At once the magic horse came galloping up, making the ground tremble under its hoofs. Flame streamed from its nostrils, smoke rose in columns from its ears. Ivan crawled into its right ear, crawled out of its left ear, and was turned into the handsomest young fellow one ever saw. All the people cried out in astonishment. The tsar gave a banquet and everyone went to the wedding. — The Dun Horse

I never heard in childhood about a fabulous horse leaping into the air to the top of a tower where a haughty princess sat, daring someone to claim her heart. Nor did tsars give banquets in my fairy tales. For that matter, the only fairy-tale witch I knew was the one in Hansel and Gretel who, let’s face it, wasn’t so impressive in the end. Scary, maybe, but not clever like the Russian witch Baba Yaga who rode in a mortar and pestle and streaked across the sky to her hut built on chicken legs.

Instead, my mother read me from Golden Books the fairy tales that Disney had already denuded, turning them into two-dimensional frolics with pastel endings and scrubbing their spiritual impact. Her own childhood was grim, so whatever heritage of tales her exhausted mother carried from the shtetls of Poland, she chose to forget.

Meanwhile, my dad extracted from the hollows of West Virginia stories filled with feuding and mining accidents, old-timey cars flying off mountain roads, and lots of moonshine. I have memories of him being “shh”-ed with words like “Don’t tell her stories like that, Lewis!”

So only in adulthood did I begin to understand the significance of the fairy tale. My initial forays were within the Russian tradition—the land that captured my attention as a teenager. Mesmerized first by the exploits of the slow-witted but ultimately heroic third son of the tsar known as Ivan Tsarevich, I thirsted to glimpse the magnificent Grey Wolf, the endangered Snow Maiden, and the lightning bolts of Kashchei the Immortal.

It also was necessary to differentiate between Russian fairy tales (skazki) and Russian fables (basni). They may seem similar on the surface, but their content and intention are quite different. Fables can be powerful, but fairy tales provide more richly the impulse for related works of art, particularly in the Russian tradition. We think first of ballet, particularly from the pen of Peter Tchaikovsky. But it is on the opera stage that Russian fairy tales are transformed into astonishing visions of color, movement, and sound. Unparalleled, too, are the ways Russian visual artists have transformed these stories into opulent canvases, sculptures, and the glittering lacquer boxes created by a technique known as Palekh.

The power of fairy tales and fables continues to be esteemed in most cultures (although, we have lost touch with it in the United States). Almost effortlessly, fairy tales and fables teach good and evil, right and wrong. They speak in winsome, unforgettable ways of courage and cowardice, virtue and falsehood. Through such stories, children are able to glean the world around them and understand what will be expected of them as adults.

We’ll have much to cover, then, when we jump into the next webinar entitled What’s So Great About Russian Fairy Tales? (Tuesday evening September 14 at 8 EST; recorded for later viewing). The session is open to participants of any age. We will consider the principal features, characters, plot lines, and styles of these stories and look at select examples of their artistic manifestations. And, yes, we will begin at the very beginning, which, in Russian is zhíli bÿli, davním davnón (there lived, there was, long ago).

Come race through the forest with me on the Grey Wolf!