One thing follows from the fairy tale. Literary leisure “In the land of fairy tales of Ch. Perrault” in a preparatory group for school. Sector “The fourth is superfluous”
Charles Perrault
(1628 - 1703)
Born on January 12. Perrault's great merit is that he selected several stories from the mass of folk tales and recorded their plot, which had not yet become final. He gave them a tone, a climate, a style that was characteristic of the 17th century, and yet very personal.
Among the storytellers who “legalized” the fairy tale in serious literature, the very first and honorable place is given to the French writer Charles Perrault. Few of our contemporaries know that Perrault was a venerable poet of his time, an academician of the French Academy, and the author of famous scientific works. But it was not his thick, serious books that brought him worldwide fame and recognition from his descendants, but his wonderful fairy tales “Cinderella”, “Puss in Boots”, “Bluebeard”.
Charles Perrault was born in 1628. The boy's family was concerned about the education of their children, and at the age of eight, Charles was sent to college. As historian Philippe Ariès notes, Perrault’s school biography is the biography of a typical excellent student. During their training, neither he nor his brothers were ever beaten with rods - an exceptional case at that time.
After college, Charles takes private law lessons for three years and eventually receives a law degree.
At twenty-three he returns to Paris and begins his career as a lawyer. Perrault's literary activity occurred at a time when a fashion for fairy tales appeared in high society. Reading and listening to fairy tales is becoming one of the most common hobbies secular society, comparable only to the reading of detective stories by our contemporaries. Some prefer to listen philosophical tales, others pay tribute to ancient fairy tales, passed down in the retellings of grandmothers and nannies. Writers, trying to satisfy these demands, write down fairy tales, processing plots familiar to them from childhood, and the oral fairy tale tradition gradually begins to turn into a written one.
However, Perrault did not dare to publish the fairy tales under his own name, and the book he published bore the name of his eighteen-year-old son, P. Darmancourt. He feared that, with all the love for “fairy-tale” entertainment, writing fairy tales would be perceived as a frivolous activity, casting a shadow with its frivolity on the authority of a serious writer.
Perrault's fairy tales are based on well-known folklore plots, which he presented with his characteristic talent and humor, omitting some details and adding new ones, “ennobling” the language. Most of all, these tales were suitable for children. And it is Perrault who can be considered the founder of world children's literature and literary pedagogy.
Charles Perrault: childhood of a storyteller.
The boys sat down on a bench and began to discuss the current situation - what to do next. They knew one thing for sure: they would never return to the boring college. But you need to study. Charles heard this from his childhood from his father, who was a lawyer at the Paris Parliament. And his mother was an educated woman; she herself taught her sons to read and write. When Charles entered college at the age of eight and a half, his father checked his lessons every day; he had great respect for books, learning, and literature. But only at home, with your father and brothers, you could argue, defend your point of view, but in college you had to cram, you just had to repeat after the teacher, and God forbid you argue with him. For these arguments, Charles was kicked out of class.
No, never set foot in the disgusting college again! What about education? The boys racked their brains and decided: we’ll learn on our own. Right there in the Luxembourg Gardens they drew up a schedule and began implementing it the next day.
Borin came to Charles at 8 in the morning, they studied together until 11, then had lunch, rested and studied again from 3 to 5. The boys read ancient authors together, studied the history of France, learned Greek and Latin, in a word, those subjects that they would take and in college.
“If I know anything,” Charles wrote many years later, “I owe it solely to these three or four years of study.”
We don’t know what happened to the second boy named Boren, but the name of his friend is now known to everyone - his name was Charles Perrault. And the story you just learned took place in 1641, under Louis XIV, the “Sun King” in the days of curled wigs and musketeers. It was then that the one we know as a great storyteller lived. True, he himself did not consider himself a storyteller, and sitting with a friend in the Luxembourg Gardens, he did not even think about such trifles.
The essence of this dispute was this. In the 17th century, the opinion still reigned that ancient writers, poets and scientists created the most perfect, most best works. The “new” ones, that is, Perrault’s contemporaries, can only imitate the ancients; they are still not capable of creating anything better. The main thing for a poet, playwright, scientist is the desire to be like the ancients. Perrault's main opponent, the poet Nicolas Boileau, even wrote a treatise "The Art of Poetry", in which he established "laws" on how to write each work, so that everything would be exactly like the ancient writers. This is what the desperate debater Charles Perrault began to object to.
Why should we imitate the ancients? - he was surprised. Are modern authors: Corneille, Moliere, Cervantes worse? Why quote Aristotle in every scientific work? Are Galileo, Pascal, Copernicus inferior to him? After all, Aristotle’s views were long outdated; he did not know, for example, about blood circulation in humans and animals, and did not know about the movement of planets around the Sun.
Creation
Charles Perrault, now we call him a storyteller, but in general during his lifetime (he was born in 1628, died in 1703). Charles Perrault was known as a poet and publicist, dignitary and academician. He was a lawyer, the first clerk of the French Minister of Finance Colbert.
When Colbert founded the Académie de France in 1666, one of its first members was Charles's brother, Claude Perrault, whom Charles had recently helped win a competition to design the façade of the Louvre. A few years later, Char Perrault was also accepted into the Academy, and he was assigned to head the work on the “General Dictionary of the French Language.”
The story of his life is both personal and social, and politics mixed with literature, and literature, as if divided into what glorified Charles Perrault over the centuries - fairy tales, and what remained transient. For example, Perrault became the author of the poem “The Age of Louis the Great,” in which he glorified his king, but also the work “Great Men of France,” the voluminous “Memoirs,” and so on and so forth. In 1695, a collection of poetic tales by Charles Perrault was published.
