Glory to Allah, Lord of the worlds! Greetings and blessings to the lord of the messengers, our lord and ruler Muhammad! May Allah bless him and greet him with eternal blessings and greetings, lasting until the Day of Judgment!
And after that, truly, the legends about the first generations became an edification for the subsequent ones, so that a person could see what events happened to others and learn, and so that, delving into the legends about past peoples and what happened to them, he would abstain from sin Praise be to him who made the tales of the ancients a lesson for subsequent nations.
Know, O my daughter, - said the vizier, - that one merchant had wealth and herds of cattle, and he had a wife and children, and Allah the Great granted him knowledge of the language and dialects of animals and birds. And this merchant lived in a village, and in his house he had a bull and a donkey. And one day the bull entered the donkey's stall and saw that it had been swept and sprinkled, and in the donkey's feeding trough there was sifted barley and sifted straw, and he himself lay and rested, and only sometimes the owner rode him, if some business happened, and returns immediately.
First night.
Shahrazad said: “They say, O happy king, that there was one merchant among merchants, and he was very rich and did great business in different lands. One day he went to some country to collect debts, and the heat overcame him, and then he sat down under a tree and, putting his hand into his saddlebag, took out a piece of bread and dates and began to eat dates with bread. And, having eaten a date, he threw the stone - and suddenly he sees: in front of him is a tall ifrit, and in his hands is a naked sword.
Know, O ifrit,” the elder said then, “that this gazelle is the daughter of my uncle and, as it were, my flesh and blood.” I married her when she was very young, and lived with her for about thirty years, but did not have a child with her; and then I took a concubine, and she gave me a son like the moon at full moon, and his eyes and eyebrows were perfect in beauty! He grew up and became big, and reached the age of fifteen;
Know, O lord of the kings of the jinn,” the elder began, “that these two dogs are my brothers, and I am the third brother.” My father died and left us three thousand dinars, and I opened a shop to trade, and my brothers also opened a shop. But I did not stay in the shop for long, since my elder brother, one of these dogs, sold everything he had for a thousand dinars and, having bought goods and all sorts of goods, left to travel. He was absent for a whole year, and suddenly, when I was in the shop one day, a beggar stopped next to me. I told him: “Allah will help!” But the beggar exclaimed, crying: “You don’t recognize me anymore!” - and then I looked at him and suddenly I saw - this is my brother!
“Oh, Sultan and head of all genies,” the old man began, “Know that this mule was my wife.” I went on a trip and was away for a whole year, and then I finished the trip and returned to my wife at night. And I saw a black slave who was lying in bed with her, and they were talking, playing, laughing, kissing and fussing. And seeing me, my wife hurriedly rose with a jug of water, said something over it and splashed it on me and said: “Change your image and take the form of a dog!” And I immediately became a dog, and my wife kicked me out of the house; and I left the gate and walked until I came to the butcher's shop.
It came to me, O happy king,” said Shahrazad, “that there was a fisherman, far advanced in years, and he had a wife and three children, and he lived in poverty. And it was his custom to cast his net four times every day, no less; and then one day he went out at midday, and came to the seashore, and put down his basket, and, picking up the floors, entered the sea and cast the net. He waited until the net was established in the water, and gathered the ropes, and when he felt that the net was heavy, he tried to pull it out, but could not;
Know, O ifrit,” the fisherman began, “that in ancient times and past centuries and for centuries there was a king named Yunan in the city of the Persians and in the land of Ruman. And he was rich and great and commanded an army and bodyguards of all kinds, but there was leprosy on his body, and doctors and healers were powerless against it. And the king drank medicines and powders and smeared himself with ointments, but nothing helped him, and not a single doctor could heal him. And a great doctor, far advanced in years, came to the city of King Yunan, whose name was doctor Duban. He read Greek, Persian, Byzantine, Arabic and Syrian books, knew healing and astronomy and learned their rules and foundations; benefits and harms, and he also knew all the plants and herbs, fresh and dry, beneficial and harmful, and studied philosophy, and comprehended all the sciences, etc.
