In the fable “Frogs Asking for a Tsar,” funny and sad things happen at the same time. The frogs were unable to live under “people's rule,” that is, without supreme power. They began to ask the gods for a king.
Twice the gods sent them a ruler, both times it had dire consequences. In the first case, “this king was a log of aspen,” and in the second, “the Crane.”
The first ruler did not suit the frogs with his tolerance, and they began to behave as they pleased. The crane was cool and quick to judge, “whomever it does not meet, it will immediately judge and swallow.” The gods did not satisfy the third request (to replace this ruler).
The allegory in the fable is transparent. Frogs are common people who make up most of the state. Kings - through these images two types of government are shown.
The fable reflects the following thoughts of the fabulist:
The people cannot manage their own lives; they are ready to give up freedom for unknown reasons;
If the king is calm, the people begin to abuse their official position, but they do not like it;
A ruler of a “different character” does not suit the people with his cruelty;
- “a voice from heaven” (the opinion of the gods) evaluates the behavior of frogs as madness;
The gods do not offer the option of a “good” king, since the people do not deserve it.
We really find it funny and sad at the same time. The behavior of common frogs is described in a funny way, and the first ruler is funny characterized. It’s sad because it shows a lack of self-awareness among the people, that the rulers are far from ideal, but there will not be better ones.
Russian history has many similar examples.
The fable begins with an ironic and slightly sad story about the fact that the frogs were not happy free life, life “without service and in freedom.” They themselves, voluntarily, asked the gods to give them a king.
The rule of the first king was that he was passive, which led to some chaos: the frogs became insolent and stopped respecting and honoring him. The rule of the Crane was exactly the opposite: punishment was its main rule, the frogs were afraid because they began to see danger to life everywhere.
It turns out that the real government Krylov did not show. Perhaps he believed that the government and the people are always in conflict. It can also be assumed that the people deserved such rulers, having been guilty of not being able to live under “people's rule.”
Help - help; aspen log - an uncouth, “heavy”, stupid and rude person; there is a great flaw in frogs every day - every day they are punished (die) large number frogs; A black year is coming - a time of failure and sadness.
The moral of the story is contained in the final lines. These words (“Why didn’t you know how to live happily before?”, “Live with him so that things don’t get worse for you!”) are pronounced by the gods from heaven.
IN ordinary life These words can be said when you need to remind someone or yourself that we always have opportunities that, due to thoughtlessness, we do not use; then there are many problems, the occurrence of which we ourselves are to blame for.
A fairy tale is a beautiful creation of art. Scientists interpret the fairy tale differently. Some of them, with absolute clarity, strive to characterize fairy-tale fiction as independent of reality, while others want to understand how the attitude of folk storytellers to the surrounding reality was refracted in the fantasy of fairy tales. Should any fantastic story be considered a fairy tale in general, or should we distinguish other types of it in oral folk prose - non-fairy tale prose? How to understand fantastic fiction, without which none of the fairy tales can do? These are the problems that have long troubled researchers.
The famous fairytale expert E.V. Pomerantseva gives a definition of a fairy tale, which is worth agreeing with: “A folk tale (or kazka, tale, fable) is an epic oral work of art, predominantly prosaic, magical, of an adventurous or everyday nature with a focus on fiction. The last feature distinguishes a fairy tale from other genres of oral prose: tales, legends and tales, that is, from stories presented by the narrator to listeners as a narration about events that actually took place, no matter how unlikely and fantastic they may be."
Probably the most common and most beloved fairy tale among people is the fairy tale. It goes back to ancient times.
All fairy tales have common features. Firstly, they are similar in the generality of their construction. The simplest scheme of the predecessor of a fairy tale contained the following links as mandatory:
1) as a starting point - the existence of a ban; 2) violation of the prohibition by someone;
3) a consequence of the violation consistent with the nature of mythological ideas;
4) a narrative about the practice of magic; 5) its positive result and the hero’s return to well-being.
