For this week’s blogpost I will examine the use of descriptive elements to convey power and autocracy in the fairy tales and Ivan Bilibin’s portraits. Similar to the operas and other texts we have previously examined, the power of the aristocracy is conveyed through conspicuous displays of material wealth, such as feats, decorations, clothing. In the “Tale of the Frog Tsarevna”, the wives of the Tsar’s sons are asked to perform various domestic tasks such as baking and sewing. During the shirt making challenge, descriptive elements are used to describe the shirt with beautiful embroidery in gold and silver. The worth of these women as wives and as members of the royal family is measured by their ability to produce material goods grand enough to be worthy of the Tsar’s use. Similarly, Vasilisa’s beauty and grandeur is conveyed through descriptions of “Gilded carriages” and her gown that evokes imagery of the night sky (141).
This imagery is contrasted against negative descriptive elements of commoners. In “Vasilisa the Beautiful”,the white horses belonging to royalty are contrasted against the dark horses belonging to commoners. This dark imagery translates to the features described on many commoners such as the “black-browed” maid (10). We see much of this imagery in the portraits of these characters such as the red and white worn by royalty and the white horses they ride. In portraits of Vasilisa the Beautiful, her white robes and blonde hair are contrasted against dark backgrounds with ominous human skulls and forests. Here, negative and dark descriptive elements are also used to illustrate lower class status.
Finally, much of the narrative is objective and the descriptive elements provide a vehicle to communicate the Tsar’s power, while not explicitly promoting the Tsar’s regime. These fairytales would have been accessible to common people (and could have been told through word of mouth for those who were illiterate). These tales are lighthearted and accessible yet act as a vehicle for subtext. For common people, their impression of the Tsar and the royal family comes from these tales and paintings. In a historical analysis, it would be important to consider the authors and artists creating such works and how the works were distributed which would allow for a more in depth understanding of the intentions behind such glorified perspectives of the autocracy.
This is an interesting analysis, but these folk tales are conceivably quite ancient, and it is also important to keep in mind that they only existed in oral form until they were collected and transcribed by folklorists in the nineteenth century. They are thus not literary texts as we know them. And they were not “created” for any top-down political purpose but were told among the common people from generation to generation. Also, in Russian folk tales there is no “autocracy” in the sense that there are multiple tsardoms, each with its own fairytale tsar. If anything, perhaps this world mimics the multiple principalities, each ruled by its own prince, of pre-Mongol ancient Kievan Rus. The world of Russian fairytales is definitely not a realistic, real-world Russia with a real-world autocratic tsar.