“ Three years ago I dropped by to get some flour. When the old man took off his flour-dusted hat, I saw a jay’s green-blue feather in it. At the same time, querulous Grandma Paraska came to the mill and began to clamor for flour out of turn. And as Paraska raised Cain, our tale ended.”
This is the humorous and poetic end of the fairy tale “A Jay’s Feather” from a new collection All Treasures Come from the Woods (1999), where Ivan Khlanta, candidate of sciences in philology, an indefatigable gleaner of the unique Transcarpathian folklore, immortalized the texts he recorded this time in borderland Velyky Berezny district, hitherto unknown in terms of Ukrainian fairy tales.
The one who told the original fairy tales was Petro Kurtanych, born in 1927 in the village of Smerekova. He is in no way a gray-haired recluse puffing a long pipe. In 1945 he enlisted in the Soviet Army and served for six years. Then he worked in various sectors of the nation’s economy, held quite important posts, and has been living in the district center since 1952. But his memory has clearly preserved the fairy tales he heard in the mountain-bound Smerekova from village elders and his mother who would sing folk songs and tell legends. In addition to tales, he also knows innumerable original riddles, proverbs, sayings, jokes, and songs. In the tales he has recorded — “All Treasures Come from the Woods,” “A Jay’s Feather,” “A Little Girl and a Magic Comb,” and “The Father and His Three Daughters” — the narrator pursues such centuries- old people’s ideals as hope for peace, undisturbed labor, patriotism, heroism, defense of the fatherland from the enemy, and so on.
The tales lead to only one conclusion: the sense of a human life lies in a harmonious unity of man, nature, and labor, which increases the riches of nature and brings only benefit to man. This is not just some exalted idea in Kurtanych’s tales, for he is, above all, an improvising teller, not a reteller.
Take another quote from “A Jay’s Feather” for illustration’s sake: “As soon as the snow melts, the green grass crops up, and willows break out in strong buds, and go to the Huska woods. There is a glade in the middle, and a tall fir on that glade, on which an old blue jay once wintered, the one whose green-blue feather is stuck in my hat. Show her this feather and she will tell you where to go, what to know, and how to find wealth.” Is this not a piece of highest quality folk prose?
The texts, meticulously recorded by the eternal traveler and folklore- collector Ivan Khlanta, vividly expose the picturesque, multicolored, and fabulous “map” of the Transcarpathian region. We also have records made by the famous story teller Andriy Kalyn from the village of Horyncheve, Khust district, who put all them together in the books Andriy Kalyn’s Transcarpathian Folk Tales (1955) and The Twelve Brothers (1972). Master storyteller Vasyl Korolovych from the village of Starobycheve, Mukacheve district, reaches out to the readers from the book The Three Golden Words (1968). Mykhailo Shopliak-Kazak from the village of Kelechyn, Mountain district, expressed himself in the collected works, A Magic Bag (1988). Yuri Banias, the village of Boroniava, Khust district, has nine tales to his credit, collected in his Carpathian Fairy Tales (1989).
In July 1973 another talented folk- tale collector was found in the area where this is a virtually mass pastime: Dmytro Yuryk, born 1911, hailing from the village of Vukove, Mountain district, spread out in a small picturesque valley surrounded by mountains and slim pine-trees. It is here that a well-known folklorist and scholar V. M. Hnatiuk recorded fairy tales in June 1895. D. I. Yuryk’s fantastic and everyday-life fairy tales “Whoever Is Stronger Is Better,” “Vasyl and Irynka,” “On Mariyka and Myhal,” “How Ivan Found Himself a Wife,” “The Misadventures of a Woman who Went Back on Her Word,” and “Stepmother and Andriyko” were published in the collections Legends and Tales (1985), Momma’s Heart (1993), and A Good Lesson (1995). You can judge about storyteller Dmytro Yuryk’s inimitable gift by how he tells about his own life:
“My momma died when I was eight. And papa was left alone. Dad had come from Russia, from the Hungarian War. My dad and I eked out a living for seven years. Then he got married to his second wife. But, you, know, a different wife is a different world. No second mother will ever love a child the way the first one did. Until I turned twenty, I graze cattle and shepherded sheep in the valley and also did useful things at my own home and for others. So I lived quietly like this. I was not drafted because, under Czechoslovakia, only sound-bodied fellows were taken into the army. If you’re a bit weak, what’s the use of you? I worked for the Hungarians, for the Czechs, and so all my life went on like this. I tried to see to it that I didn’t do people any harm and work honestly, so that everybody liked me. At twelve, I began to do music, I played the
husli or, as it is called now, the fiddle. I played various tunes by ear. What everybody liked especially was me playing our kolomyiky (local lively songs — Ed.). When I got married, my wife was fifteen. She was so lean and weak, but now she’s all right. We loved and respected each other, and we never bore grudges against each other. My wife’s father stayed with us, living to be 94. He also helped me a little: I learned from him a lot of folk tales, all kinds of jokes and gags.”
“When we compare these,” folklorist Ivan Khlanta noted, “we are struck with the resemblance of what was written in a five-year interval. Sometimes whole paragraphs coincide. There are no changes in composition and plot. This means the teller, improvising on the go, can reproduce by heart a well-edited and well thought-out text. There are only some small differences.”
Using fantastic and everyday-life plots, Yuryk propagates his own vision of the family as a feast and untouchable substance. While doing so, he also comes to interesting conclusions, and puts forward interesting remarks and advice. In his fairy tales, each member of a family knows what he/she must do, be responsible for, and care about. For instance, the mother from the tale “The Found Children” is prepared to tolerate, suffer, and forgive everything for the happiness of her children. The husband from the tale “On a Shepherd, His Wife, and a White Head Scarf” goes to look for his wife and child who got lost through his fault. It is love for his family that helps him overcome all obstacles and reach a place where even a raven cannot bring human bones.
...Even now, at 89, the teller boasts of a very good memory, a very optimistic view of life, and high spirits, although he deeply regrets the current material hardships and the irreparable bereavement of his wife...
The teller Mykhailo Mayor from the village of Vyshkova, Khust district, is a bit younger: he was born in 1928. But his tales also reflect grass- roots assessment of the actions of people and interpretation of such moral categories as good and evil, courage and cowardice, stubbornness and compliance, industriousness and laziness. In his folklore, Mayor gives a compelling, even satirical, expression of his ideas:
“I would like the residents of every Transcarpathian village, as well as of all Ukraine, not to lose without a trace their spiritual values, as was the case under the Soviet regime and still is in the conditions of our unforgiving pseudo-market economy. So the tales should be recorded, published, and handed down to our descendants.”
Well, Mr. Mayor is lucky in this respect. Antonovych Prize winner Ivan Khlanta, gathered, under the aegis of the Transcarpathian Boikivshchyna Research Society, his stories in the book The Golden Bird published in 1998. What enchants you is their spirit of irony, a spirit which brings what he said and wrote closer to our day. For example: “In a certain kingdom, precisely in the one we live in, there was a king and his queen” (from “Ten Brothers and the Witch”). Or the beginning of the tale “On a Poor Man who had Two Sons”: “This happened long, long ago, when there were still no people, the rafts were full of fatback, everybody loved and helped each other, had earthenware, slept on hay, every house had rags, and they sewed clothes out of hemp, for they had no money.”
Master storytellers come from real life, with their tales also nurtured by life. Thus it is no accident that Ivan Harastei wrote in a poem dedicated to folklorist Ivan Khlanta:
A folktale!
The world of a cradle!
The eternity of life and an instance of childhood!
You are nursed by a full-grown field of grain and the blue skies.