But the collection “Tales of Mother Goose, or Stories and Tales of Bygone Times with Teachings” was published under the name of Charles Perrault’s son Pierre de Armancourt - Perrault. It was the son who, in 1694, on the advice of his father, began to record folk tales. Pierre Perrault died in 1699. In his memoirs, written a few months before his death (he died in 1703), Charles Perrault does not write anything about who was the author of the fairy tales or, more precisely, the literary record.
These memoirs, however, were published only in 1909, and twenty years after the death of the writer, academician and storyteller, in the 1724 edition of the book “Tales of Mother Goose” (which, by the way, immediately became a bestseller), authorship was first attributed to Charles Perrault alone . In a word, there are many “blank spots” in this biography. The fate of the storyteller himself and his fairy tales, written in collaboration with his son Pierre, is described in such detail for the first time in Russia in Sergei Boyko's book "Charles Perrault" ".
Charles Perrault (1628-1703) was the first writer in Europe to introduce folk tales into children's literature. An unusual interest in oral folk art for a French writer of the “age of classicism” is associated with the progressive position that Perrault took in the literary polemics of his time. In France in the 17th century, classicism was the dominant, officially recognized movement in literature and art. Followers of classicism considered the works of ancient (ancient Greek and especially Roman) classics to be exemplary in all respects and worthy of imitation. At the court of Louis XIV, a real cult of antiquity flourished. Court painters and poets, using mythological subjects or images of heroes ancient history, glorified the victory of royal power over feudal disunity, the triumph of reason and moral duty over the passions and feelings of the individual, glorified the noble monarchical state that united the nation under its auspices.
Later, when the absolute power of the monarch began to come into increasing conflict with the interests of the third estate, opposition sentiments intensified in all areas public life. Attempts were made to revise the principles of classicism with its unshakable “rules”, which had already turned into a dead dogma and hampered the further development of literature and art. At the end of the 17th century, a dispute broke out among French writers about the superiority of ancient and modern authors. Opponents of classicism stated that new and recent authors are superior to the ancients, if only because they have a broader outlook and knowledge. You can learn to write well without imitating the ancients.
One of the instigators of this historical dispute was Charles Perrault, a prominent royal official and poet, elected in 1671 to a member of the French Academy. Coming from a bourgeois-bureaucratic family, a lawyer by training, he successfully combined his official career with literary work. In the four-volume series of dialogues “Parallels between the ancient and the modern in matters of art and science” (1688-1697), Perrault urged writers to turn to depicting modern life and modern morals, and advised them to draw plots and images not from ancient authors, but from the surrounding reality.
To prove he was right, Perpo decided to start processing folk tales, seeing in them a source of interesting, lively plots, “good morals” and “characteristic features folk life" Thus, the writer showed great courage and innovation, since fairy tales did not appear at all in the system of literary genres recognized by the poetics of classicism.
In 1697, Charles Perrault, under the name of his son Pierre Perrault d'Armancourt, published a small collection entitled "Tales of My Mother Goose, or Stories and Tales of Bygone Times with Instructions." The collection consisted of eight fairy tales: “Sleeping Beauty”, “Little Red Riding Hood”, “Bluebeard”, “Puss in Boots”, “Fairies”, “Cinderella”, “Rike with the Tuft” and “Tom Thumb”. In subsequent editions, the collection was replenished with three more fairy tales: “Donkey Skin”, “Funny Desires” and “Griselda”. Since the last work is typical for that time literary story in verse (the plot is borrowed from Boccaccio’s “Decameron”), we can consider that Perrault’s collection consists of ten fairy tales 3. Perrault adhered quite closely to folklore plots. It was possible to trace each of his tales to a primary source existing among the people. At the same time, by presenting folk tales in his own way, the writer clothed them in a new artistic form and largely changed their original meaning. Therefore, although Perrault’s tales retain folklore basis, are works of independent creativity, that is, literary fairy tales.
In the preface, Perrault argues that fairy tales are “not trifles at all.” The main thing in them is morality. “All of them are intended to show what are the advantages of honesty, patience, foresight, diligence and obedience, and what misfortunes befall those who deviate from these virtues.”
Each of Perrault's fairy tales ends with a moral lesson in verse, artificially bringing the fairy tale closer to the fable - a genre accepted with some reservations by the poetics of classicism. Thus, the author wanted to “legitimize” the fairy tale in the system of recognized literary genres. At the same time, ironic moral teaching, not related to the folklore plot, introduces a certain critical tendency into the literary fairy tale - with a view to sophisticated readers.
Little Red Riding Hood was unreasonable and paid dearly for it. Hence the moral: young girls should not trust “wolves.”
For small children, not without reason (And especially for girls, beauties and spoiled girls), Meeting all kinds of men on the way, You cannot listen to insidious speeches, - Otherwise, the wolf may eat them...
Bluebeard's wife almost became a victim of her excessive curiosity. This gives rise to the maxim:
A woman's passion for immodest secrets is funny: It is known that what was dearly acquired will instantly lose both taste and sweetness.
Fairy-tale heroes are surrounded by a bizarre mixture of folk and aristocratic life. Simplicity and artlessness are combined with secular courtesy, gallantry, and wit. Healthy practicality, a sober mind, dexterity, and resourcefulness of a plebeian prevail over aristocratic prejudices and conventions, which the author never tires of making fun of. With the help of a clever rascal, Puss in Boots, a village boy marries a princess. The brave and resourceful Little Thumb defeats the cannibal giant and becomes one of the people. The patient, hard-working Cinderella marries the prince. Many fairy tales end in “unequal” marriages. Patience and hard work, meekness and obedience receive the highest reward from Perrault. At the right moment, the good fairy comes to the aid of the heroine, who copes with her duties excellently: punishes vice and rewards virtue.
