Arabian tales. Thousand and One Nights
Glory to Allah, Lord of the worlds! Greetings and blessings to the lord of the sent ones, our lord and master Muhammad! May Allah bless him and may Allah greet him with blessings and eternal greetings, lasting until the Day of Judgment!
And after that: verily, the legends about the first generations became an edification for the next, so that a person could see what events happened to others, and learn, and so that, delving into the legends about past peoples and what happened to them, he would refrain from sin ... Praise be to the one who made the legends about the ancients a lesson for the peoples of the next!
Such legends include the stories called "The Thousand and One Nights", and the sublime stories and parables contained in them.
They tell in the legends of the peoples that it was, has passed and has long passed (and Allah is more knowledgeable in the unknown and is wise and glorious, and most generous, and most benevolent, and merciful), that in ancient times and past centuries and centuries he was on the islands India and China is the king of the kings of the Sasana clan, the lord of the troops, guards, servants and servants. And he had two sons: one adult, the other young, and both were heroic knights, but the older one surpassed the younger in valor. And he reigned in his country and justly ruled over his subjects, and the inhabitants of his lands and kingdom fell in love with him, and his name was King Shahriyar; and his younger brother's name was King Shahzeman, and he reigned in Persian Samarkand. They both dwelt in their lands, and each in his kingdom was a just judge of his subjects for twenty years and lived in complete contentment and joy. This continued until the elder king wanted to see his younger brother and ordered his vizier to go and bring him. The Vizier fulfilled his order and set off and rode until he arrived safely in Samarkand. He went to Shahseman, conveyed greetings to him and said that his brother yearned for him and wanted him to visit him; and Shahseman answered with consent and equipped himself for the journey. He ordered to take out his tents, equip camels, mules, servants and bodyguards, and made his vizier the ruler of the country, while he went to the lands of his brother. But when midnight came, he remembered one thing that he had forgotten in the palace, and returned and, entering the palace, saw that his wife was lying in bed, embracing a black slave from among his slaves.
And when Shahseman saw this, everything turned black before his eyes, and he said to himself: "If this happened when I had not yet left the city, then what will the behavior of this damned be like if I go away to my brother for a long time!" And he pulled out his sword and struck both of them and killed them in bed, and then, at the same hour and minute, he returned and ordered to drive off - and rode until he reached his brother's city. And approaching the city, he sent messengers to his brother with the news of his arrival, and Shakhriyar went out to meet him and greeted him, extremely delighted. He decorated the city in honor of his brother and sat with him, talking and having fun, but King Shahseman remembered what happened to his wife, and felt great sadness, and his face turned yellow, and his body weakened. And when his brother saw him in such a state, he thought that the reason for this was the separation from the country and the kingdom, and left him like that, not asking about anything. But then, one day, he said to him: "O my brother, I see that your body has become weak and your face has turned yellow." And Shahseman answered him: "My brother, there is an ulcer inside me," and did not tell what he experienced from his wife. "I want," Shakhriyar said then, "for you to go hunting with me and catch it: maybe your heart will be merry." But Shahseman refused this, and his brother went hunting alone.
In the royal palace there were windows overlooking the garden, and Shahseman looked and suddenly saw: the doors of the palace were opening, and twenty slaves and twenty slaves came out of there, and his brother's wife walked among them, standing out with a rare beauty and charm. They went to the fountain, and took off their clothes, and sat down with the slaves, and suddenly the king's wife shouted: "O Masud!" And the black slave went up to her and hugged her, and she did his too. He lay down with her, and the other slaves did the same, and they kissed and hugged, caressed and amused themselves until the day turned into sunset. And when the king's brother saw this, he said to himself: "By Allah, my trouble is easier than this calamity!" - and his jealousy and sadness dissipated. "This is more than what happened to me!" He exclaimed and stopped refusing food and drink. And then his brother returned from the hunt, and they greeted each other, and King Shahriyar looked at his brother, King Shahseman, and saw that the old colors returned to him and his face turned red and that he was eating without catching his breath, although he had eaten little before. ... Then his brother, the elder king, said to Shahseman: “O my brother, I saw you with a yellowed face, and now the blush has returned to you. Tell me what is the matter with you. " “As for the change in my appearance, I’ll tell you about it, but spare me the story of why my blush returned to me,” Shahseman answered. And Shahriyar said: "First tell me why you have changed in appearance and become weak, and I will listen."
“Know, my brother,” Shahseman said, “that when you sent a vizier to me with a demand to come to you, I equipped myself and had already left the city, but then I remembered that there was a pearl in the palace that I wanted to give you. I returned to the palace and found my wife with a black slave sleeping in my bed and killed them and came to you thinking about it. This is the reason for my change in appearance and my weakness; before the blush came back to me - let me not tell you about it. "
But, hearing the words of his brother, Shahriyar exclaimed: "I conjure you by Allah, tell me why the blush has returned to you!" And Shahseman told him about everything that he saw. Then Shakhriyar told his brother Shahseman: "I want to see it with my own eyes!" And Shahseman advised: "Pretend that you are going hunting and catching, and hide yourself with me, then you will see it and be convinced with your own eyes."