Each of the fairy tales of later times gravitates towards the structure of these stories as its original narrative basis. Secondly, not a single fairy tale is complete without a miraculous action: sometimes an evil and destructive, sometimes a good and beneficial supernatural force intervenes in a person’s life. Wonderful fiction lies at the heart of this type of fairy tale.
Let's try to understand the origin of this fiction using the example of the Russian folk tale "The Frog Princess". From the very beginning, the fairy tale takes the listener (reader) into a strange world, unlike the one that surrounds a person. The narrative immediately captures the imagination. The father forces his sons to take bows and shoot an arrow at
different sides: where the arrow falls, take the bride there! This episode cannot seem like anything other than a free invention to a modern reader with views alien to the ideas of those times, when people attached importance to this peculiar fortune-telling and firmly believed in the fate to which they entrusted themselves. But this belief still persisted, and the ancient motif was retained in the fairy-tale narrative.
The eldest son's arrow fell into the boyar's courtyard, the arrow shot by the middle son landed in a merchant's courtyard, and the youngest son's arrow fell into a swamp and was picked up by a frog. The older brothers were cheerful and happy, but the younger brother cried: “How can I live with a frog?” The brothers got married: the eldest - to a hawthorn tree, the middle one - to a merchant's daughter, and the younger brother - to a frog. They were married according to the ritual.
The younger brother did not receive any dowry for his wife: a frog lived in a dirty and swampy swamp. On the contrary, the older brothers married with benefits. The ancient motif of the destitute son takes on new meaning in this tale. In the artistic narrative, the life situation turned out to be changed. All that remains from the long-standing tradition is the memory that it is the younger brother who should have the hardest time.
Poetic imagination recreated a picture full of lively ironic meaning - a frog is held on a platter during a wedding: how else could Ivan, the youngest son, stand next to him and lead the frog bride by the hand.
The hero's bitter thoughts about the power of fate, which gave him a bug-eyed green and cold frog as his wife, are conveyed in the fairy tale with naive simplicity and psychological clarity: “How to live? To live is not to cross a field, not to cross a river!” A fairy tale strives to capture the hero’s state of mind; it specifically speaks about a person’s experiences.
Communication with the powerful forces of nature makes the hero of a fairy tale strong. He and his wife are helped by “nurses” whom the priest once assigned to the frog. The fairy tale almost forgot that it is the family connection with the natural world that makes the hero both powerful and strong. It talks about the youngest son in the family as a person who remained faithful to the previous ethical standards. He does not seek wealth and marries a simple swamp frog.
Let's take a closer look at the fairy tale characters in their correlation with people's beliefs and mythical characters.
The title character, the frog, is a character widely represented in the myths and legends of many peoples. In various mythological and poetic systems there are both positive (connection with fertility, productive power, rebirth) and negative (connection with the chthonic world, pestilence, illness, death) functions of the frog, determined primarily by its connection with water, in particular with rain . In some cases, the frog, like a turtle, fish or any sea animal, holds the world on its back, in others it acts as the discoverer of some important cosmological elements. Among the Altai people, the frog discovers a mountain with a birch tree and stones from which the first fire is made. Sometimes the frog is associated with the water elements of chaos, the original silt (or mud) from which the world arose. In Burma and Indochina, the image of a frog is often associated with a spirit that swallows the moon (therefore, the frog is considered the cause of an eclipse). In China, where frogs are also associated with the moon, they are called “heavenly chickens”, as there is a belief that frogs fall with dew from the sky. The motif of the heavenly origin of frogs allows us to consider them as transformed children (or the wife) of the Thunderer, expelled to earth, into the water, into the lower world (compare with the Russian sign “until the first thunderstorm the frog does not croak” and the widespread ideas about the croaking of a frog for rain, about their appearing with rain, etc.).
