55 of 400 Tales Feature the Fox: Ukraine’s Animal Folktales, Published in 1916

Ukrainian has two words for folk tale: “kazka” (казка) and “baika” (байка). In 1916 the Shevchenko Scientific Society in Lviv published 400 animal tales collected by the folklorist Volodymyr Hnatiuk (1871–1926) as the two-volume Ukrainian Folk Baiky (Animal Epic). The book arranges, by animal, tales in which the fox, wolf, bear and dog take the leading role, along with birds, fish and even insects.

“Rukavychka” (the mitten), in which animals one after another crawl into a mitten dropped in a snowy forest, is one of the tales the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (published by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, CIUS, at the University of Alberta; hereafter IEU) lists as a tale for young children. This tale’s relationship to a Japanese picture book was introduced in the article on the picture book Tebukuro, its original title “Rukavychka,” and the Ukrainian folk tale. Here, drawing on the preface and table of contents of the 1916 book, we trace when, and by whom, the animal tales behind it were collected, and how they were classified.

Are the Main Characters People, or Animals?

In his opening essay, “Some Observations on the Baika,” Hnatiuk notes that the two terms are often confused, and draws the following distinction.

• Kazka: a folk tale built out of fantasy rather than everyday life, with a marvellous element as its foundation. The protagonist is always a human being, and animals, even when they appear, remain secondary, showing up to help the hero when in trouble
• Baika: a folk tale depicting the life of animals rather than humans. The main characters are animals, and if humans appear, they play only a secondary or one-scene role

Hnatiuk also writes that the literary fable is not the same as the folk baika. In the literary fable, people, animals, plants and sometimes even objects all speak alike, and it is usually written in verse. The folk baika is told in prose, and it is mainly animals that speak. According to IEU’s “Fable” entry, the first person in Ukraine to compile a collection of fables was the philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda, who included 30 in his Kharkiv Fables of 1769–74 (see the article “The world tried to catch me, but did not catch me”: the philosopher Skovoroda).

Tales Left Sitting in the Corner

According to Hnatiuk’s preface, as far as he knew, European folklore studies had not yet produced any large scholarly collection devoted solely to animal tales. In 19th-century folk-tale collections, he says, animal tales were normally mixed in among magic tales and other material. The preface lists the number of animal tales contained in the major folk-tale collections.

Hnatiuk likens the animal tale to “a daughter made to sit in the corner,” and writes that he wants to “build it a separate little house of its own, lead it out of the corner and seat it in the place of honour, making it master of its own house within folklore.” The Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne’s index of tale types (FF Communications No. 3) had assigned numbers only up to 299 to animal tales. Hnatiuk states that independent animal tales had been thought not to exceed 300 in number, yet his own collection alone reaches that many.

The Breakdown of the 400 Tales

The preface gives a table of the number of tales by the person who recorded them: 361 newly recorded tales plus 39 reprinted from other books, for 400 in all.

According to the preface, most of the tales were recorded in two regions at opposite ends of where Ukrainians lived. About a quarter were recorded in a single village in what was then Kursk Governorate, on the boundary between Ukrainian and Russian settlement, and about half were recorded in four villages in the Sniatyn–Horodenka–Buchach area of the westernmost region, Galicia. Hnatiuk also writes that many more tales would surely be found by recording in places rich in animal life, such as the Carpathian mountains, the marshes of Polissia, the steppes of Podillia, Kherson and Katerynoslav Governorates, and the floodplains of the Danube and the Prut.

Among those who recorded tales was also the writer Ivan Franko. Tale no. 25, “Sob, kume, sob bery!,” in which a wolf and a hare become “kumy” (a bond between godparents), carries the note: “Recorded by Ivan Franko in March 1892, on the ferry at Khoreshiv, Zhydachiv County, from an unnamed old peasant.”

Arranged by Animal

The book’s table of contents divides the tales by kind of animal. It begins with mammals (wild, domestic, and tales mixing various mammals), followed by birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, crustaceans, arachnids and insects, and ends with tales imitating “animal sounds.” The mammal section begins with the monkey, the lion and the tiger, and includes tales of animals not native to this land.

After each tale is given the name of the recorder, the village, the year and month, and the name of the narrator, along with a list of which other books contain similar tales (which Hnatiuk calls “parallels”) and a summary in German.

Tales from Old, Moralising Tales, and Satirical Tales

Hnatiuk divided the tales he collected into three types by character.

• Epic baiky: tales that simply narrate the life of animals and their relations with one another and with people. Hnatiuk considers these the oldest layer. Examples are tale no. 30, “The Wolf Who Wanted the Kid,” and tale no. 96, “The Fox Who Spent the Winter with the Wolf and the Bear”
• Moralising baiky: tales that draw a lesson for people out of the story. Examples are tale no. 23, “The Wolf and the Lamb,” and tale no. 55, “The Fox and the Sour Grapes.” Tale no. 150, “The Hare Who Loved to Dance,” is a long, seven-page tale that Hnatiuk explains became a moralising tale only because the narrator added, at the end, the remark, “An enemy is to be defeated by wit, when you lack his strength”
• Satirical baiky: the fewest in number, and, Hnatiuk considers, the newest layer. Tale no. 6, “The Animals Ruled by the Lion,” he describes as a satire on state institutions, featuring candidates for the throne, secret councils, stolen votes, royal decrees and ministers who oppress their subjects. Tale no. 275, “The Hawk Who Became Village Headman,” and tale no. 365, “Why the Little Ruffe Fish Escapes the Big Fish” (a satire on the courts), also belong to this type

Hnatiuk writes that the literary fable arose out of the folk moralising baika, and not the other way around. In the supplement at the end of the book, he lists critical editions of Aesop’s fables among the parallels for tale no. 14 and for tale no. 55, “The Fox and the Sour Grapes.”

A Book Delayed Two Years by War

According to the preface, the book was supposed to appear at the end of 1914. Publication was delayed because the First World War broke out, the Russian army invaded and occupied Lviv, Ukrainian national activity was banned, and both the Shevchenko Scientific Society’s operations and its printing house were shut down. The preface is dated 15 October 1916.

In the preface, Hnatiuk also writes that he received news that the recorder Voloshynskyi had died in the autumn of 1914, during the first Russian occupation, and that much of Taraseuskyi’s material was lost, along with the records of the Society’s Ethnographic Commission, when Lviv was invaded.

Franko’s When the Animals Still Talked

According to IEU, Franko wrote children’s books including Fox Mykyta (1890) and When the Animals Still Talked (1899). In the 1916 book, tales from When the Animals Still Talked are cited as “parallels” for many of the entries. Franko led the Society’s Ethnographic Commission from 1898 to 1913, and edited its ethnographic collections together with Hnatiuk (IEU). Franko’s life is covered in the article on Ivan Franko, the writer who died in the year he was nominated for the Nobel Prize.