A gift book in a leather cover "Tales of Russian foreigners. "

"Tales of Russian Foreigners" - under such a rather exotic title for a modern reader, a collection of unique fairy tales of the multinational Russian Empire was published in 1890. The publication, which was the result of a long academic expedition to Siberia and the Volga region, the Baltic States and Finland, the Caucasus and Transcaucasia, carefully prepared by the first female professor-ethnographer Vera Kharuzina, turned out to be extremely bright and original. Fantastic legends about the origin of tribes and their settlement, bizarre plots that paint an equally reliable picture of housing and clothing, food and family life, primitive beliefs and rituals, still amaze the imagination. The usual sorcerers and witches appear here in the images of the treacherous abaga and devas, wizards - in the images of great shamans, and the glorious heroes Ai-Moko and Amiran surpass the Atlanteans themselves. Fabulous, semi-epic, all these characters eloquently testify to how integral, unified and at the same time stunningly diverse the culture of mankind is…