And when this doctor came to the city and spent a few days there, he heard about the king and the leprosy that had affected his body, with which Allah tested him, and that scientists and doctors could not cure it.
They say, and Allah knows best,” the king began, “that there was one king from the kings of the Persians who loved fun, walking, hunting and fishing. And he raised the falcon and did not part with it day or night, and all night he held it in his hand, and when he went hunting, he took the falcon with him. The king made a golden cup for the falcon, which hung on his neck, and gave him water from this cup. And then one day the king was sitting, and suddenly the chief falconer came to him and said: “Oh, king of time, the time has come to go hunting.” And the king ordered to leave and took the falcon in his hand; and the hunters rode until they reached one valley, there they stretched out a net for catching, and suddenly a gazelle was caught in this net, and then the king exclaimed: “I will kill anyone whose head the gazelle jumps over.”
Among Arabic tales, the most famous is a collection of tales called “ Thousand and One Nights».
More than two and a half centuries have passed since the whole world first became acquainted with Arabian tales "One Thousand and One Nights", but even now they use strong love readers. The passage of time had no effect on the popularity of Scheherazade's stories. The influence was enormous fairy tales 1001 nights on the work of many writers.
It's difficult to say what attracts more fairy tales 1001 nights- fascinating plot, interesting interweaving of the incredible and the real, rich pictures of life in the Arab East, entertaining descriptions extraordinary countries or the vividness of the experiences of fairy tale characters.
Fairy tales "A Thousand and One Nights" are not the work of an individual writer - the collective author is the whole Arab people. In the form in which we now know it, " 1001 and one night" - a collection of fairy tales in the Arabic language, united by a common story about the bloodthirsty king Shahriyar, who took for himself every night new wife and the next day he killed her. History of " Thousand and one nights» has not been clarified to date; its origins are lost in the depths of centuries. On our website you can look list of Arabian Nights tales.
We all love fairy tales. Fairy tales are not just entertainment. Many fairy tales contain encrypted wisdom of humanity, hidden knowledge. There are fairy tales for children, and there are fairy tales for adults. Sometimes some are confused with others. And sometimes about everyone famous fairy tales We have a completely wrong idea.
Aladdin and his magic lamp. Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Which collection are these tales from? Are you sure? Are you firmly convinced that we are talking about the collection of fairy tales “A Thousand and One Nights”? However, none of the original lists of this collection contain the tale of Aladdin and his magic lamp. It appeared only in modern editions of One Thousand and One Nights. But it is not known exactly who and when inserted it there.
Just as in the case of Aladdin, we have to state the same fact: not a single authentic copy of the famous collection of fairy tales contains the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. It appeared in the first translation of these tales into French. The French orientalist Galland, preparing a translation of “The Thousand and One Nights,” included in it the Arabic fairy tale “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” from another collection.
Modern text fairy tales "A Thousand and One Nights" are rather not Arabic, but Western. If we follow the original, which, by the way, is a collection of Indian and Persian (and not Arabic) urban folklore, then only 282 short stories should remain in the collection. Everything else is late layers. Neither Sinbad the Sailor, nor Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, nor Aladdin with the Magic Lamp are in the original. Almost all of these tales were added by the French orientalist and first translator of the collection, Antoine Galland.
Initially, these tales had a slightly different name - “Tales from a Thousand Nights”. As we have already noted, they were formed in India and Persia: they were told in bazaars, in caravanserais, in the courts of noble people and among the people. Over time, they began to be recorded.
It must be said that in the East this book has long been viewed critically. "A Thousand and One Nights" was not considered highly artistic for a long time literary work, because her stories did not have a pronounced scientific or moral overtones.
It is interesting that the original tales of "A Thousand and One Nights" in to a greater extent full of eroticism rather than magic. If in the version familiar to us, Sultan Shahriyar indulged in sadness and therefore demanded every night new woman(and executed her the next morning), then in the original the Sultan from Samarkand was angry with all the women because he had caught his beloved wife cheating (with a black slave - behind a willow hedge in the garden of the palace). Fearing that his heart would be broken again, he killed women.
