Ivan the fool

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Illustration to the fairy tale
Ivan the Fool .
Illustrator: Michael Sevier (1916)

Ivan the Fool , also The Tale of Ivan the Fool , Ivan the Fool and His Brothers and The Tale of the Simple-Minded Ivan and The Tale of Ivan the Fool ( Russian Сказка об Иване-дураке , Skaska ob Iwane-durake ), is a fairytale figure dressed political satire by Lev Tolstoy , written in 1885 and published in the works of Count LN Tolstoy in 1886 . In 1982 the text in Vol. 10 Powesti and Stories 1872–1886 of the 22-volume Tolstoy edition was published by the publishing house for artistic literature in Moscow .

content

Ancient times in a kingdom: the young farmer Iwan and his mute sister Melania feed their parents. Ivan has two roots. With it he can heal any pain. He gives one to his sick old dog to eat and the other to a crooked beggar woman. Both “patients” get well on the spot. The old king promises his subject, who is single and heals his sick daughter, to marry her. When Ivan's parents heard about it, they scolded the son for a fool. How could he waste his magic roots like that! Ivan goes anyway. All he has to do is go up the stairs to the king's daughter and she will get well. From then on, Ivan and his two brothers, the brave Simeon and the fat Taras, lived a royal life. Ivan will soon get bored. He leaves the palace and goes home to his silent sister. As always, both of them feed their parents with their own hands. The ministers lament the untenable situation without the reigning King Ivan. The officials can no longer be paid. “Hey what,” replies the ruler Ivan, should the officials drive crap. You've already done a lot of it. Ivan's wife, the young queen - also a fool - thinks for a long time, takes off her robes and works in the field with her husband and sister-in-law Melania. All wise leave the realm. Only the simple-minded stay and get by without money.

Because the three little devils could not divide the three reigning brothers Iwan, Simeon and Taras at all, the old devil himself has to go to the kingdom in matters of fraternal dispute. The devil turns into a general and incites the brave Simeon into a campaign against the king of India. Simeon loses. The brave warrior runs away, always following his nose. The next thing the old devil gets down to is fat Ivan with money deals. In the end the devil bites his teeth into Ivan. Ivan and the fools who remained in the kingdom disdain the shiny gold pieces of the devil. The devil uses his last resort - mental work. Ivan has the devil set up a high lookout point from which the incarnate speaks for days in front of the unimpressed people on his favorite topic: how man can live well without work. When, after a few days, exhausted, the devil hits his head against a pillar in the high waiting room, he stumbles, hits head first, counting every step, down the stairs and sinks into the earth. A hole remains.

Self-testimony

Tolstoy writes to Paul Boyer about the sedentary , that is, about Tolstoy's role models for the figure of Ivan: “From these people… one can only learn. When I used to chat with them ... who pass through our country, I carefully wrote down those expressions of theirs that I heard for the first time - good, solid, old Russian expressions ... Yes, the spirit of the language is alive in these people. "

reception

Semjon Moissejewitsch Breitburg writes: The satire on monarchy, military and capital, written under the apparently harmless name of fairy tales, was written by the author from the beginning with an uncertain fear of censorship in the back of his mind. Such fears initially turned out to be unfounded. The text, submitted to the Russian censors in April 1886, was printed that same year. However, the censorship, stimulated by police and clerical intervention - regarding the author's moral and religious views, turned its attention again to Ivan the Fool in the 1892 reprint of the above-mentioned works by Count LN Tolstoy . The Moscow censorship banned the text until 1906.

Adaptations

German-language editions

  • The fairy tale of the simple-minded Ivan and his two brothers. P. 183–194 in: Tilly Bergner, Marina Renner: Tolstoi. A reader for our time . Thüringer Volksverlag, Weimar 1952 (used edition)
  • The fairy tale of Ivan the Fool. German by Arthur Luther . Pp. 189–222 in: Gisela Drohla (Ed.): Leo N. Tolstoj. All the stories. Fifth volume. Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1961 (2nd edition of the edition in eight volumes 1982)
  • Leo Tolstoy: Ivan the Fool. A Russian fairy tale retold and illustrated by Laurenz Laurenzzi. Norderstedt 2010, ISBN 978-3-8391-1533-6

Web links

annotation

  1. ↑ Anno 1961 Gisela Drohla ( German-language editions see above in this article) writes in the last volume of her eight-volume Tolstoy edition on p. 277, 1. Zvu, Ivan's brave brother Simeon stands for the militarism under Nicholas I and Ivan's obese brother Taras for capitalism.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ russ. «Сочинения гр. Л. Н. Толстого », 1886, 12-я часть пятого издания
  2. ↑ Russian Л.Н. Толстой. Собрание сочинений в 22 томах, Vol. 10
  3. ↑ fr: Paul Boyer (professeur de russe) (1864–1949)
  4. ↑ Edition used, p. 183 above
  5. ↑ Russian Семён Моисеевич Брейтбург (1897–1970)
  6. ↑ Russian Московский Цензурный Комитет
  7. ↑ Russian entry at tolstoy-lit.ru on the story of the censorship of the fairy tale according to unpublished documents. Source: see also it: La fiaba di Ivan lo scemo e dei suoi due fratelli # Genesi dell'opera and #Critica.