The tsar at once ordered to call the call for departure, and the troops with tents marched out of the city, and the tsar also left; but then he sat down in the tent and said to his servants: "Let no one come to me!" After that, he changed his appearance and stealthily walked into the palace where his brother was, and sat for a while at the window that overlooked the garden - and suddenly the slaves and their mistress entered there along with the slaves and acted as Shahseman told, before being called up. for afternoon prayer. When King Shahriyar saw this, his mind flew out of his head, and he said to his brother Shahseman: “Get up, let's leave immediately, we don't need royal power until we see someone with whom the same happened to us! Otherwise, death is better for us than life! "
They went out through a secret door and wandered day and night until they came to a tree in the middle of a lawn, where a stream ran by the salt sea. They drank from this stream and sat down to rest. And when an hour of daytime had passed, the sea suddenly became agitated, and a black pillar rose from it, rising to the sky, and headed towards their lawn. Seeing this, both brothers were frightened and climbed to the top of the tree (and it was high) and began to wait for what would happen next. And suddenly they see: in front of them is a genie, tall, with a large head and wide chest, and on his head he has a chest. He went out onto dry land and went up to the tree on which the brothers were, and, sitting down under it, unlocked the chest, and took out a chest from it, and opened it, and a young woman with a slender body, shining like a bright sun, came out.
The genie looked at this woman and said: "O mistress of the noble ones, oh you, whom I kidnapped on the night of the wedding, I want to get some sleep!" - and he laid his head on the woman's lap and fell asleep; she raised her head and saw both kings sitting in a tree. Then she took the head of the genie from her knees and laid it on the ground and, standing under a tree, said to the brothers with signs: "Get off, do not be afraid of the ifrit." And they answered her: "We conjure you with Allah, deliver us from this." But the woman said, "If you don't go down, I will wake up the ifrit and he will kill you with an evil death." And they got scared and went down to the woman, and she lay down in front of them and said: "Stick it in, but stronger, or I'll wake up the ifrit." Out of fear, King Shahriyar said to his brother, King Shahseman: "O my brother, do what she told you!" But Shahseman replied: “I won't! Do you before me! " And they began to provoke each other with signs, but the woman exclaimed: “What is this? I see you winking! If you don’t come and do it, I’ll wake up the ifrit! ” And out of fear of the genie, both brothers obeyed the order, and when they finished, she said: "Wake up!" - and taking out a purse from her bosom, she pulled out a necklace of five hundred and seventy rings. "Do you know what these rings are?" She asked; and the brothers answered: "We do not know!" Then the woman said: “The owners of all these rings dealt with me on the horns of this ifrit. Give me a ring, too. " And the brothers gave the woman two rings from their hands, and she said: “This ifrit kidnapped me on the night of my wedding and put me in a chest, and the box in a chest. He hung seven shiny locks on the chest and lowered me to the bottom of the roaring sea, where the waves beat, but he did not know that if a woman wanted something, no one could overcome her. "
What do you know about the tales of The Thousand and One Nights? Most are content with the well-known stereotype: this is the famous Arab fairy tale about the beautiful Scheherazade, who became a hostage of King Shahriyar. The eloquent girl intoxicated the king and thereby bought herself freedom. It's time to find out the bitter (or rather, salty) truth.
And of course, among her stories were stories about Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor and other brave men, but it turned out that all this is complete nonsense.
Fairy tales have come down to us after many centuries of censorship and translations, so little is left of the original. In fact, the heroes of Scheherazade's fairy tales were not as sweet, kind and morally stable as the characters in the Disney cartoon. Therefore, if you want to preserve a fond memory of your favorite childhood characters, stop reading immediately. And to everyone else, welcome to a world you might not even have known about. The first documented information describing the story of Scheherazade as a well-known work dates back to the pen of the tenth century historian al-Masoudi. Subsequently, the collection was repeatedly rewritten and modified depending on the life time and the language of the translator, but the backbone remained the same, therefore, if not the original story, then very close to the original, has come down to us.
It begins, oddly enough, not with the tears of a young beauty who is about to say goodbye to life, but with two brothers, each of whom ruled his country. After twenty years of separate rule, the elder brother, whose name was Shakhriyar, invited the younger Shahseman to his domain. He agreed without thinking twice, but as soon as he left the capital, he "remembered one thing" he had forgotten in the city. Upon his return, he found his wife in the arms of a negro slave.
