Rike-Hokholok. Fairy Tales

Charles Perrault (1628–1703) is a French writer of fairy tales, poet, and critic of the classical era. He was born in Paris into the family of a judge of the Paris parliament. The whole world knows Charles Perrault as a wonderful storyteller; however, his passion for literary creativity did not manifest itself very early, and for some time it was more of a pastime than a serious, deep engagement. 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 in college, Perrault wrote poetry, many of which were very popular. However, he considered the poem in a comic style “The Walls of Troy, or The Origin of Burlesque” (1653) as the beginning of his literary career. The work of the budding writer drew 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 Belles-Lettres. After Colbert's death (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 Olden Times with Morals.” The foundation of Charles Perrault’s literary fairy tales was the plots of folk tales that the writer heard in childhood from his wet nurse. Perrault invented the tale “Rike-Hokholok” himself, and soon its plot became the basis for fairy tale works by other authors. At that time, the fairy tale was considered a “low” genre, so Charles Perrault published them under the name of his son Perrault d’Armancour. Charles Perrault laid the groundwork for the “fairy tale” tradition, and his tales greatly influenced the works of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. There are many translations of “Tales of Mother Goose,” so one can encounter several variants of the titles of the same fairy tale: “Rike-Hokholok,” “Rike with a tuft,” “Hokhlik,” etc. This collection features a translation by I.S. Turgenev (1867).