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Robert Nisbet Bain (1854–1909) was a British historian and linguist who worked for the British Museum but He published “Cossack Fairy Tales”in 1916. The term Cossack refers to a member of an ethnic and social group, known in the Russian Empire for their military service, who hailed mostly from modern Ukraine and Russia. He translated the stories, drawn from three different collections, from Ruthenian—a Slavic dialect once spoken in what is now Ukraine and elsewhere. Bain was a polyglot who could reportedly speak over twenty languages fluently. Apart from his translations he also wrote works on folklore and history.The edition from 1916 is adorned with beautiful illustrations from Scottish artist Noel Laura Nisbet.
The story of the Unlucky Days- Ukrainian fairy tale
This is the story of two brothers living in a village. Right from the beginning we are told that one is rich and one is poor. The rich brother is casting away his sibling when he sits at his table, telling him that is place is actually on the fields, scaring the crows. His brother obeyed him and while he was scaring the crows in the fields a raven came to him and told him he should move for “here there is neither luck nor happiness for thee”. So the man went home to gather his family and his belongings and set for another village, carrying with him a water-skin. On this road we are introduced to another characters, namely the Unlucky Days, who “clung on to the man behind”. I found the line they address to the man to be particularly intriguing, maybe because of the old English they are written, or maybe because they are a bit dramatic: “Why dost thou not take us with thee? We will never leave thee, for thou art ours!”. We then learn that the Unlucky Days followed the man to a river where we managed to trick them into getting into his water skin which he then buried in the bank near the river. The man and his family eventually reached a village where they found an empty hut and moved in. One day, they heard a cry: “Catch hold! catch hold! catch hold!”, so the man ran to see what was going on and found an old goat with two large horns, moment where we are told it was actually the Devil. The man caught the goat and took it to his barn, but the goat disappeared and in that moment money started falling down from the ceiling, enough to fill two large coffers, which meant that the poor brother was now rich. He then sends for his brother to come and live with him. When he hears this, his brother thinks that he is being called to bring food so he packs some pancakes and sets for his brother’s village. On his way he hears about his brother’s new wealth and throws away the pancakes. After reaching his brother and seeing the two coffers he gets envious and we are told that “ he grew quite green in the face”. When realizing this, the now rich brother tells him to go look for the water-skin he buried in the bank for he would find some money in there. The rich brother went to the river and when he opened the water-skin the Unlucky Days popped out shouting
“Thou art ours!”, and indeed they followed him back to his village where the man found out that his wealth was consumed and his house had burned down, so he had to go and live with his brother, the Unlucky Days never living him again.
I enjoyed this fairy tale a lot as the plot is simple and easy to follow. To me it seems like a moral story because of the clear difference between the two brothers. The rich one is being mean and when he sees the luck changed for his brother he then becomes envious. The lesson seems to be that being rich and greedy is not good for you, as in the end this is the brother who gets stuck with the Unlucky Days. An interesting element that has caught my eye was the devil character as it seemed that he was the one who changed the luck for the poor brother. The devil did something good, right? That’s what I was thinking initially but then I thought of the saying “Banul, ochiul dracului” (I guess “Money is the root of all evil” would be the English equivalent) and realized that after the poor brother got rich he actually became the mean one as he tricked his brother into being followed by the Unlucky Days. Of course, this doesn’t change the moral of the story, it only enhances it; the brother with the money was the mean brother. I also picked up another lesson though; the idea that maybe you should be nice to everyone no matter if you are rich and they are poor because you never know when your luck is going to change.
In what regards the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Classification of Folk Tales, I would classify this fairy tale under the religious tales category because of the presence of the devil.
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