Angry, the king hacked to death both, and then with a clear conscience went to his brother. On a visit, he became sad that his wife was no longer alive, and he stopped eating. The elder brother, although he tried to cheer him up, but to no avail. Then Shakhriyar offered to go hunting, but Shahseman refused, continuing to plunge into depression. So, sitting at the window and indulging in black melancholy, the unfortunate king saw how the wife of his absent brother arranged an orgy with slaves at the fountain. The king immediately cheered up and thought: "Wow, my brother will have more serious problems."
Shakhriyar returned from hunting, finding his brother with a smile on his face. It didn't take long to find out, he immediately told everything frankly. The reaction was unusual. Instead of acting like the younger brother, the elder suggested that they go on a trip and see: are their wives cheating on other husbands? 
They were unlucky, and the wanderings dragged on: they could not find unfaithful wives until they came across an oasis on the seashore. A genie emerged from the depths of the sea with a chest under his arm. From the chest he pulled a woman (real) and said: "I want to sleep on you," - and so he fell asleep. This woman, seeing the kings hiding on the palm tree, ordered them to go down and take possession of her right there, on the sand. Otherwise, she would have awakened the genie, and he would have killed them.
The kings agreed and granted her wish. After the act of love, the woman asked for the rings from each of them. They gave it away, and she added the jewels to the other five hundred and seventy (!), Which were kept in her casket. So that the brothers did not languish in conjectures, the seducer explained that all the rings once belonged to men who had taken possession of her secretly from the genie. The brothers looked at each other and said: “Wow, this genie will have more serious problems than ours,” and returned to their countries. After that, Shakhriyar cut off the head of his wife and all the "accomplices", and he himself decided to take one girl a night. 
Nowadays, this story may seem chauvinistic, but it is much more like a script for an adult film. Think for yourself: no matter what the heroes do, wherever they go, they have to either look at the act of intercourse, or participate in it. Such scenes are repeated more than once throughout the book. Why, the younger sister of Scheherazade personally watched her relative's wedding night: “And then the king sent for Dunyazada, and she came to her sister, hugged her and sat on the floor near the bed. And then Shakhriyar took possession of Shahrazada, and then they began to talk. "
Another distinguishing feature of the tales of a thousand and one nights is that their heroes act absolutely for no reason, and often the events themselves look extremely ridiculous. This is how, for example, the tale of the first night begins. Once a merchant went to some country to collect debts. He felt hot, and he sat down under a tree to eat dates and bread. “Having eaten a date, he threw a bone - and suddenly he sees: in front of him is a tall ifrit, and in his hands is a naked sword. Ifrit approached the merchant and said to him: "Get up, I will kill you, as you killed my son!" - "How did I kill your son?" the merchant asked. And the ifrit replied: "When you ate a date and threw the bone, it hit my son in the chest, and he died at that very moment." Just think: the merchant killed the genie with a date bone. If only the enemies of Disney's Aladdin knew about this secret weapon. 
There are also many absurdities in our folk tale, such as: “The mouse ran, waved its tail, the pot fell, the testicles broke,” but there you will definitely not find such crazy characters as in the story of the fifth night. It tells the story of King al-Sinbad, who trained the falcon for many years to help him in the hunt. And then one day the king, together with his retinue, caught a gazelle, and then the devil pulled him to say: "Anyone over whose head the gazelle jumps over, will be killed." The gazelle, naturally, jumped over the king's head. Then the subjects began to whisper: they say, why did the owner promise to kill everyone over whose head the gazelle jumps over, and he still has not laid hands on himself. Instead of fulfilling his promise, the king chased the gazelle, killed it and hung the carcass on the rump of his horse.
Going to rest after the chase, the king stumbled upon a source of life-giving moisture dripping from a tree. Three times he collected the bowl, and three times the falcon overturned it. Then the king got angry and cut off the wings of the falcon, and he pointed upward with his beak, where on the branches of a tree was sitting a baby echidna, emitting poison. It is difficult to say what is the moral of this story, but the character who told it in the book said that it was a parable about envy. 
Of course, it is foolish to demand from a book that is at least 11 centuries old, a harmonious dramatic line. That is why the purpose of the above-described persiflage was not to rudely ridicule her, but to show that she can become an excellent read for the night, which will definitely make any modern person laugh. The fairy tales of "A Thousand and One Nights" are a product of time, which, having passed through the centuries, involuntarily turned into a comedy, and there is nothing wrong with that.
Despite the wide popularity of this historical monument, its adaptations are incredibly few, and those that exist usually show the famous Aladdin or Sinbad the sailor. However, the most striking film version of fairy tales was the French film of the same name. It does not retell all the plots of the book, but presents a bright and absurd story that is worthy of the films of "Monty Python" and at the same time corresponds to the crazy spirit of fairy tales.
