Abstract:
The article focuses on the retelling of Pushkin’s The Tale of Tsar Saltan by an
80-year-old local woman, recorded at the end of the 20th century in the Novgorod
region (northwest Russia). The text is analyzed both in terms of its structural
aspect (the correspondence of prose narration, poetic quotations from Pushkin’s
text, and the narrator’s comments) and in terms of its linguistic aspect (the correspondence
of dialect and literary variants of grammatical forms). In comparison
with Pushkin’s original, in the retelling the author’s perspective has been changed
from the fantastic to reality; consequently, the text has been transformed by the
adaptation of elements alien to the familiar reality or by their replacement with
familiar, but different, elements. Thus, the narrator included in the retelling
several stories from her own life and the lives of her relatives (acquaintances),
interiorizing the plot and filling it with personal and familiar realities, including
transformations on the lexical level. The retelling retains features of a traditional
folklore text. The plot becomes simplified; only the basic “event-related” points
are kept, and detailed descriptions are excluded. The viewpoint of the narrator
has also been changed from the external in The Tale of Tsar Saltan to internal in the
retelling. In addition, some structural characteristics of the retelling, in comparison
to Pushkin’s original, are typical of oral speech. The narrator produced two versions
of the retelling, the “male” and the “female” version, told, respectively, to
linguists of different genders. The versions are different at the level of the plot: the
“male” version describes the liberation of the Swan Princess, and in the “female”
one, the narrator focuses on the revenge of Guidon that is directed toward his
aunts. Thus, in the retelling, two folk plots, combined in Pushkin’s original, are
separated again and exist as two versions of the same text.
