Getting acquainted with the tales of A. S. Pushkin, the reader finds himself in a fascinating and magical world. These magnificent works reflect the author's love for Russian folk legends, legends, songs, for the history of his people. Pushkin worked on fairy tales for a significant part of his life.
Researchers have identified several sources from which Pushkin drew inspiration and looked for subjects for his fairy tales. It is known that the writer spent a lot of time collecting historical information and working in archives. These materials reflected not only the life of the leaders of Russian history, tsars and military leaders, but also contained valuable information about the life of the common Russian people. Many of the details found by Pushkin in historical descriptions are reflected in fairy tales.
During his life in the village of Mikhailovskoye, Pushkin took part in folk festivals more than once, spent time at fairs, mingling with the crowd of ordinary people. Here he could listen to folk songs and fairy tales, which were passed on to the audience by the blind beggars. Apt words, vivid images and accurate comparisons sunk into the soul of the writer, becoming the basis for future works.
In childhood and adolescence, Pushkin was very attached to his nanny, Arina Rodionovna. Being a simple peasant serf, the nanny often told Alexander fairy tales, which she knew a lot. Evenings spent listening to folk tales performed by Arina Rodionovna, Pushkin considered the greatest reward. “What a charm these fairy tales are! Each is a poem! - he wrote later. In a more mature age, the writer also often asked the nanny to retell individual fairy tales to him.
Famous fairy tales, imbued with the Russian folk spirit, Pushkin composed throughout almost his entire creative life, up to 1834. Literary scholars prefer to divide these works into two groups. The early tales were written by the author before 1825. The later ones, from which the readers just learned about the priest and his worker Balda, about Tsar Saltan, about the fisherman and the fish, about the golden cockerel, belong to the more mature period of Pushkin's work.
Researchers and critics agree that Pushkin's early fairy-tale poems do not reflect the true nationality of the writer's work, characteristic of the mature period of his literary activity. Here it is difficult to find signs of expression of the aspirations and interests of the people. Working on the first tales, the author only tried to consciously assimilate and qualitatively rework certain methods of oral creativity of the Russian people.
But even in the early period of composing fairy tales, Pushkin strove, whenever possible, to use some elements of folk legends, characteristic speech patterns, fairy tale motifs, and the names of characters. In exactly the same way, at the beginning of the 19th century, other Russian masters of the word created their fairy-tale poems.
After 1825, Pushkin gradually switched to realism in his work. He seeks to get closer to the people, to understand their ideals, dreams and age-old aspirations. Step by step, he worked out the plot lines of his future fairy tales, several times correcting the layout of the texts and mercilessly replacing one image with another. At the same time, the writer strove to touch on topical social topics, not forgetting about the moral ideals of the common people. The result of such a deepening into folk art were several of Pushkin's fairy tales, which were included in the "golden fund" of Russian and world literature.
