Episode Details

An archer finds a golden feather of the firebird glowing like fire in the forest, and though his heroic horse warns him — "Do not take the golden feather; if you take it, you will learn grief!" — he carries it to the tsar, and buys himself a life of impossible errands at the price of his head: the firebird itself, trapped in a field of scattered wheat; Princess Vasilisa, fetched in a silver boat from the edge of the world where the red sun rises; her wedding dress, raised from under a great stone at the bottom of the blue sea by an army of crayfish; and at last a bath in boiling water, from which his horse's charm brings him out more handsome than a tale can tell, while the tsar who climbs in after him does not come out at all. This episode reads both of Afanasyev's tellings of the tale whole: the archer's telling, and the telling of the foundling and his little foal, in which envious nobles twice plot the hero's ruin, the bird is caught in a cage baited with pearls, the Tsar-Maiden is carried off in a velvet ship that walks on land and sails on sea, her dowry chest is brought by the crayfish and the pike he spared on the hungry road, and her seventy-seven mares are milked into a cauldron of boiling milk that ends, as before, with the wrong man in the bath and the right man at the wedding.

The tale «Жар-птица и Василиса-царевна» (№№ 169–170) — from the collection of Alexander Afanasyev, in new English translations made for this show, read aloud over a gentle instrumental bed.

Afanasyev.

Intermission: "2-25" — instrumental.

KacheliTV — Russian classics, read aloud.