Ivan the Wolf and the Gray Tsarevich

2023

This work is a collaboration with director Diana Galimzyanovain the genre of video poetry. The cycle "Ivan the Wolf and the Gray Tsarevich" is a reflection on a fairy tale familiar to everyone since childhood in the context of the deep layers of folklore, magic, forest and transformations. In different cultures, the practice of ritual assimilation of young men to wolves in the process of initiation was common. Later, this was expressed in the special magical status of combat squads, as if "withdrawn" from the general moral and legal laws. The poem is based on a special interpretation by Vladimir Propp of such characters from Russian folk tales as magical helpers (for example, Sivka-Burka). In The Morphology of a Fairy Tale, Propp notes that in folklore the hero and the magical helper are functionally the same. At an early stage of the myth, the hero turns into an animal (a magical horse, Sivka-burka, a bird, etc.) in order to perform a feat; later he meets an animal. I wondered if this could be true for the closest fairy tale symbiosis known to us since childhood -Ivan the wolf and the gray wolf? Moreover, in some versions, the text contains indications of a difficult connection between the prince and the wolf: after the accomplishment of the feat, the wolf confesses to Ivan that he is also a prince, turned into an animal for his misdeeds.
In general, interspecific boundaries in fairy tales are extremely conditional -a wolf easily turns into a girl and a golden horse, Finistthe clear falcon into a young man and vice versa, a cow and a dog give birth to a human cub, which in turn turns into different creatures. In folklore, we are all, in fact, werewolves, and our appearance reveals our dream. Such a folklore utopia.

Watch the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_GdK0f2zOI