"Pushkin's Fairy Tales."

There's a green oak tree by the bow-moor;
A golden chain on that oak tree:
Day and night, the cat is a scientist
Everything goes round and round on a circuit;
He goes to the right, he starts a song,
To the left, a tale tells.....

These lines from the "Prologue" of the poem "Ruslan and Lyudmila" are familiar to everyone from childhood. They absorbed almost all the images of the wonderful and mysterious world of Pushkin's fairy tales.

Fairy tales accompanied Pushkin throughout his life. One of the first was "The Tale of Bove-Korolevich", which he heard as a child from his nanny Arina Rodionovna. The first work that brought the poet wide fame was the fairy-tale poem "Ruslan and Lyudmila" (1820). Pushkin's great interest in folk poetry is evidenced by his letter to his brother Lev from Mikhailovsky exile: "What a charm these fairy tales are! Each is a poem!".

The poet turned to Russian folklore, the element of "truly folk" oral art, in the 1830s - in the period of the highest flowering of his talent. In the fall of 1831, when Pushkin and Zhukovsky lived in Tsarskoe Selo, they decided to write a fairy tale, arranging a kind of friendly competition. Zhukovsky unconditionally recognized the victory of Pushkin, who wrote "The Tale of Tsar Saltan". Soon saw the light of "The Tale of the Dead Princess", "The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish" and "The Tale of the Golden Cockerel". "The Tale of the Pope and his worker Balda", written in 1830, for censorship reasons during Pushkin's lifetime was not published and was published only in 1840 under the title "The Tale of the merchant Kuzma Ostolopa and his worker Balda".

Having crossed the boundaries of literary space, Pushkin's fairy tales continued their life in other forms of art, including painting and graphics. Already during the poet's lifetime, the first illustrations to his works appeared in print.

Subsequently, many famous artists turned to Pushkin's fairy tales. The exhibition exhibits only a small part of Pushkiniana from the funds of the Pushkin State Museum. Nevertheless, it gives an idea of the diversity and high artistic level of its collections. These are editions of Pushkin's fairy tales, illustrations to them, made by T.A. Mavrina, V.A. Milashevsky, E.A. Kibrick, N.I. Polyakova and other outstanding artists. Each of them was characterized by sharpness and keenness of observation, as well as their own vision of the characters of fairy tales. At the same time, their works bear the stamp of their time, as each epoch found in Pushkin's genius that new and vital that was consonant with it. The exposition includes works by Palekh masters on the subjects of Pushkin's fairy tales, decorating caskets, plates and other objects made of papier-mâché.

The year 2024 will mark the 225th anniversary of Pushkin's birth. The exhibition prepared by the Pushkin State Museum is timed to coincide with this significant date. It is addressed to a wide range of viewers, but the greatest interest is for young visitors who are just beginning to get acquainted with the world of Pushkin's fairy tales. In the words of K.I. Chukovsky, "children, whom the poet never thought to address when he wrote his "Saltan", "The Golden Cockerel" and "The Tsarevna", introduced them into their spiritual life and once again proved that folk poetry in its highest achievements is often children's poetry".