Cheap popular sources of Pushkin’s Tale of Tsar Saltan

The article deals with Russian sources of Pushkin's Tale of Tsar Saltan. The cheap popular Tale of the Three King’s Daughters, Full Sisters, which was included in the printed collections of fairy tales titled The Tale of Katerina-Saterima is considered as one of the sources of the text. It is known that Pushkin was familiar with cheap popular print. Cheap popular prints are mentioned in some of his texts. Well known are cases of direct plot borrowings from cheap popular texts (the unfinished youth poem Bova, a number of plot moves in Ruslan and Ludmila etc.). But in the case of The Tale of Tsar Saltan, the question is not so much about the plot similarity, as about Pushkin’s use of individual expressions and clichés, dating back to the cheap popular tale, that is, about direct borrowings. An important place is given to the analysis of these loans in the article. Apparently, Pushkin was attracted by cheap popular fairy tales, as they laid outside the literary norm and represented the formation of the layer of the Russian language, which was practically undeveloped by the literary tradition. The cheap popular tale turned out to mediate between the Russian literary language and the folk elements. At the same time, the cheap popular tale, like all cheap popular literature, was considered a low type of literature by the contemporaries, and an appeal to these texts could be perceived as a literary shocking. It is apparently with this that Belinsky’s very negative attitude to fairy tales by Pushkin was connected.