And only the beautiful Scheherazade managed to quell his thirst for revenge. Among the stories she told there were many that children for those who love fairy tales You can't read: about lesbians, homosexual princes, sadistic princesses, and beautiful girls who gave their love to animals, since there were no sexual taboos in these fairy tales.
In a rage, he cut off her head and the head of her lover. Frustrated, he went to his brother for advice, but his brother also witnessed his own wife’s betrayal. Shahryar and his brother did not know what to think, having killed their wives, they went looking for answers. And we ended up near the sea. A huge figure of Jin appeared from the sea. A few moments later another figure appeared, also emerging from the water, but it was already female. Shahryar and his brother hid and watched as Jin lay down on his wife’s knee (the woman coming out of the water was Jin’s wife). After some time, Gina's wife noticed the two brothers and called them to her. She said that she wanted to have intimacy with them, but the brothers refused. Gina's wife began to threaten them that she would wake up her husband and say that they were the ones who were persuading her to have sex. Shahriyar and his brother were scared and began to become intimate with Jin’s wife. After copulation with the brothers, Gina's wife asked them for wedding rings. The brothers did not understand why she needed them. Then Gene's wife pulled out a bag of 560 rings and showed them to the brothers. They asked what it was. Gina's wife told them that these rings belonged to all the men with whom she cheated on her husband.
After this, Shahriyar was beside himself with anger. From that moment on, all women were for him a fiend of evil, incapable of fidelity and devotion. He realized that women are needed only for bodily entertainment.
Shahriyar ordered every girl of marriageable age to be brought to him every night, after which he killed them in the morning. With each murder, he sank to the very bottom of unconsciousness, where low energies, fears, and entities that eat the human soul reign.
Scheherazade was the daughter of a vizier. And she was no ordinary girl. WITH early childhood She showed such qualities as hard work, love of reading, Eastern traditions and spiritual dedication. She was well versed in many areas of life: politics, art, music, exact sciences. Scheherazade was very patient and strong. She could speak well and knew many languages.
It was the turn of Kharezezade’s father. Sultan Shahriyal ordered him to bring his daughter, Scheherazade, to his palace, or the Sultan would cut off his head. Scheherazade's father understood that if he took his daughter to the palace, it would be the certain death of his daughter, and he wanted to refuse the Sultan. Scheherazade approached her father and begged him to let her go, saying that she understood what she was getting into, and that she actually wanted to try to help the Sultan with pure intentions. Scheherazade's father, having seen his daughter's bold and honest desire to help the Sultan, let her go.
Scheherazade understood what she was doing, and most importantly, she began to treat Shahriyar with fairy tales. That is, the point is not to quarrel with your husband, but to tell him stories, give examples of what, in your opinion, is not an entirely correct solution to this situation. But of course you need to listen to your husband. Be careful. Understand the things that interest him.
Women often complain that their man is not suitable for them, does not give them gifts, or does not offer them travel. But they forget to ask themselves a question: “Am I the woman who deserves such a man who gives his companion gifts and offers to travel the world, builds big house for your family? What am I doing for this? Am I developing personally as a person? Am I interested in my man’s interests?”
Scheherazade was constantly evolving. Just try to tell your child at least one fairy tale, beautifully, so that the child is not distracted and is completely in the attention of your voice and fairy tale. SHAHERAZADE had to be in constant fear of death, because every night could be her last, and despite this, she constantly managed to keep Shahriyar’s attention on herself, so much so that he wanted to spend one more night with this woman.
Shahryar was cruel, and at that time, he had already killed many innocent girls, what could happen to such a person? with his soul? By killing and raping, a person simply descends into low-lying worlds, from which it is very, very difficult to get out. Nowadays, these worlds are subject to various kinds of addictions and a dissolute lifestyle.
How much patience and love is required from a woman for a man like Shahriyar to be able to change?!!