Magical transformations and happy endings have always been characteristic of folk tales. Perrault expresses his thoughts with the help of traditional motifs, colors the fairy-tale fabric with psychological patterns, introduces new images and realistic everyday scenes that are absent in folklore prototypes. Cinderella's sisters, having received an invitation to the ball, dress up and preen themselves. “I,” said the eldest, “I’ll wear a red velvet dress with lace trim.” “And I,” said the younger one, “I’ll be in a simple skirt, but I’ll put on a mantilla with gold flowers and a diamond headdress, and such a headdress is not everywhere.” there will be." They sent for a skilled craftswoman to fit them into double-flounced caps, and bought flies. The sisters called Cinderella to ask her opinion: after all, she had good taste.” Even more everyday details in “Sleeping Beauty”. Along with the description of various details of palace life, housekeepers, ladies-in-waiting, chambermaids, gentlemen, butlers, gatekeepers, pages, footmen, etc. are mentioned here. Sometimes Perrault reveals the darker sides of contemporary reality. At the same time, his own moods are guessed. The woodcutter and his large family live in poverty and starve. Only once did they manage to have a hearty dinner, when “the lord who owned the village sent them ten crowns, which he owed them for a long time and which they no longer hoped to receive” (“The Boy With Thumb”). Puss in Boots intimidates the peasants with the loud name of the imaginary feudal lord: “Good people, reapers! If you don’t say that all these fields belong to Monsieur Marquis de Caraba, you will all be finely minced, like pie meat.”
Perrault's fairy-tale world, for all its apparent naivety, is complex and deep enough to not only captivate a child's imagination, but also influence an adult reader. The author put a rich supply of life observations into his fairy tales. If a fairy tale like “Little Red Riding Hood” is extremely simple in content and style, then, for example, “Rike with the Tuft” is distinguished by its psychologically subtle and serious concept. The witty small talk between the ugly Rike and the beautiful princess allows the author to reveal in a casually entertaining form the moral idea: love ennobles a person’s heroic traits.”
Perrault's subtle irony, elegant style, and cheerful moral teachings helped his fairy tales take a place in “high” literature. Borrowed from the treasury of French folklore, “Tales of My Mother Goose” returned to the people, polished and faceted. When processed by the master, they glowed with bright colors and took on a new life.
Some famous works:
"The Walls of Troy, or the Origin of Burlesque" 1653 parody poem - first work
"The Age of Louis the Great", 1687 poem
"Parallels between the ancient and the modern in matters of art and science", vol. 1-4, 1688-97 dialogues
"Tales of My Mother Goose, or Stories and Tales of Bygone Times with Teachings" 1697
"Sorceresses" (French: Les Fees)
"Cinderella" (French: Cendrillon)
"Puss in Boots" (French: Le Chat botte)
"Little Red Riding Hood" (French: Le Petit Chaperon rouge) folk tale
"The Boy-thumb" (French: Le Petit Poucet) folk tale
"Donkey skin" (French: Peau d'Ane)
"The Sleeping Beauty" (French: La Belle au bois dormant)
“Riquet the tuft” (French Riquet a la houppe) Charles Perrault (January 12, 1628, Paris - May 16, 1703, ibid.) - famous French writer - storyteller, poet and critic.
Conclusions:
So, what moral can I take away from the works of Charles Perrault?
I would like to test myself whether I understand Perrault’s fairy tales as the author himself understood them or not. Therefore, for now I am writing from a layman’s point of view. And, above all, I share my impressions and emotions of one of the modern mothers, which I am.
Reading in Russian, I can judge Perrault only by translations, and, unlike the original, there can be a great many of them. For myself, I am trying to at least determine whose translation I would like to give to my child.
So about translations. Take a book with illustrations by Dore. It was called: “Tales of Mother Goose.” And at the end of each fairy tale there were poems. I remember that when I read them, I was very surprised at what the writer actually “wanted to say”...
The morality given to “The Little Thumb” interested me greatly. I also dug around and found teachings for other fairy tales.
For example, to “Little Red Riding Hood” (mother, grandmother, daughter - it seems that this is already a completely modern beginning).
First translation:
“It’s not without reason for small children
(And especially for girls,
beauties and spoiled girls),
On the way, meeting all sorts of men,
You can’t listen to insidious speeches, -
Otherwise the wolf might eat them.
I said: wolf! There are countless wolves
But there are others between them
The rogues are so savvy
That, sweetly exuding flattery,
The maiden's honor is protected,
Accompany their walks home,
They are escorted bye-bye through dark corners...
But the wolf, alas, is more modest than it seems,
This makes him always more cunning and more terrible!”
Second translation option:
From this saying it becomes clearer:
It is dangerous for children to listen to evil people
Especially the girls
And slender and beautiful-faced.
It’s not surprising or a miracle at all
Get the wolves on the third course
Wolves... but not all of them
They are frank in nature.
Another friendly, respectable,
Without showing your claws,
As if innocent, quiet,
And himself for the young girl
He's hot on his heels right up to the porch
But who doesn’t know and how can we not understand,
That the flattering wolf is more dangerous than all wolves.
There is no need to comment here anymore. After reading this teaching, we see that Perrault primarily addresses young girls, not children.
From this it becomes clear why the wolf invites Little Red Riding Hood to bed. Doré has a vivid, memorable scene: close-up of Little Red Riding Hood and a wolf with a cap on his head in bed. But Dore’s illustrations approach these fairy tales, first of all, as works for adults.
And here in the “children’s” illustration by B. Dekhterev: Little Red Riding Hood is going to lie down next to ... a real wolf. (As a child, I didn’t have a book with his illustrations, so when I so clearly saw a close-up of a girl with a wolf under one blanket in Doré’s engraving, I was very surprised, and for the first time I read the whole text again. I look at the illustration and I’m surprised : Maybe Little Red Riding Hood is blind? After all, it’s clear that there’s a wolf lying there (not even in disguise).
