[HN Gopher] The history and context of Aleksandr Afanasev's obsc...
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The history and context of Aleksandr Afanasev's obscene Russian
folktales
Author : prismatic
Score : 31 points
Date : 2023-08-10 04:03 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.laphamsquarterly.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.laphamsquarterly.org)
| david927 wrote:
| 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._
| rootw0rm wrote:
| How times have changed. I imagine pristine specimens of the
| rare field cock would fetch a good sum these days.
| drewcoo wrote:
| 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...
| ROTMetro wrote:
| 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.
| chasil wrote:
| 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.
| ConanRus wrote:
| [dead]
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2023-08-11 23:01 UTC)