MEMORY IN THE MIRROR OF A FAIRY TALE

Abstract

Memory has long been an integral part of culture. Long before the emergence of psychology as a science, different forms of memory appeared in legends and fairy tales. We can recall Wilhelm Gauf’s fairy tale “The Caliph-stork”. Caliph forgets the magic word “mutabor” and therefore cannot turn back from a bird into a man. Interestingly, the mechanism of forgetting is described: Caliph, who turned into a stork on his own free will, is distracted and laughs. Apparently, this is one of the fi rst cases of the description of the inhibition of memory traces by interference. The scientifi c characteristic of this mechanism of forgetting appeared only in . We also fi nd a case of bad memory in the Strugatsky brothers’ fairy tale “Monday begins on Saturday”: the talking cat Vasily cannot remember a single fairy tale to the end. In the future kittens with “genetic sclerotic memory” appear in his family. Memory can help out of trouble. In the fairy tale “In the Land of Unlearned Lessons” (), the cute lazy and sloppy Viktor Perestukin and his cat Kuzya fi nd themselves in a magical land. There they meet with various situations of the educational process in which the boy failed. This fairy tale was published long before Russian neuropsychologists began to study diffi - culties in the development of memory in younger schoolchildren. Another example of help from memory we fi nd in the fairy tale “Tom Thumb”: a smart kid throws small pebbles on the road to save his brothers from the forest. This is an example of the effectiveness of memorization using special means. In conclusion, it should be said that the images of memory in fairy tales solve the important task of fi nding a new, unusual, humorous view of memory, its functions and capabilities.