In the book containing Turgenev's translation, Little Red Riding Hood simply stands next to the bed and pulls back the curtain. And accordingly, there is no “bed scene” in the illustrations for this edition by A. Vlasova. This version of translation and illustrations for the text seems to me more suitable for children. I would choose him.
After all, the moral of the tale is clear without this action. And it is still relevant today. Perhaps this is one of the most instructive fairy tales for modern children: under no circumstances speak to strangers, and especially (!) do not be simple-minded, do not tell them where you are going, who you are, where your grandmother lives and other details , which some bad people can use to your detriment. “Don’t talk to strangers, don’t turn off the road!”
Young girls nowadays no longer learn from fairy tales. In our country, the fairy tale has become entirely the property of children, and, perhaps, also of their parents and literary scholars.
I completely miss how E. Bern interpreted the fairy tale - because our conversation is exclusively about children.
What a heated debate surrounding the name of Charles Perrault! Simply captivating. I would like to participate.
Indeed, you can find different translations and interpretations of the same tale. Or you can simply not perceive them so critically. After all, a critical article and such deep reflections negate all the charm of a fairy tale.
In fairy tales there is never a direct moral, but only a “hint”. What's the "hint"? in my opinion, that something very good CAN happen in the life of an ORDINARY person, that EVERYTHING WILL BE GOOD, After all, fairy tale characters are far from ideal in all fairy tales, people saw themselves in them: ORDINARY people with flaws. After all, if you look at fairy tales like this, then why is “Little Red Riding Hood” better? After all, the frail old woman lived alone (there weren’t even neighbors), her daughter took strange care of her, sending her little granddaughter with food. But this is an analysis for psychologists who see or can see a problem in any situation.
But in my opinion, a fairy tale is a fascinating story that teaches something, scares, and entertains.
The world itself used to be more cruel (although ours is not ideal). Death was common. More people died from disease, hunger, wars... And in the fairy tale there was hope for a miracle, that your life would just change for the better. After all, the prince fell in love with Cinderella, although she was dirty. And our lazy man, Emelya, married a princess. This is magic! It doesn't happen like that in life. And for dreams there is a fairy tale!
But everyone chooses for themselves what to read to their child. There are many genres and each has fans. You just shouldn’t treat a fairy tale like that! And if you want “correct” works with morality, then you need to read other literature. For example, the publishing house "Father's House" publishes the series "Orthodox Children's Library." All the stories in it are moralizing, kind and good, and they also have a miracle. But here this is a miracle from God, and not just like that.
I return to the episode described earlier. Regarding fiction and fabulousness, now, in our time, the issue seems to have already been resolved. What about the moral side - the teachings that this fairy tale carries?
The parents who are described in it are deeply antipathetic to me. I have nothing to justify their actions. And they do it twice. If after the first time they seem to repent of what they did. Then, despite their regrets, they repeated everything the same as the first time.
And all this is very reminiscent of the plots of modern crime reports reported on television: when an alcoholic mother took her daughters into the forest and returned home...
There is no condemnation of the actions of such parents in the work itself!
And what about the episode in which the Ogre killed all his daughters?! And Little Thumb is to blame for this. But the Ogre’s daughters were also the daughters of his wife, who showed great sympathy for the boys and defended them in every possible way from her husband. It turns out that Little Thumb repaid her with black ingratitude. And the Ogre’s wife herself finds herself in a strange situation. The phrase “the woman got scared and gave everything she had, because the Ogre, although he ate small children, was a good husband and she loved him” is just a quote from a modern program about maniacs (where wives and acquaintances also say that their husband and relative is a maniac – he was a very good husband and person).
Summary of the tale: “A little boy provided for his entire family. He got a place for both his father and his brothers and thus accommodated them all. And he himself soon received a court position.” Some kind of careerist and scoundrel - this Boy with a Thumb! And he began his career by provoking murders and robbing.
It turns out to be an interesting case. Fairy tales are familiar from childhood and are known almost by heart. But opening the book “Charles Perrault. The Big Book of Fairy Tales" (Eksmo Publishing House with illustrations by Yu. Nikolaev) or "Charles Perrault. Fairy Tales" (from the same publishing house with illustrations by A. Vlasova), I suddenly discover that I myself have never read Perrault.
And I really didn’t read it. Because at a time when children are introduced to fairy tales through reading books and watching cartoons, I did not yet know how to read. And then, when I learned, I had no desire to read Perrault’s fairy tales, because “everything was already known.”
...And now I’m reading about Thumb for the first time. I compare the translation-retelling of I. Turgenev in the book “Eksmo” (series “The Best Storytellers of the World”) - this is listed in the bibliographic description on the back of the title - and the translation in the gift edition with a gold edge (of the same publishing house) - the translator is not listed there, but According to the text, this is the same translation by I. Turgenev, slightly edited by someone.
… “Having eaten to her heart’s content, the woodcutter (there’s a word you can’t pronounce!) and says:
Oh, where are our poor children now? How nice they would be to eat the leftovers! And we are all the reason for everything! After all, I told you that we will cry later!”
This is how the heroine of the fairy tale laments after she and her husband took the children into the forest to certain death, in the book “Fairy Tales” (I repeat that this book contains the name of Turgenev as a translator and reteller). In the “Big Book of Fairy Tales” there is no “woodcutter”, instead there is “wife”. But the rest of the text in this passage remains unchanged.
