To the results of the discussion about the folklore identity of the Kalmyk tale from “The Captain’s Daughter” by A.S. Pushkin

The subject of the work is the Kalmyk fairy tale about the eagle and the raven, which is present in the story of A.S. Pushkin “The Captain’s Daughter” (1836). One group of scientists believes that this fairy tale-parable was composed by A.S. Pushkin himself. We represent those researchers who recognize this fairy tale as an independent work of A.S. Pushkin during a trip to the Orenburg region. Despite the fact that this tale is absent in the manuscripts of A.S. Pushkin and is not identified in the folklore of Russian Kalmyks, there are serious reasons to recognize it as an original work of Kalmyk folklore. This is convinced by the structure of the tale’s plot, which is becoming a series of tales about the relationship of animals, the recording of a similar tale among the Evens – the people of the Tungusic group, the existence of the same tale among the Xinjiang Kalmyks, the availability of information about the Kalmyk woman who told this tale to A.S. Pushkin, the widespread opposition of the eagle and the raven in the folklore of the peoples of the world, the presence of such semantic structures in the indexes of fairy tales and motives of S. Thompson. By the nature of the semantic elements composition and the plot structure, we can judge that neither A.S. Pushkin, nor anyone else could have composed such a fairy tale.

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