Richly represented in the Russian folktale tradition, the legends are religious tales (types 750-849 in the Aame-Thompson index) in a peasant village setting. Among the standard themes is the return of Christ, who wanders through rural Russia with his disciples. Satan appears here too, as do a cast of spirits and lesser devils. Pre-Christian gods may be recognized in tales of saints Ilya and Nikolai (Elijah and Saint Nicholas). The hapless peasant in these tales - cheated, betrayed, impoverished, foolish, orphaned, crippled - take the reader deep into the traditional village culture of Russia and into the imperfect human quest for moral choice and justice on this earth.
Biography
Jack V. Haney received bachelor’s degrees in Russian language and literature from the University of Washington (1962) and Oxford University (1964), where he was a Rhodes Scholar. In 1970 he completed a D.Phil. in medieval Russian literature at Oxford with a dissertation on Maxim the Greek. Until his retirement he was professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he taught medieval Russian literature, Russian folklore, and the Russian language.
