Episode Details
Back to Episodes
Afanasyev — The Armless Maiden
Description
A merchant's daughter is slandered again and again by her brother's wife — for the smashed furniture she did not smash, for the favourite horse she did not kill, for the child she did not harm — until her own brother, driving her out as if to the early mass, cuts her hands off at the elbows in the forest and rides away. What follows, in telling after telling, is the tale's unbreakable pattern: the years in the forest, the prince or the merchant's son who will marry no one else, the son born with gold arms and silver legs and a moon and a red sun for his signs, the letters stolen and rewritten on the road, the exile with the baby tied to her breast, and the well — where she bends to save her fallen child, and her hands are given back to her. This episode reads all four of Afanasyev's tellings of the Armless Maiden, whole and in page order: the long telling of the sorceress sister-in-law and the truth told as a story in her own brother's house, the telling of the little boy pouring nuts from box to box, the short telling recorded in Belarusian in which a voice answers out of the water, and the telling of the oak stump, the three-times dream, and Saint Nicholas at the well.
The tales «Косоручка» (№№ 279–282) — from the collection of Alexander Afanasyev, in new English translations made for this show, read aloud over a gentle instrumental bed.
Afanasyev.
Intermission: "The Cello's Unfinished Promise" — instrumental.
KacheliTV — Russian classics, read aloud.