Pushkin himself was a connoisseur of Russian songs and tales. Chulkov's ABC of Russian Superstitions (1780-83) and Levshin's Russian Tales (1788) were well-thumbed texts on Pushkin's shelves. He had been brought up on the peasant tales and superstitions of his beloved nanny, Arina Rodionova, who became the model for Tatiana's nurse. 'Mama' Rodionova was a talented narrator, elaborating and enriching many standard tales, judging by the transcripts of her stories that Pushkin later made.121 During his years of exile in the south in 1820-24 he became a serious explorer of the folk traditions, those of the Cossacks in particular, and then, when exiled to his family estate at Mikhailovskoe in 1824-6, he carried on collecting songs and tales. Pushkin used these as the basis of Ruslan and Liudmila (1820), his first major poem, which some critics panned as mere 'peasant verse', and for his stylized 'fairy tales' like Tsar Sultan which he composed in his final years. Yet he had no hesitation in mixing Russian stories with European sources, such as the fables of La Fontaine or the fairy tales of the Grimm brothers. For The Golden Cockerel (1834) he even borrowed from the Legend of the Arabian Astrologer which he had come across in the 1832 French translation of The Legends of the Alhambra by Washington Irving. As far as Pushkin was concerned, Russia was a part of Western and world culture, and it did not make his 'folk tales' any less authentic if he combined all these sources in literary re-creations of the Russian style. How ironic, then, that Soviet nationalists regarded Pushkin's stories as direct expressions of the Russian folk.*
* Akhmatova was denounced by the Soviet literary authorities for suggesting, quite correctly, that some of Pushkin's sources for his 'Russian tales' were taken from The Thousand and One Nights.
By Pushkin's death, in 1837, the literary use of folk tales had become commonplace, almost a condition of literary success. More than any other Western canon, Russian literature was rooted in the oral narrative traditions, to which it owed much of its extraordinary strength and originality. Pushkin, Lermontov, Ostrovsky, Nekrasov, Tolstoy, Leskov and Saltykov-Shchedrin - all to some degree could be thought of as folklorists, all certainly used folklore in many of their works. But none captured the essential spirit of the folk tale better than Nikolai Gogol.
Gogol was in fact a Ukrainian, and, were it not for Pushkin, who was his mentor and gave him the true plots of his major works, The Government Inspector (1836) and Dead Souls (1835-52), he might have written in the peasant dialect of his native Mirgorod, where Gogol's father was well known (though unpublishable under Tsarist laws) as a writer in Ukrainian. During his childhood Gogol fell in love with the earthy idiom of the local peasantry. He loved their songs and dances, their terrifying tales and comic stories, from which his own fantastic tales of Petersburg would later take their cue. He first rose to fame as 'Rudy [i.e. redhead] Panko, Beekeeper', the pseudonymous author of a bestselling collection of stories, Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (1831-2), which fed the growing craze for Ukrainian folk tales. Aladin's Kochubei, Somov's Haidamaki and Kulzhinsky's Cossack Hat had all been great successes in the Russian capital. But Gogol was nothing if not ambitious and, in 1828, when barely out of school, he came to Petersburg in the hope of making his own literary name. Working during the day as a humble clerk (of the sort that filled his stories), he wrote at night in his lonely attic room. He badgered his mother and sister to send him details of Ukrainian songs and proverbs, and even bits of costume which he wanted them to buy from the local peasants and send to him in a trunk. Readers were delighted with the 'authenticity' of Evenings on a Farm. Some critics thought that the stories had been spoilt by a 'coarse' and 'improper' folk language. But the language of the stories was their principal success. It echoed perfectly the musical sonorities of peasant speech - one of the reasons why the stories were adapted by Musorgsky for the unfinished Soroch-intsy Fair (1874-) and for St John's Night on Bald Mountain (1867), and by Rimsky-Korsakov for May Night (1879) - and it could be