The connection of the frog with the god of the sky is indirectly attested in Aesop's fable about the frogs asking the Thunderer for a king for themselves. The motif of frogs as transformed people, also known in Australian mythology, is not limited to their connection with the Thunderer; in a Philippine etiological myth, a man who fell into the water and was carried across the river in a basket turns into a frog; The same range of ideas includes the motive of turning into a frog for deception, images of the so-called frog prince in German folklore and, finally, images of the Frog Princess in Russian fairy tales.
Having completed a brief excursion into the myths and beliefs of various peoples with the participation of a frog, we will move on to consider other characters. After Ivan violated a certain prohibition by throwing a frog skin into the oven, and received punishment in the form of excommunication from his wife, he encounters a group of characters very typical of fairy tales, especially fairy tales - animals (the title character is one of them).
A childish, naive attitude towards living nature became the basis of man’s views on the living world: the beast is intelligent and speaks. Tales about animals took forms of fiction from the ideas and concepts of primitive people, who attributed to animals the ability to think, speak and act intelligently. The ideas of people who attributed human thoughts and rational actions to the beast arose in the vital struggle for mastery of the forces of nature.
The first animal that Ivan Tsarevich saw after meeting the “old man” who gave him a ball to show him the way was a bear. In the minds of any person familiar with fairy tales, the bear is a beast of the highest rank. He is the most powerful forest animal. When in fairy tales one animal replaces another, the bear is in the position of the strongest. Such is the tale of the little tower, the beasts in the pit, and other tales. One must think that this position of the bear in the animal hierarchy is explained in its own way by its connection with those traditional pre-story mythological legends in which the bear occupied the most important place as the owner of forest lands. Perhaps, over time, the bear began to be seen as the embodiment of the sovereign, the ruler of the district.
Fairy tales constantly emphasized the enormous strength of the bear. He crushes everything that comes under his feet. Even in ancient times, the bear was considered a special creature; one had to beware of it. The pagan belief in the bear was so strong that in Ancient Rus', in one of the canonical questions they asked: “Is it possible to make a fur coat from a bear?” The answer was: “Yes, you can.” Why is this question asked specifically about the bear? Is it because this beast has been considered an inviolable creature since ancient times? But this, of course, contradicted the spirit of the new Christian religion. So, nothing prevents us from recognizing the existence of a bear cult among the Slavs as more than likely. The idea of a patron close to the totem was associated with the bear. But even regardless of the solution to the question of whether the ancestors of the Eastern Slavs had totemism or not, scientists have proven the fact that the Slavic peoples had mythical ideas about animals endowed with intelligence. It was a world that people were afraid of and did not want to quarrel with: people observed all sorts of customs and magical rituals. This also applies to other animals that the main character meets. The drake, the slanting hare and the pike, which Ivan Tsarevich took pity on and did not kill, subsequently served him well. In fairy tales, there is a common motive of gratitude to an animal, which becomes a faithful friend and helper of a person. The animals take the side of the hero when he shows generosity and does not harm them. The later explanation for such a fabulous episode is natural: the beast rewards good for good. A different explanation for this was given in ancient times. Almost all peoples had a custom of killing the totem bird, the beast. Considerations for the inviolability of the totem were combined with expedient measures to preserve game at a time when it was breeding. Perhaps tales of grateful animals reflect these ancient fishing customs.
Let's draw some conclusions. The appearance of fairy tales about animals was preceded by stories directly related to beliefs about animals. These stories did not yet have an allegorical meaning. The animal images meant animals and no one else. Existing totemic concepts and ideas obligated animals to be endowed with the traits of mythical creatures; animals were surrounded by reverence. Such stories directly reflected ritual, magical and mythical concepts and ideas. This was not yet art in the literal and precise sense of the word. Stories of a mythical nature were distinguished by a narrowly practical, life purpose. It can be assumed that they were told for edifying purposes and taught how to treat animals. By observing certain rules, people sought to subordinate the animal world to their influence. This was the initial stage of the emergence of fantastic fiction. Later, fairy tales about animals and tales with their participation were based on it.
