The Annotated Afanas′ev Library

Maintained by: David J. Birnbaum (djbpitt@gmail.com) Last modified: 2012-01-15T18:01:41+0000

About this site

Introduction

The Annotated Afanas′ev Library is a set of Russian folk fairy tales drawn from the collection published by A. N. Afanas′ev in the first half of the nineteenth century, with linguistic and cultural comments and a small accompanying encyclopedia of Russian fairy tales.

Goals and non-goals

The Annotated Afanas′ev Library was developed initially by David J. Birnbaum and David Galloway as a tool for helping students learn to read Russian fairy tales in the original. Our target user will have completed at least one year of university-level Russian-language study and will have taken or be taking simultaneously a general survey course on Russian fairy tales.

The tales are presented in unmodified form, with three types of annotations:

Linguistic annotations provide additional information about uncommon or difficult words or linguistic forms. We do not annotate every word that a second-year language student is unlikely to know, which means that some use of a dictionary may still be required. We have, however tried to gloss words that are unlikely to be in standard dictionaries, as well as those that present peculiarities or raise questions that may not be answered in an obvious and accessible way in dictionaries, grammars, or textbooks.
Cultural commentary explains or draws attention to aspects of the tales that are interesting from a folkloric perspective. Because our target user will already have some familiarity with Russian folk tales, we have not annotated topics that we expect those users to be able to recognize on their own.
The encyclopedia is an ancillary resource intended to collect common information about cultural matters in a convenient place. Its purpose is to avoid the need to repeat the same annotation in tale after tale; if a cultural feature recurs frequently, information about it will be omitted from the tale-specific cultural commentary and the user will be directed instead to the applicable encyclopedia entry. References between the tales and the encyclopedia are cross-linked; tales contain pointers to relevant explanatory encyclopedia entries and encyclopedia entries contain pointers to illustrative tales.

How to use the site

From the main page, click on a tale title to begin reading. English page references are to the Pantheon edition of Russian fairy tales. Click on a column heading to sort the table according to that column. Click on the count of unique words for a tale to open a sorted list of the words, and click on a word in that list to look it up on http://www.multitran.ru. Counts are for inflected word forms, not lexemes. Mouse over the initials of contributors to an individual tale to see their names or scroll to the bottom of this page for a complete list.

Within a tale, click on highlighted words to scroll the linguistic commentary panel or click on a raised note number to scroll the cultural commentary panel. Those panels are back-linked to the main text; you can click on an entry in one of the side panels to scroll the main text to the location where the reference appears. Click on the encyclopedia entries at the top of a tale to open the relevant encyclopedia article. Click on the <aal> logo in the upper left corner to return to the main project page.

This site should function fully in the following browsers:

Microsoft Windows 7: Chrome 12.0, Firefox 5.0, Internet Explorer 9.0, Opera 11.11, Safari 5.0.5.
MacOS 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard): Firefox 5.0, Safari 5.0.5.
iOS: Safari. (add version number)
Linux (Centos 5.5): Firefox. (not yet)

Disabling Javascript, CSS, cookies, etc. in your browser may limit functionality.

Developers and contributors

The site was originally designed by David J. Birnbaum and David Galloway, and is currently maintained by David J. Birnbaum. Annotations and other content have been contributed by the following persons: Annette Yauger, Annis Benn, Audrey Wood, Daniel Duncan, David Galloway, David J. Birnbaum, Elena Filipova, Hillary Brevig, Jon-Michel Seman, Maria J. Rogers, Sibelan E. S. Forrester.