Scheherazade, with her love, brought Shahriyar from the lowest level to the upper ones, where it was possible to believe in miracles. For three years, Scheherazade was a captive of the Sultan, bore him three children, and only three years later she dared to turn to her Sultan with a request to leave her alive, since she had three children, and that they would be lost without her. Shahryar, by this time, was already a different person. He said that he already loved her with all his heart and is grateful that she gave him life and happiness! She gave birth to three wonderful sons!
Next to us are exactly the men we deserve. And they show us how ignorant we are and how stagnant we are in development. You need to try to be mindful in order to understand this and not succumb to base feelings such as anger and aggression. As soon as we begin to rise through the levels of our consciousness, our men begin to change. Because with a developing woman, a man also begins to develop. But this does not mean that you need to force him! Only patience and love.
Scheherazade showed by her example that even a man who has already fallen into the lowest energies can be brought to the upper levels, where there is already FAITH, HOPE, LOVE.
When we forgive our offenders, then by doing so we only add strength to life and gain much more than through insults and revenge.
When we begin to truly love our men with all their shortcomings, we become witnesses to the real transformation of our men into real kings and sultans.
I would like to express my deep gratitude to Tina Mitusova, who inspired me to write this article. Tina Mitusova conducts seminars based on the tales of Scheherazade, One Thousand and One Nights. It was she who opened the door to this amazing world oriental tales...
Almost two and a half centuries have passed since Europe first became acquainted with the Arabian tales of the Arabian Nights in Galland's free and far from complete French translation, but even now they enjoy the constant love of readers. The passage of time did not affect the popularity of Shahrazad's stories; Along with countless reprints and secondary translations from Galland’s publication, publications of “Nights” appear again and again in many languages of the world, translated directly from the original, to this day. The influence of “The Arabian Nights” on the work of various writers was great - Montesquieu, Wieland, Hauff, Tennyson, Dickens. Pushkin also admired Arabic tales. Having first become acquainted with some of them in Senkovsky’s free adaptation, he became so interested in them that he purchased one of the editions of Galland’s translation, which was preserved in his library.
It’s hard to say what attracts more in the tales of “The Arabian Nights” - the entertaining plot, the bizarre interweaving of the fantastic and the real, vivid pictures of city life in the medieval Arab East, fascinating descriptions amazing countries or the liveliness and depth of experiences of the heroes of fairy tales, the psychological justification of situations, a clear, definite morality. The language of many of the stories is magnificent - lively, imaginative, rich, devoid of circumlocutions and omissions. Speech of heroes best fairy tales“Nights” is clearly individual, each of them has their own style and vocabulary, characteristic of the social environment from which they came.
What is “The Book of a Thousand and One Nights”, how and when was it created, where were Shahrazad’s tales born?
“A Thousand and One Nights” is not the work of an individual author or compiler - the entire Arab people is a collective creator. In the form in which we now know it, “A Thousand and One Nights” is a collection of fairy tales based on Arabic, united by a framing story about the cruel king Shahriyar, who took a new wife every evening and killed her in the morning. The history of the Arabian Nights is still far from clear; its origins are lost in the depths of centuries.
The first written information about the Arabic collection of fairy tales, framed by the story of Shahryar and Shahrazad and called “A Thousand Nights” or “One Thousand and One Nights,” we find in the works of Baghdad writers of the 10th century - the historian al-Masudi and the bibliographer ai-Nadim, who talk about it how long ago and good famous work. Already at that time, information about the origin of this book was quite vague and it was considered a translation of the Persian collection of fairy tales “Khezar-Efsane” (“A Thousand Tales”), allegedly compiled for Humai, the daughter of the Iranian king Ardeshir (IV century BC). The content and nature of the Arabic collection mentioned by Masudi and anNadim are unknown to us, since it has not survived to this day.
