Doctor Collins, Ivan the Terrible and the ‘First Recorded’ Russian Folktales

Abstract

The Present State of Russia (1671) contains important records of traditional narratives relating to Tsar Ivan IV (the Terrible) collected by Samuel Collins, an Englishman who served as Tsar Alekse's surgeon in the 1660s. While the status of such narratives as instances of international folktales has been broadly accepted, it is helpful to consider them as representing two different traditions – one of popular Russian discourse, in which the Tsar is a good figure, punishing wicked nobles and officials and rewarding his honest humble subjects, and the other of expatriate discourse, stories current among resident foreigners in Moscow, in which the Tsar is depicted as arbitrary in his cruelty. Some of the narratives from the first tradition are found in later Russian popular tradition, while many of the stories from the other one appear particularly in earlier or contemporaneous writings about Russia by learned western and central Europeans. Placing the two sets of stories within these respective corpora allows us to better perceive their meaning. It is also worth attending to Collins's English relation of these ‘Russian’ stories, which possesses its own characteristic narrative style.