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1 - Freedom and the Fool

from Part I - Emancipation of the Arts (1850–1889)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2019

Jeffrey Brooks
Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University, Maryland
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Summary

Imperial Russia’s most popular historical novel was not War and Peace but a story of folkloric origins that celebrated freedom and poked fun at authority. The Legend of How a Soldier Saved Peter the Great from Death appeared in multiple versions from 1843 onward and drew upon mythologies of the Fool – in sacred accounts, the Holy Fool (Iurodivyi); in secular tales, little Ivan the Fool (Ivanushka-Durachok). The hero of Russia’s first commercialized folktale, Tsarevich Ivan, the Firebird, and the Grey Wolf, tricks a tsar as the protagonist of the contemporaneous children’s classic, The Little Humpbacked Horse. The freedom of fools was attractive enough in traditional society; amidst multi-dimensional change after the Emancipation, the idea of release from traditional constraint was electrifying. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and others created a dialogue between the familiar and the new by peopling their works with recognizable characters, foremost among which was the Fool. In so doing they illuminated ideas of self-fulfillment free from oppressive and unjust authority. But the era’s authors and readers also knew that when authority seemed most in shadow, it could return in force. The tension between freedom and order reflected ambivalence toward each that endured in Russian traditions and new works.

Type
Chapter
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The Firebird and the Fox
Russian Culture under Tsars and Bolsheviks
, pp. 19 - 37
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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  • Freedom and the Fool
  • Jeffrey Brooks, The Johns Hopkins University, Maryland
  • Book: The Firebird and the Fox
  • Online publication: 05 October 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108695893.003
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  • Freedom and the Fool
  • Jeffrey Brooks, The Johns Hopkins University, Maryland
  • Book: The Firebird and the Fox
  • Online publication: 05 October 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108695893.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Freedom and the Fool
  • Jeffrey Brooks, The Johns Hopkins University, Maryland
  • Book: The Firebird and the Fox
  • Online publication: 05 October 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108695893.003
Available formats
×