The evidence of the named writers about the existence in their time of the Arabic book of fairy tales “One Thousand and One Nights” is confirmed by the presence of an excerpt from this book dating back to the 9th century. Subsequently, the literary evolution of the collection continued until the XIV-XV centuries. More and more fairy tales of different genres and different social origins were put into the convenient frame of the collection. We can judge the process of creating such fabulous collections from the message of the same anNadim, who says that his elder contemporary, a certain Abd-Allah al-Jahshiyari - a personality, by the way, is quite real - decided to compile a book of thousands of tales of “Arabs, Persians, Greeks and other peoples,” one per night, each containing fifty sheets, but he died having only managed to type four hundred and eighty stories. He took material mainly from professional storytellers, whom he called from all over the caliphate, as well as from written sources.
Al-Jahshiyari’s collection has not reached us, and other fairy-tale collections called “One Thousand and One Nights,” which were sparingly mentioned by medieval Arab writers, have also not survived. The composition of these collections of fairy tales apparently differed from each other; they only had in common the title and the frame of the tale.
In the course of creating such collections, several successive stages can be outlined.
The first suppliers of material for them were professional folk storytellers, whose stories were initially recorded from dictation with almost stenographic accuracy, without any literary processing. A large number of such stories in Arabic, written in Hebrew letters, are stored in the Saltykov-Shchedrin State Public Library in Leningrad; ancient lists belong to the XI-XII centuries. Subsequently, these records went to booksellers, who subjected the text of the tale to some literary processing. Each tale was considered at this stage not as an integral part of the collection, but as a completely independent work; therefore, in the original versions of the tales that have reached us, later included in the “Book of One Thousand and One Nights,” there is still no division into nights. The text of fairy tales was divided into last stage their processing when they fell into the hands of the compiler who compiled the next collection of “A Thousand and One Nights”. In the absence of material for the required number of “nights,” the compiler replenished it from written sources, borrowing from there not only short stories and anecdotes, but also long knightly romances.
The last such compiler was that unknown-named learned sheikh, who compiled the most recent collection of tales of the Arabian Nights in Egypt in the 18th century. Fairy tales also received the most significant literary treatment in Egypt, two or three centuries earlier. This 14th-16th century edition of The Book of the Thousand and One Nights, usually called “Egyptian”, is the only one that has survived to this day and is represented in most printed publications, as well as in almost all the Nights manuscripts known to us and serves as specific material for the study of Shahrazad’s tales.
From the previous, perhaps earlier, collections of “The Book of One Thousand and One Nights,” only single tales have survived, not included in the “Egyptian” edition and presented in a few manuscripts of individual volumes of “Nights” or existing in the form of independent stories, which, however, have a division at night. These stories include the most popular fairy tales among European readers: “Aladdin and the Magic Lamp”, “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” and some others; The Arabic original of these tales was at the disposal of the first translator of the Arabian Nights, Galland, through whose translation they became known in Europe.
When studying The Arabian Nights, each tale should be considered separately, since there is no organic connection between them, and they existed independently for a long time before being included in the collection. Attempts to group some of them into groups based on their supposed origin - India, Iran or Baghdad - are not well founded. The plots of Shahrazad's stories were formed from individual elements that could penetrate Arab soil from Iran or India independently of one another; in their new homeland they were overgrown with purely native layers and from ancient times became the property of Arab folklore. This, for example, happened with the framing tale: having come to the Arabs from India through Iran, it lost many of its original features in the mouths of the storytellers.
More appropriate than an attempt to group, say, according to a geographical principle, should be considered the principle of uniting them, at least conditionally, into groups according to the time of creation or according to their belonging to the social environment where they existed. The oldest, most enduring fairy tales in the collection, which may have existed in one form or another already in the first editions in the 9th-10th centuries, include those stories in which the element of fantasy is most strongly manifested and acts supernatural beings actively interfering in people's affairs. These are the tales “About the Fisherman and the Spirit”, “About the Ebony Horse” and a number of others. For my long literary life they, apparently, were repeatedly subjected to literary processing; This is evidenced by their language, which claims to have a certain sophistication, and by the abundance of poetic passages, undoubtedly interspersed into the text by editors or copyists.