Presenting his translations of Perrault from French into Russian, here is what their author Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev wrote in 1867 (these tales with engravings by G. Doré were published by the famous Mauritius Osipovich Wolf). “Perrault's fairy tales are especially popular throughout Europe; Russian children know them relatively less, which is probably due to the lack of good translations and publications. Indeed, despite their somewhat scrupulous Old French grace, Perrault's fairy tales deserve an honorable place in children's literature. They are cheerful, entertaining, relaxed, not burdened with either unnecessary morality or authorial pretension; the spirit of folk poetry that once created them is still felt in them; they contain exactly that mixture of the incomprehensibly miraculous and the everyday-simple, the sublime and the funny, which constitutes the hallmark of real fairy-tale fiction. Our positive and enlightened time is beginning to abound with positive and enlightened people who do not like precisely this admixture of the miraculous: raising a child, according to their concepts, should be not only an important matter, but also a serious matter - and instead of fairy tales, he should be given small geological and physiological treatises . ...Be that as it may, it seems to us very difficult and hardly useful for the time being to banish everything magical and wonderful, to leave the young imagination without food, to replace a fairy tale with a story. The child undoubtedly needs a teacher, and he also needs a nanny.
The witty publisher of Perrault's fairy tales, J. Getzel... in his preface notes very rightly that one should not be afraid of the miraculous for children. Not to mention the fact that many of them do not allow themselves to be completely deceived and, amused by the beauty and cuteness of their toy, in fact know very firmly that this never happened (remember, gentlemen, how you rode on sticks, because you you knew that these were not horses under you, but the case still turned out to be completely believable and the pleasure was excellent); but even those children (and these are for the most part the most gifted and intelligent heads) who unconditionally believe all the miracles of a fairy tale are very good at immediately renouncing this belief as soon as the hour comes. “Children, like adults, take from books only what they need and as long as they need it.” Goetzel is right: the dangers and difficulties of child education do not lie in this direction.
We have just said that we believe that one of the reasons for the relative obscurity of Perrault’s fairy tales is the lack of good translations and editions. The public is left to judge how satisfactory our translation is...” - I quote this text almost in its entirety as an interesting evidence of my era. It seemed to me also remarkable because it provides confirmation of the arguments of K. Chukovsky, which he brought in the 1920s in defense of the fairy tale. And how well said about the teacher and nanny!
Perrault (the storyteller's brother Charles Perrault) invented a summing device “... an improved version of the rhabdological abacus Perrault. 1770 - Evna...
Dictionary of Philosophy
Abstract >> PhilosophyAlfred North Whitehead, Ralph Barton Perry and U.P. Montepo. Arthur Lovejoy..., 1954). MONTESQUIEU Charles Louis, Charles de Secondat, Baron de La... problems of psychology and theory of knowledge, founder physiological school and natural science direction...
History of political and legal doctrines (12)
Law >> State and lawThe essence and appearance of the Enlightenment. Charles Louis Montesquieu, Jean... Galbraith, W. Rostow (USA), J. Fourastier and F. Perroux(France), J. Tinbergen (Netherlands), X. Schelsky and 0. ... L.I. Petrazhitsky. L. Petrazhitsky became founder Russian psychological theory rights. IN...
History of economic thought (3)
Cheat sheet >> Economic theoryPrograms, flexible centralized management. Perroux François (1903–1987) – ... practical program Sismondi Jean Charles Leonard Simon de Sismondi...PE and taxation." Becomes founder trends of petty-bourgeois economic thought. Craft...
Eat fairy-tale heroes who come to us at dawn, sad and cheerful, simple-minded and crafty. Hours of happy children's reading fly by unnoticed, the book closes, but its characters remain. For a long time. For life. And over the years they do not lose their magical charm - spontaneity, old-fashioned comfort, and most importantly - their by no means fairy-tale essence.
It is no coincidence that, trying to give a convincingly vivid definition, we sometimes say with a smile: “What a dandy - he struts around like a cat in boots...”, “Why are you so lethargic - like a sleeping beauty?..”, “Small , but resourceful, like a little boy.”...
And behind these images that have returned from childhood, we hardly see a man in a curled wig, in a satin camisole, in shoes with silver buckles. But it was he, Charles Perrault, a royal official, court poet and member of the French Academy, who once arrogantly said: “The Milesian stories are so childish that it is too much honor to contrast them with our tales of Mother Goose or Donkey Skin...”
By Milesian stories he meant ancient myths; “Tales of My Mother Goose” he called his collection of processed folklore materials. (This material will help you write competently on the topic of Fairy Tales by Charles Perrault. Summary does not make it possible to understand the full meaning of the work, so this material will be useful for a deep understanding of the work of writers and poets, as well as their novels, stories, stories, plays, poems.) Thus, Perrault became the first writer in Europe to make a folk tale a global property literature.
The success of his tales was extraordinary. Reprints immediately appeared, and then imitators were found who began to adapt their works to the tastes and morals of various classes - often aristocratic ones. But more on that below. First, let's try to figure out what is the reason for the success of "Tales of My Mother Goose"?
In French literature XVII century, classicism dominated with the cult of ancient gods and heroes. And the main pillars of classicism were Boileau, Corneille, Racine, who introduced their works into the rigid mainstream of academicism. Often their tragedies and poems, with all their classical completeness, looked lifeless, cold casts and did not touch either the mind or the heart. Court poets, painters and composers, using mythical subjects, glorified the victory of the absolute monarchy over feudal disunity, praised the noble state and, of course, the “Sun King” Louis XIV.
But the young, growing bourgeoisie was not satisfied with the frozen dogmas. Her opposition intensified in all spheres of public life. And the toga of classicism shackled the shoulders of the adherents of the “new” party, led by Charles Perrault.
Calling on writers to draw their stories not from ancient authors, but from the surrounding reality, in his ode “The Age of Louis the Great” he wrote:
Antiquity, no doubt, respectable and beautiful,
But we got used to falling on our faces before her in vain.
After all, even the ancient great minds
Not inhabitants of heaven, but people like us.
