Donkey Skin: Tales

Charles Perrault 1628–1703 - a French writer of fairy tales, poet, and critic of the classical era. He was born in Paris to a family of a judge in the Paris Parliament. The whole world knows Charles Perrault as a... wonderful fairy tale writer; however, his inclination towards literary creativity did not manifest in him early, and for a while, it was more of a pastime than a serious, profound pursuit. Charles followed in his father's footsteps: he became a lawyer, then a tax collector, and later a clerk for his brother, the architect Claude Perrault. While studying at college, Perrault wrote poems, many of which were very popular. However, he considered the beginning of his literary career to be the poem in a comic style The Walls of Troy, or The Origin of Burlesque 1653. The emerging writer caught the attention of one of the ministers of King Louis XIV, Jean Colbert. Thanks to his patronage, Charles Perrault was appointed secretary of the Academy of Inscriptions and Fine Letters. After Colbert's death in 1683, he lost both this position and his literary pension. But this did not stop the writer; he continued to work on literary texts, wrote poetry, and began composing fairy tales. In 1697, he published a collection Tales of Mother Goose, or Stories and Tales of Old Times with Morals. The basis of Charles Perrault's literary fairy tales were the plots of folk tales that the writer heard in childhood from his wet nurse. The tale Rike-Khokholok was crafted by Perrault himself, and soon its plot became the foundation for other authors' fairy tale works. At that time, fairy tales were considered a low genre, which is why Charles Perrault published them under his son's name, Perrault d’Armancour. Charles Perrault laid the foundation for the fairy tale tradition; his tales greatly influenced the works of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. There are numerous translations of Perrault's works, so one can encounter several variants of the titles of the same fairy tale. This collection presents the translation by I.S. Turgenev from 1867.