“How long, how short, the ball rolled towards the forest. There stands a hut on chicken legs, turning around itself.” Among the images that arose on an ancient life basis is the image of a female assistant, an enchantress and a sorceress. A rare fairy tale is complete without a story about the sinister old woman, Baba Yaga, who, however, turns out to be very caring and attentive to the hero. Let us remember what features and what role Yaga is endowed with. She lives in a dense forest, in a strange hut on chicken legs. According to the wonderful spell “Hut, hut, stand in the old way, as your mother put it: with your back to the forest, with your front towards me,” the hut turns towards the hero and he enters this strange dwelling. Baba Yaga greets the daredevil with the same traditional grunts and snorts.
V. Ya. Propp in his study about wrote a fairy tale, that Yaga is uncomfortable with the smell of a living person. “The smell of the living is just as disgusting and terrible to the dead as the smell of the dead is terrible and disgusting to the living.” Baba Yaga is dead. She lies across her hut “from corner to corner, her nose rooted in the ceiling.” Ieba is too tight for Yaga, she feels like she’s in a coffin. That Yaga is a dead man is also indicated by her bone-legged appearance. Baba Yaga is blind: she does not see the hero, but smells him. In Yaga, apparently, people saw an ancestor on the female line, who lived beyond the line that separates living people from the dead. The cult of female ancestors was closely related to totemism and the cult of nature. This explains the old woman’s special power over the living world of nature, and she herself has many animal traits. In some fairy tales, Yaga is replaced by a goat, a bear, or a magpie. Yaga herself has the ability to transform into different birds and animals. Yaga’s closeness to the mythical images of the lords of the natural world also explains the special character of her hut on chicken legs. The hut, reminiscent of a coffin in its cramped space, is perhaps evidence of the late poetic development of the ancient custom of burying the dead in trees or on a platform (the so-called air burial).
Baba Yaga told Ivan Tsarevich that his wife was with Koshchei the Immortal, and also told how to deal with him. The image of Koshchei expresses the world of violence and misanthropy. Undoubtedly, Koschey is a representative of that social force that violated the ancient clan orders of equality and took away from a woman her former social role. Koschey always appears in fairy tales as a kidnapper of women, turning them into his slaves. In addition, he appears in fairy tales as the owner of untold wealth. Fairy tales depict Koshchei as a withered, bony old man with sunken, burning eyes. According to fairy tales, he increases and decreases the age of people, but he himself is immortal: his death is hidden in an egg, and the egg is in a nest, and the nest is in an oak tree, and the oak tree is on an island, and the island is in the boundless sea. It’s as if materialized in the egg beginning of life, this is the link that makes continuous reproduction possible. Only by crushing an egg can life end. The fairy tale did not put up with the unjust social system and ruined the immortal Koshchei. Resorting to imaginary means of dealing with Koshchei, storytellers ended the life of this creature in a completely understandable and naive way - the embryo was crushed. In this episode we are faced with partial magic (it is based on replacing the whole with a part), characteristic of fairy tales (remember flint, steel, etc.). The death of Koshchei, this tale says, “at the end of a needle, that needle in an egg, the egg in a duck, the duck in a hare, that hare sits in a stone chest, and the chest stands on a tall oak tree, and that oak Koschey the Immortal, like its own eye, protects." The hero overcomes all obstacles, picks up a needle, breaks the tip - and now “no matter how much Koschey fought, no matter how much he rushed in all directions, he had to die.”
This is where we end our far from comprehensive, but quite complete analysis of the Russian folk tale “The Frog Princess,” which is a fairy tale - an example of national Russian art. A fairy tale has its deepest roots in the psyche, in the perception, culture and language of the people.
Literature used:
1. Anikin V.P. Russian folk tale. - M.: "Enlightenment", 1977.
2. Meletinsky E. M. Hero of a fairy tale. Origin of the image. M., 1958.
3. Myths of the peoples of the world. Encyclopedia. - M.: "Soviet Encyclopedia", 1988,
4. Pomerantseva E. V. Some features of the Russian post-reform fairy tale. -
M.: "Soviet ethnography", 1956, N4, p. 32-44.