If only someone in our age would dare to
Prejudice
Photo-1L "The influence of Charles Perrault... is so great that if you ask someone today to tell you a typical fairy tale, he will probably tell you one of the French ones: "Puss in Boots", "Cinderella" or "Little Red Riding Hood" . (J.R.R. Tolkien)
The cult English storyteller of the twentieth century was not mistaken. And half a century after his statement, the situation has not changed. In 2004, the British cinema chain UCI conducted a survey among children on their favorite fairy tale. The results of the survey did not particularly surprise anyone: 1st place was unconditionally taken by a poor but promising stepdaughter with an influential godmother, followed by a beauty who had lain in suspended animation for a hundred years, and 5th place was taken by a young fashionista talking with wolves. In another survey (conducted among adults), the list was already topped by “Little Red Riding Hood.” It turns out that 80% of Europeans, 60% of Americans and 50% of Australians remember this fairy tale almost by heart.
If we add “Puss in Boots”, “Bluebeard” and “Tom Thumb” to the mentioned masterpieces, it becomes clear that they owe their fame to the Frenchman Charles Perrault, who at the end of the 17th century not only recorded and published these folklore fairy tales, but also truly canonized, legalized and “promoted” them in elite society. Folk tales have finally become literature, and not nanny tales. What is Perrault's true role in the treatment of these subjects that have become part of the flesh and blood of Western culture? What metamorphoses have they experienced over the several centuries of their existence?
Photo-2R Tales from His Majesty's Court
"Don't let it bother you at all,
If the wise thought of the luminaries,
Tired of bending your back over a book,
Listen to the fairy tales of the good fairy..."
(C. Perrault)
This may surprise some, but before Perrault, folklore and elite noble culture existed without actually intersecting. Of course, noble ladies and gentlemen indulged themselves in fantasy, but it was of a completely different kind - more about knights, their exploits and lovers (like the courtly poems of the Arthurian cycle). “Peasant fables” were too rude and vulgar, and therefore unworthy of refined taste. And so Perrault, who himself adored these “nanny” fairy tales to the depths of his soul, volunteered to justify the folklore genre to the noble public, to introduce the folk tale into high society.
In 1696, he made his first attempt - he published the fairy tale “The Sleeping Beauty” in the magazine “Gallant Mercury”. Without a signature. “The Audience at Court” is more than successful, and next year Charles publishes a full-fledged collection - “Tales of Mother Goose, or stories and tales of bygone times with teachings,” which he signs... with the name of his 11-year-old son and dedicates to the daughter of Louis XIV. The author resorted to this hoax for a reason - well, it’s not serious for a respectable 69-year-old man to entertain the respectable public with such “nonsense”! Fairy tales were published under the name of Charles Perrault only after the death of the author.
Photo-4L "Your Royal Highness!
No one will think it strange that the child was pleased to compose the fairy tales that made up this collection, but it will be surprising that he had the audacity to present them to you. However, Your Royal Highness, whatever the disproportion between the simplicity of these stories and the enlightenment of your mind, if you carefully consider these tales, it will become clear that I am not as worthy of blame as it may seem at first. All of them are full of very reasonable meaning and are revealed to a greater or lesser extent, depending on how much the readers delve into it. Moreover, since nothing distinguishes true breadth of mind so much as its ability to rise to the greatest objects and at the same time condescend to the smallest... ...who better to know how peoples live than those individuals who Heaven intended to lead them! The desire to know this brought valiant men, and even men belonging to your family, to poor huts and shacks in order to see up close and with their own eyes the remarkable things that were happening there, for such knowledge seemed necessary to them to complete their enlightenment." (Perrod 'Amancourt, but actually Charles Perrault, from the preface to fairy tales)
Perrault made excuses in vain. The enlightened public appreciated this “nonsense”, and fairy tales became no less popular than gallant novels. However, Perrault himself did everything possible to prevent the rejection of the nobility from the “grassroots” culture.
Folk tales were “ennobled” as much as possible - cleansed of everything coarse and vulgar, stylized as courtly literature and filled with signs of the times. The characters' manners, clothing and meals perfectly reflected the nobility of the 17th century.
Photo-3R Thus, in “The Sleeping Beauty” the cannibal demands that children’s meat be served to her invariably “with Robber sauce”; the prince, who woke up the beauty, notices that she is dressed in an old-fashioned way (“her collar is upright”), and the awakened woman herself addresses the prince in the tone of a languid, capricious lady (“Oh, is it you, prince? You kept yourself waiting”). By the way, Perrault’s prince did not rush into a vulgar kiss. Having discovered the princess, he “approached her with awe and admiration and knelt down beside her.” And even after waking up, our heroine and her gallant gentleman did nothing reprehensible, but talked about love for four hours until they woke up the whole castle. Plus, in Perrault’s case, not all the inhabitants of the kingdom fall into a magical sleep. The king and queen, as befits royalty, continue to stay awake, although, naturally, they do not catch their daughter waking up.
After his adventures, Little Thumb becomes a “royal courier,” and Bluebeard’s surviving wife manages her cruel hubby’s wealth quite practically.
“She used some of them to marry her sister Anna to a young nobleman...; the other part - to give her brothers the rank of captain, and the rest - to get married herself...”. (C. Perrault "Bluebeard") All goodies Perrault's people are well-educated, gallant like a nobleman, and express themselves almost exclusively in “high style.” However, fairy tales also contain images of the life of the common people. Thus, the peasants of that time, who had fallen into complete poverty, indeed often took their children into the forest and abandoned them to their fate (as in “The Little Thumb”), and the deprived Younger son The miller could well have disposed of his “inheritance” as he was going to do in the fairy tale - eat the cat and make a muff from its skin.
"...with teachings..."
“I could give my fairy tales greater pleasantness if I allowed myself other liberties with which they are usually enlivened; but the desire to please readers never tempted me so much that I decided to break the law that I set for myself - not to write anything that would offend chastity or decency." (C. Perrault)
To introduce folk tales into high society, it was not enough to refine their style and surroundings. It was necessary to prove that folklore also contains a moralizing principle, that “lesson for good fellows” that Pushkin wrote about. And although I don’t really like straightforward moralizing, it is clear that such a step was necessary for Perrault.
