Aleksandr Nikolaevič Afanas’ev – Wikipedia

Aleksandr Nikolaevich Afan’ev ( in Russian: Alexander Nikolaevich Afanasyev ^? ; Bogučar, 11 July 1826 – Moscow, 23 September 1871) was a Russian writer and linguist.
He is the most famous of the Russian folkrs of the nineteenth century.

He was born on 11 July 1826. His father was a small employee who passed his life working in the offices of two locations of second order of the Gubernija of Voronež. Small provincial self -taught, he wanted to study his son, entrusting him to masters and popci of a roughness so characteristic as to make us think that Afanas’ev remembered later on these youth years when he transcribed with so much taste those tales of the people who contained satirical elements On schools, churches and generally on the small bureaucratic world of provincial towns.

In Moscow he enrolled in the faculty of the law, but was passionate about all the various aspects, historical, literary and not only legal, of the intense intellectual life of the old capital which then gave the most visible fruits of the 1940s and deepened in all directions The dialogue between Westernist and Slavophili, between Hegelian romantics and new Enlightenment. The historians Granovsky and Solov’ëv, the jurists Redkin and Kavelin, and above all the glottologist, historian of religion and art F. I. Buslaev each gave an encouragement, a model, an address to Afanas’ev. The imprint of the historical-legal school was strong on him who was then laying the foundations of the modern conception of the evolution of the Russian state. But the incitement stronger, given to him by Buslaev, to look at the language, to its structure to find the key to history and popular consciousness.

In 1849 Afanas’ev found the work that was suited to him. Officer of the central archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he was able to dedicate himself with passion to the publication of ancient cards and, together, enjoy a lot of time. Thus wrote about the history of Russian literature, of bibliography; minutes and precise articles that demonstrate a timing of researcher and scholar, but who have nothing ingenious. All the warmth of his soul and the genius of his spirit was concentrated on a new and exciting task: to collect, publish and interpret the stories of the Russian people.

He gave his work to work as soon as the university is finished. He found a vast material already transcribed by the famous lexicographer from the ‘, he himself got himself from the voices of the peasants, nor did he ever get tired of comparing everything he managed to put together. When he began to publish his collections, it did not exist in Russia that some modest attempt to offer a collection of popular stories, such as that of I. P. Sacharov, published in 1841. A minimum of philological practice was enough to discover that they were compilations without any artistic value or scientific. It is therefore easy to understand the deep echo that accompanied the publication of Afanas’Ev, who scored for a period of nine years, from 1855 to 1864, in eight volumes. For the first time they could read in their together, in a faithful and lively version, those fairy tales that for centuries had accompanied the life of the peasants, whom the bans had told the young children of the lords, who had sometimes been printed on flying sheets that The Muziki had bought themselves at the market, but that only the soul and romantic culture of Afanas’ev now brought to the light of Russian literature. Nor did the echo had to go more to the century that has now gone from the first attempts of Afanas’ev to publish his collection. From scientific discussions then aroused in magazines such as the Sovoremenik (“The Contemporary”) To the Russian musicians and finally to the visible imprint that these fairy tales have left in the poetic world of Esenin, the echlet was varied and continuous.

Following the traces of the Grimm brothers – of which he studied the works with particular attention – even Afanas’ev tried to penetrate the primitive, religious and mythological meaning of the fairy tales he had collected. In his own as well as fantastic as admirable for width of knowledge and for acute individual intuitions, he tried to reconstruct the “poetic conceptions of the Slavs on nature” and to study all those elements of the popular stories that could be interpreted as transpositions of the phenomena of nature , sun, stars, rain, water and storm. All his conception, which he derived from German romanticism, has been rightly criticized and is now a curious document of European culture of the last century. But this continuous search for a primitive revelation in the stories had led him to consider and evaluate every word, every sentence, every inflection of these stories. Precious they became passing through his hands and precious are still today when all a century of work has now transformed our ideas on folklore, on its meaning and also on the way of collecting the material itself.

His whole life was thus summarized in his work. Until the death, which took place in 1871, Afanas’ev dedicated himself exclusively to the study of popular life. This did not prevent him from suffering the repercussing of the political persecutions that began against the radical elements in 1862. For having met with that Kel’SIV who tried to contact the world of Raskol’niiki, of the religious seats, to introduce Herzen’s ideas you , also Afanas’ev was obliged to abandon his place to the archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and prohibited him in the future of occupying any state employment. The last decade of his life he passed by dedicating himself to preparing and publishing an ever better edition of his stories and other literary works. His fame was now insured and he had become a representative figure of that period that saw the romantic push transfulating himself in the hope of the great reforms and the love for the language of the people become the food of the nascent democratic movement.

In 1860 Afanas’ev made a trip to Germany, Switzerland and Italy. The latter was visited in the period of the Risorgimento, and his epistolary testifies to the sympathy with which he observed the Italian events of that period: the liberation of the Italian state from the domains from Austria, and to the expedition started by Garibaldi who ended with the meeting of King Vittorio Emanuele II.

• Ancient Russian fairy tales , translation by Gigliola Venturi, preface by Franco Venturi, Turin, Einaudi, 1953.
• Prohibited Russian fairy tales , edited by Pia Pera, with an introductory essay by Boris Andreevic Uspenskij and the comparative notes attributed to Giuseppe Pitrè, series The elephants, Milan, Garzanti, 1992.
• Russian popular fairy tales , Cure and trad. by Luisa De Nardis, Rome, Newton Compton, 1994.

• ( IN ) Aleksandr Nikolaevich Afan’ev . are British encyclopedia Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
• Opere di Aleksandr Nikolaevich Afan’ev . are openMLOL , Horizons Unlimited srl.
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• ( IN ) Opere di Aleksandr Nikolaevich Afan’ev . are Gutenberg project .
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• Bibliograph of Italiana di Aleksandr Nikolaevich Afan’ev . are Vegetti catalog of fantastic literature , Fantascienza.com.