5. Propp V. Ya. Historical roots of a fairy tale. M., 1946.
6. Russian folk tales. Collection. - M.: "Children's Literature", 1966, p. 3-12.
A fairy tale is a beautiful creation of art. Scientists interpret the fairy tale differently. Some of them, with unconditional obviousness, strive to characterize fairy-tale fiction as independent of reality, while others want to understand how the relativity of fairy tales was refracted in the fantasy of fairy tales.
Fables by I.A. Krylova is a special satirical genre inherited from antiquity. In the era of classicism, fables belonged to “low” genres, so they sounded simple colloquial speech. The heroes of the fables could be either people from the people or animals reflecting certain character traits.
In the fable “Frogs Asking for a Tsar,” the heroes are Frogs, but this, of course, is an allegory. Allegory - allegory - one of characteristic features fables. By Frogs we mean people who ask the gods to give them a sovereign. Zeus gave them a King, but it was an aspen block that did not react to anything. Having rested from fear, the Frogs became bold and daring, and then they did not care about the new ruler at all. Having asked Jupiter to give them another King, “truly for glory,” they received the Crane for their power. Now another extreme awaited them: the Crane ate the guilty, “and at his trial no one was right.” Soon the Frogs repented of their desire and again prayed to Jupiter, “that even they cannot... neither stick their nose out nor croak safely.” But now Jupiter no longer makes concessions.
The final words of Jupiter are the moral of the fable, a short instructive statement that contains the main meaning of the fable:
“...Was a King given to you? - so he was too quiet:
You rebelled in your puddle,
Another one was given to you - so this one is very dashing;
Live with him so that things don’t get worse for you!”
This is a lesson to people: they want to change their lives through outside intervention, not taking into account the fact that society should develop gradually, historically. Stupid Frogs proceed only from their ideas about power, but their intelligence is not enough to understand the need for gradual development public relations. For this God punishes them. In the fable, the author uses colloquial and colloquial expressions: “cracked into the kingdom”, “all the Frogs’ legs fluttered in fright”, “there’s a croaking and groaning more than ever”, “swallowing them up like flies.” Many words and expressions are outdated (“Why didn’t you know how to live happily before?”). But the idea of Krylov’s fable is not outdated, it is still significant, causing both sadness and laughter at the same time.
Toads and frogs live in large numbers in the vast expanses of swamps, they may differ appearance, but are very similar in their lifestyle and similar anthropometric features.
Lifestyle of marsh toads with frogs
Marsh toads with frogs have an undeveloped neck and a fixed head; the larvae still have a tail, but in adults it is reduced, since the remaining caudal vertebrae merge into a rod-shaped bone.
Toads with frogs belong to the order of anurans, they are predators and catch with the help of their tongue, insects stick to its tip and are drawn into the oral cavity. In most cases, their diet consists of mollusks, worms and arthropods.
These swamp animals can also be viviparous, for example, like African toads or tree frogs living in Puerto Rico. However, most representatives of tailless amphibians are born in the form of free-swimming larvae - tadpoles.
Sharp-faced marsh frog
One of the brightest representatives of frogs living in swamps is the sharp-faced marsh frog.
This species is not large - only six centimeters in length. The color of individuals is most often grayish and brown, sometimes it reaches a chocolate shade with spots, but there are no spots on the abdomen and in general it is light in color.
Among the features of the species, one can highlight a dark temporal spot that stretches to the shoulder from the eye, bypassing the eardrum; the frog’s muzzle is sharp.
Features of marsh frogs
Frogs and toads that live in swampy areas often have six-toed webbed feet, which makes them stand out compared to representatives of the tailless class that live in fresh water bodies.
In most cases, marsh frogs and toads lead a twilight lifestyle, but they often go hunting in daytime. When spawning occurs, they move away from the water and can be as close as 0.3 hectares from the swamp. But if there is a lack of food supply, they raid the swamp.