by far the most important, extending to nearly 3,000 pages, and containing 332 distinct stories — of many of which several variants are given, sometimes as many as five. Khudyakof''s collection contains 122 skazkas — as the Russian folk-tales are called — Erlenvein''s 41, and Chudinsky''s 31. Afanasief has also published a separate volume, containing 33 "legends," and he has inserted a great number of stories of various kinds in his " Poetic views of the Old Slavonians about Nature," a work to which I have had constant recourse."

1873. One touch of storytelling may . . . make the whole world kin. So stated Ralston. In England the works of Ralston were the first to deal with the vast field of Slavonic, and more especially of Russian, folklore. His chief endeavour was to show the great amount of information which the unwritten literature of Russia contains as to the early stages of religious development.(Goodreads)