Photo-5R "The reception that the public gave to the works that made up this collection, as it received them separately, serves as some guarantee that they will not make an unfavorable impression on them when they appear all together. There were, however, people who who pretend to be important and have sufficient insight to see in them only fairy tales written for fun and devoted to subjects of little importance, and they treated them with contempt, but it turned out to our satisfaction that people endowed with good taste judge about them; They noted with pleasure that these trinkets were not trinkets at all, but contained a useful moral, and that the playful tone of the narrative was chosen only so that they would act on the reader’s mind with greater pleasantness, both instructing and entertaining. "This should be enough for me not to fear the reproach that I was looking for frivolous fun." (C. Perrault)
As a result, Perrault, like fables, supplied each fairy tale with one (and sometimes two) poetic morals. True, these morals are addressed mainly to adult readers - they are elegant, playful, and sometimes, as they say, they have a “double bottom.”
Some of them are quite unexpected. Thus, in the first moral of the fairy tale “Bluebeard,” Perrault does not so much reproach the cruel husband as make fun of the feminine trait of poking one’s nose where it shouldn’t, and in the second moral, he makes fun of the husbands who are pushed around by their wives.
Photo-6R “Yes, curiosity is a scourge.
It confuses everyone
On the mountain mortals were born.
There are thousands of examples, as you look a little closer:
A woman’s passion for immodest secrets is funny:
It is known that it came at a price,
It will instantly lose both taste and sweetness.”
"If there is a little mind in my head,
To explain the gibberish of the world,
You can easily understand - this is the story
Only in a fairy tale can we read.
There are no fierce men in the world today:
There are no such prohibitions in sight.
The current husband is at least familiar with jealousy,
Hurried around his wife like a loving cockerel,
And even if his beard is piebald,
You can’t figure it out—whose power is she in?”
In the moral to The Sleeping Beauty, he carefully criticizes the desire of ladies to quickly get married.
"Wait a little for a husband to turn up,
Handsome and rich, too
Quite possible and understandable.
But a hundred for long years, lying in bed, waiting
It's so unpleasant for ladies
That no one will be able to sleep..."
And “Little Red Riding Hood,” according to Perrault, is a good warning to young girls about the deceit of rogue seducers.
Photo-7R "Little children have a reason
(And especially for girls,
beauties and spoiled girls),
On the way, meeting all sorts of men,
You can’t listen to insidious speeches, -
Otherwise the wolf might eat them.
I said: wolf! There are countless wolves
But there are others between them
The rogues are so savvy
That, sweetly exuding flattery,
The maiden's honor is protected,
Accompany their walks home,
They are escorted bye-bye through dark corners...
But the wolf, alas, is more modest than it seems,
That makes him always more cunning and more terrible!”
We find the most striking manifestation of courtly morality in Cinderella. By the way, not so long ago I read that this famous fairy tale, along with “Snow White,” was ostracized by some rabid feminists. The “fault” of these works was supposedly that they teach girls that “it pays to be beautiful.” Such a statement is not only stupid, but also completely false. The dirty stepdaughter, whom no one pays attention to, differs from her sisters (by no means ugly) not in the size of her chest and waist (although, of course, she is “potentially” beautiful), but namely in her modesty, patience, kind heart and truly courtly courtesy ( It’s not for nothing that at the ball Cinderella sits down with her sisters, showers them with pleasantries and shares “the oranges and lemons that the prince gave her”). Beauty is, rather, a magical Gift - an external reward for internal (in Perrault's case, courtly) virtues. By the way, psychologist E. Bern also noticed this.
"The teachings with which Charles Perrault accompanied the story of Cinderella were, in our opinion, Parental instructions. The author spoke about a happy gift that is more than the beauty of the face; the charm of this gift surpasses everything else. This is exactly what the fairy gave to Cinderella. She cared for her so much instructed, taught noble manners in such a way that Cinderella became a queen. The last three provisions describe the real Parental model that Cinderella received from the fairy: this is the exact model of raising a lady, which we have already mentioned. Charles Perrault makes another conclusion - about the need for parental permission in. in the event that a child is destined to do something important in his life, he said that a person undoubtedly needs intelligence, courage and nobility, but none of these virtues will manifest themselves in life if a person does not receive blessings from. wizards and prophets." (E. Bern, "People Who Play Games")
And I would advise feminists to read another wonderful (though not so well-known) fairy tale by Perrault, “Rikke with the Tuft,” which is dedicated precisely to the problem of the relationship between beauty and intelligence. In it, a beautiful, but extremely stupid princess and an intelligent, but ugly prince, thanks to love, loyalty and nobility, seem to share their merits. Not such a fairy tale, I must say...
"Although beauty is a great virtue in a young person, still youngest daughter always had more success than the eldest. At first, everyone rushed to the beauty to look at her, to admire her, but soon everyone went to the one who was smart, because it was pleasant to listen to her... The eldest, although she was very stupid, noticed this and would not regret giving all her beauty, just to be half as smart as her sister."
“...You know that when I was still a fool, I still didn’t dare to marry you then, so how do you want that now, possessing the mind that you gave me... I made the decision that I couldn’t accept it even at that time.”
“—…know: from the same sorceress who, on my birthday, awarded me a magical gift and allowed me to endow with the mind of any person I please, you also received a gift - you can make the one you love and whom you want to honor with this grace handsome.” .
