“What’s the good of disputing that way? Let the sabre belong to him who will cut this corpse’s head off!”
Up jumped Marko the Rich like a madman. The robbers were frightened out of their wits, flung away their spoil and scampered off.
“Here, Moujik,” says Marko, “let’s divide the money.”
They divided it equally between them: each of the shares was a large one.
“But how about the copeck?” asks the poor man.
“Ah, brother!” replies Marko, “surely you can see I’ve got no change!”
And so Marko the Rich never paid the copeck after all.
We may take next the large class of stories about simpletons, so dear to the public in all parts of the world. In the Skazkas a simpleton is known as a duràk, a word which admits of a variety of explanations. Sometimes it means an idiot, sometimes a fool in the sense of a jester. In the stories of village life its signification is generally that of a “ninny;” in the “fairy stories” it is frequently applied to the youngest of the well-known “Three Brothers,” the “Boots” of the family as Dr. Dasent has called him. In the latter case, of course, the hero’s durachestvo, or foolishness, is purely subjective. It exists only in the false conceptions of his character which his family or his neighbors have formed.[61] But the duràk of the following tale is represented as being really “daft.” The story begins with one of the conventional openings of the Skazka—“In a certain tsarstvo, in a certain gosudarstvo,”—but the two synonyms for “kingdom” or “state” are used only because they rhyme.
The Fool and the Birch-Tree.[62]
In a certain country there once lived an old man who had three sons. Two of them had their wits about them, but the third was a fool. The old man died and his sons divided his property among themselves by lot. The sharp-witted ones got plenty of all sorts of good things, but nothing fell to the share of the Simpleton but one ox—and that such a skinny one!