We all love fairy tales. Fairy tales are not just entertainment. Many fairy tales contain encrypted wisdom of humanity, hidden knowledge. There are fairy tales for children, and there are fairy tales for adults. Sometimes some are confused with others. And sometimes we get a completely wrong idea about all the famous fairy tales.
Aladdin and his magic lamp. Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Which collection are these tales from? Are you sure? Are you firmly convinced that we are talking about the collection of fairy tales “A Thousand and One Nights”? However, none of the original lists of this collection contain the tale of Aladdin and his magic lamp. It appeared only in modern editions of One Thousand and One Nights. But it is not known exactly who and when inserted it there.
Just as in the case of Aladdin, we have to state the same fact: not a single authentic copy of the famous collection of fairy tales contains the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. It appeared in the first translation of these fairy tales into French. The French orientalist Galland, preparing a translation of “The Thousand and One Nights,” included in it the Arabic fairy tale “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” from another collection.
Antoine Galland
The modern text of the Arabian Nights fairy tales is, rather, not Arabic, but Western. If we follow the original, which, by the way, is a collection of Indian and Persian (and not Arabic) urban folklore, then only 282 short stories should remain in the collection. Everything else is late layers. Neither Sinbad the Sailor, nor Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, nor Aladdin with the Magic Lamp are in the original. Almost all of these tales were added by the French orientalist and first translator of the collection, Antoine Galland.
At the beginning of the 18th century, all of Europe was gripped by some kind of pathological passion for the East. On this wave began to appear works of art on an oriental theme. One of them was offered to the reading public by the then unknown archivist Antoine Galland in 1704. Then the first volume of his stories was published. The success was deafening.
By 1709, six more volumes had been published, and then four more, the last of which was published after Galland's death. All of Europe was binge-reading the stories that the wise Shahrazad told King Shahryar. And no one cared that the real East in these tales became less and less with each volume, and there were more and more inventions of Galland himself.
Initially, these tales had a slightly different name - “Tales from a Thousand Nights”. As we have already noted, they were formed in India and Persia: they were told in bazaars, in caravanserais, in the courts of noble people and among the people. Over time, they began to be recorded.
According to Arab sources, Alexander the Great ordered these tales to be read to himself at night in order to stay awake and not miss an enemy attack.
Confirms ancient history of these tales is an Egyptian papyrus from the 4th century with a similar title page. They are also mentioned in the catalog of a bookseller who lived in Baghdad in the mid-10th century. True, next to the title there is a note: “A pathetic book for people who have lost their minds.”
It must be said that in the East this book has long been viewed critically. “A Thousand and One Nights” was not considered a highly artistic literary work for a long time, because its stories did not have a pronounced scientific or moral subtext.
Only after these tales became popular in Europe did they fall in love in the East. Currently, the Nobel Institute in Oslo ranks “A Thousand and One Nights” among the hundred most significant works of world literature.
It is interesting that the original tales of the Arabian Nights are more saturated with eroticism than with magic. If in the version familiar to us, Sultan Shahriyar indulged in sadness and therefore demanded a new woman every night (and executed her the next morning), then in the original the Sultan from Samarkand was angry with all women because he had caught his beloved wife cheating (with a black slave - behind the willow hedge in the palace garden). Fearing that his heart would be broken again, he killed women. And only the beautiful Scheherazade managed to quell his thirst for revenge. Among the stories she told were many that children who love fairy tales should not read: about lesbians, homosexual princes, sadistic princesses, and beautiful girls who gave their love to animals, since there were no sexual taboos in these fairy tales.
Indo-Persian eroticism was originally at the heart of the Arabian Nights tales.
Yes, I would probably be careful about reading such fairy tales to my children. As for who and when they were written, there is even a radical opinion that these tales simply did not exist in the East before they were published in the West, since their originals, as if by magic, began to be found only after Galland’s publications. May be so. Or maybe not. But in any case, these tales are currently one of the most significant works of world literature. And that is great.
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