Old Peter’s Russian Tales

Description

Arthur Michell Ransome was a prominent English writer and journalist. Although better known for his Swallows and Amazons series, he wrote many other children’s books, including the collection of Russian-fold tales “Old Peter’s Russian Tales”. Although they didn’t receive much attention at first, they became quite popular over the decades. With a wealth of information about Russian culture and how peasants tell stories to their children, European and American readers managed to get an insight into Russia’s folk.

The Old Peter’s Russian Tales is a collection of short stories gathered and translated during the early 1900. Ransome apparently fled his first marriage and went to Russia in 1913. It is there that he was drawn to Russian folk tales. On the first page of the book, it is written: Vergezha, 1915. It is in this city on the river Volkhov that the author gathered all these stories while staying as a guest in the house of Harold Williams and his wife.

Ransome acknowledges in his autobiography that, since the English and American public have no prior knowledge of the Russian folklore and background, he couldn’t simply translate the stories, but he had to read all versions of each tail and then translate it for the Western public. Thus, he substituted characters such as the Ogre, the Imp and the Elf to Old Peter, Vanya and Maroosia. The latter two are actually orphaned children who have taken refuge in the hut of their grandfather, deep inside a pine forest.

The narrative then follows with Old Peter telling the children a series of folk tales, such as the popular Russian tale The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship. Old Peter’s Russian Tales is a delightful insight into Russian culture and the tales that have been told to children for generations.
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