(C. Perrault "Rikke with a tuft")
By chance, she went for a walk in the very forest where she met Prince Rike, so that in freedom she could think about what to do. Walking there in deep thought, she suddenly heard a dull noise under her feet, as if some people were walking, running, fussing. Listening carefully, she made out the words; someone said: “Bring me that pot,” and someone else: “Give me that pot,” and a third: “Put some wood on the fire.” At that same moment, the earth opened up, and under her feet the princess saw a large kitchen, which was filled with cooks, scullions and all sorts of people needed to prepare a sumptuous feast. A crowd of twenty or thirty people separated from them; These were fishermen, they headed to one of the alleys, settled down around a long table and, with spiking needles in their hands, wearing hats with fox tails on their heads, began to work in unison, humming a euphonious song. The princess, surprised by this sight, asked them for whom they were working. “This, madam,” answered the most prominent of them, “this is for Prince Rike, tomorrow is his wedding.” The princess, surprised even more and suddenly remembering that today was a year since the day she promised to marry Prince Rike, almost fell. She did not remember this because, when she made the promise, she was still a fool, and having received from the prince the intelligence that he gave her, she forgot all her nonsense.
She had not yet walked thirty steps, continuing her walk, when Rike stood in front of her with a tuft, full of courage and splendor, indeed, like a prince preparing for a wedding. “You see, madam,” he said, “I sacredly kept my word and I have no doubt that you also came here to fulfill your promise and make me the happiest among people by giving me your hand.” “I confess to you frankly,” answered the princess, “I have not yet made a decision and I don’t think that I will ever make the decision that you would like.” “You surprise me, madam,” Riquet told her with a tuft. “I believe,” answered the princess, “and, of course, if I were dealing with a rude or stupid person, I would be in great difficulty. The princess's word is sacred, he would have told me, and you must marry me, since you promised me; but I’m talking to the smartest person in the whole world, and therefore I’m sure that I can convince you. You know that when I was still a fool, I still didn’t dare to marry you even then - so how do you want that now, possessing the mind that you gave me and from which I became even more selective than was before, I made a decision that I couldn’t make even at that time? If you really were going to marry me, then it was in vain that you saved me from my stupidity and taught me to understand everything.”
“If a stupid person,” objected Rike with a tuft, “would be allowed, as you just said, to reproach you for betraying your word, then why don’t you allow me, madam, to do the same, although it’s about the happiness of my life? What is the point in smart people being in a worse position than those who have no intelligence at all? Are you saying this, you, who have so much intelligence and who so wanted to become wiser? But let's get back to business. Apart from my ugliness, what don't you like about me? Are you dissatisfied with my race, my mind, my character, my behavior?” “Not at all,” answered the princess, “I like everything about you that you have just listed.” “If so,” said Rike with a tuft, “I will be happy, because you can make me the most pleasant of mortals.” - “How can this be?” - said the princess. “It will be,” answered Prince Rike, “if you love me so much that you wish it, and so that you, madam, have no doubt, know: from the same sorceress who, on my birthday, awarded me a magical gift and allowed me to endow another with the mind the person I please, you have also received a gift - you can make handsome the one you love and whom you want to honor with this grace.”
“If so,” said the princess, “I sincerely wish that you become the most beautiful and most amiable prince in all the land, and, as far as it is in my power, I bring you beauty as a gift.”
Before the princess had time to utter these words, Prince Rike had already turned into the most handsome, slender and most amiable man she had ever seen. Others claim that the sorceress’s spell had nothing to do with it, that only love brought about this transformation. They say that the princess, having reflected on the constancy of her admirer, on his modesty and on all the beautiful properties of his mind and his soul, ceased to notice how ugly his body was, how ugly his face was; that his hump now began to seem to her like nothing more than the posture of a self-important man, that in his terrible lameness she now began to see only his manner of holding himself a little crookedly, and this manner delighted her. They also say that his eyes seemed even more brilliant to her because they had braids, as if she saw in them an expression of passionate love, and his big red nose had for her some kind of warlike, heroic character.
Be that as it may, the princess promised him to marry him immediately, if only he received her father's consent. The king, having learned how highly his daughter ranks Prince Rike, who was also known to him as a very careful and wise prince, was glad to see his son-in-law in him. The wedding was celebrated the next day, as Riquet with the tuft had foreseen, and in accordance with his orders, which he had already given long before.
One thing follows from the fairy tale,
But the most correct ones were:
Everything that you and I loved,
It's wonderful and smart for us.
ANOTHER MORALITY
In another subject, nature itself
Infused grace and brilliance of this kind,
How can art compete with it?
But all this cannot ignite the heart,
Until love quietly helps
With its invisible beauty.
Tom Thumb
Once upon a time there lived a woodcutter with his wife, and they had seven children, all boys; the eldest was only ten years old, and the youngest only seven. It may seem strange that the woodcutter had so many children in such a short time, but his wife did not hesitate and brought him twins every time.
These people were very poor, and their seven children were a great burden for them, because none of the boys could yet earn a living. They were also upset by the fact that the youngest was very weak and was always silent; they considered stupidity what was actually a sign of intelligence. He was very small in stature, and when he was born, he was no bigger than a finger, which is why they began to call him: A boy the size of a finger.
At home, he suffered insults from everyone and always found himself guilty. Meanwhile, he was the smartest and most reasonable of the brothers, and if he spoke little, he listened a lot.
A difficult time came, such a great famine began that these poor people decided to get rid of their children. One evening, when the boys had already gone to bed, the woodcutter, whose heart was squeezing with melancholy, said to his wife, sitting with her by the fire: “You see that we can no longer feed our children; I can’t stand it if they die of hunger before my eyes, and I decided to take them to the forest tomorrow and throw them there, and it’s easy to do: while they amuse themselves - knitting brushwood - we just have to run away, so that they didn’t see.” - “Ah! - exclaimed the woodcutter’s wife, “are you really going to lead and abandon our children?” In vain did her husband prove to her their great poverty; she did not agree: she was poor, but she was their mother.
Search
We can notify you about new articles,