Our Notes & References

A fine example of the first edition of these folk tales from the White Sea region, edited by Nikolai Onchukov (1872-1942), with the participation of the linguist Aleksei Shakhmatov and the prose writer Mikhail Prishvin among others. Onchukov spent the years 1900-08 working in the Far North under the auspices of the Russian Geographical Society collecting ethnographic and folkloric materials.

This volume contains a portion of Onchukov’s collection, and features 303 tales from Arkhangelsk and Olonetsk provinces. The tales are organised by narrators, and some information about the storytellers is provided. All the tales are written in northern Russian dialects, which makes the work a valuable linguistic source on language which barely exists today.

This is the volume XXXIII of the Zapiski Imperatorskogo russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva po otdeleniiu etnografii [Notes of the Imperial Geographical Society; Etnography].

Provenance

Avenir Nizoff (émigré, pianist, who lived in Edmonton, Canada, in the second half of the 20^th century, and gathered a large, wide-ranging library of Russian works, especially covering art, history and literature).