ПЕРВАЯ РАБОТА Е.М. МЕЛЕТИНСКОГО О ГЕРОЕ ВОЛШЕБНОЙ СКАЗКИ

Abstract

The article considers the history of creation of a previously unpublished work by E.M. Meletinsky, preceding the first draft of his doctorate thesis and monograph “The hero of fairy tale”. A typewritten copy of it was preserved among the documents seized during the scholar’s second arrest in 1949 and later donated to the library of Petrozavodsk University. During his time as a post-graduate student in the Central Asian University (then-name of National University of Uzbekistan) Meletinsky was already interested in historical poetics and folklore studies. That resulted in the “Fairytale plots in question about their everyday meaning” article. The fact that it was the first ever Meletinsky’s work on fairy tales is obvious not only from the documents and memoirs of Meletinsky himself, but from the very structure of the article: in the first chapters the author, taking a problem posed by A.N. Veselovsky in “The poetics of plots” – “to check Russian data about the third sibling, the little fool, the cinderwench against other people’s fairy tales” – as a basis, dwells extensively the motif of the youngest sibling in world fairy tales and the history of studying it, but in the last chapter he moves to the analysis of another motif – the tales about a “poor orphan”. Namely that motif, being in stadia way older, takes centre stage not only in the 1948 thesis, but in all of Meletinsky’s works on fairy tales prior to the second arrest, both published and unpublished.