For example, Shahriyar in the film is a king who dreams of simultaneously growing roses, composing poetry and touring a traveling circus. The vizier is an old pervert, so worried about the absent-mindedness of the king that he himself goes to bed with his wife, so that he understands how windy women are. And Scheherazade is an extravagant girl who invites everyone she meets to fix her child. By the way, she is played by the young and beautiful Catherine Zeta-Jones, who more than once in the entire tape appears naked before the audience. We've listed at least four reasons to watch this movie. Surely after this you will want to read the book "A Thousand and One Nights" even more. 
We all love fairy tales. Fairy tales are not just entertainment. In many fairy tales, the wisdom of mankind, hidden knowledge is encrypted. There are fairy tales for children, there are fairy tales for adults. Sometimes some are confused with others. And sometimes we have a completely wrong idea about all the known fairy tales.
Aladdin and his magic lamp. Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. What collection are these fairy tales from? Are you sure? Are you firmly convinced that we are talking about a collection of fairy tales "A Thousand and One Nights"? However, none of the original copies of this collection contains the tale of Aladdin and his magic lamp. It appeared only in modern editions of Thousand and One Nights. But who and when put it there is not exactly known.
Just as in the case of Aladdin, we have to state the same fact: in none of the original list of the famous collection of fairy tales there is a story about Ali Baba and the forty robbers. She appeared in the first translation of these tales into French. The French orientalist Galland, preparing the translation of The Thousand and One Nights, included the Arabic fairy tale Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves from another collection.
Antoine Galland
The modern text of the Thousand and One Nights is not Arabic, but Western. If you follow the original, which, by the way, is a collection of Indian and Persian (not Arabic) urban folklore, then only 282 short stories should remain in the collection. Everything else is late layering. There is neither Sinbad the sailor, nor Ali Baba and the forty robbers, nor Aladdin with a magic lamp in the original. Almost all of these tales were added by the French orientalist and the first translator of the collection, Antoine Galland.
At the beginning of the 18th century, all of Europe was seized directly by some pathological passion for the East. On this wave, works of art on an oriental theme began to appear. One of them was offered to the reading public by the then unknown archivist Antoine Galland in 1704. Then the first volume of his stories came out. The success was deafening.
By 1709, six more volumes were published, and then four more, the last of which came out after the death of Gallan. All of Europe drunkenly read the stories that the wise Shahrezada told the king Shahriyar. And no one cared about the fact that the real East in these fairy tales became less and less with each volume, and more and more inventions of Galland himself.
Initially, these tales had a slightly different name - "Stories from a Thousand Nights". As we have already noted, they were formed in India and Persia: they were told in bazaars, in caravanserais, in the courtyards of noble people and among the people. Over time, they began to be recorded.
According to Arab sources, Alexander the Great told himself to read these tales for the night in order to stay awake and not miss an enemy attack.
The Egyptian papyrus of the 4th century with a similar title page confirms the ancient history of these tales. They are also mentioned in the catalog of a book dealer who lived in Baghdad in the middle of the 10th century. True, next to the name there is a note: "A pitiful book for people who have gone out of their minds."
I must say that in the East this book has long been criticized. “A Thousand and One Nights” was not considered a highly artistic literary work for a long time, because her stories did not have a pronounced scientific or moral connotation.
It was only after these tales became popular in Europe that they fell in love in the East as well. Currently, the Nobel Institute in Oslo ranks "One Thousand and One Nights" among the hundred most significant works of world literature.
It is interesting that the original of the fairy tales "A Thousand and One Nights" is more saturated with eroticism than magic. If in the version familiar to us, Sultan Shahriyar indulged in sorrow and therefore demanded a new woman every night (and executed her the next morning), then in the original the Sultan from Samarkand was angry with all women due to the fact that he had caught his beloved wife of treason (with a black slave - behind a willow hedge in the palace garden). Fearing to break his heart again, he killed women. And only the beautiful Scheherazade managed to calm his thirst for revenge. Among the stories she told there were many such that children who love fairy tales should not read: about lesbians, homosexual princes, sadistic princesses, and beautiful girls who gave their love to animals, since there were no sexual taboos in these fairy tales.
Indo-Persian eroticism originally formed the basis of the tales "A Thousand and One Nights",
Yes, I probably would be careful not to read such fairy tales to my children. As for who and when they were written, there is even a radical opinion that these tales simply did not exist in the East before they were published in the West, since their originals, as if by magic, began to be found only after the publications of Galland. May be so. Or maybe not. But in any case, these tales are currently one of the most significant works of world literature. And that's great.
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Thousand and One Nights
Foreword
Almost two and a half centuries have passed since Europe first became acquainted with the Arabian tales of the Thousand and One Nights in Galland's free and far from complete French translation, but even now they are still loved by readers. The passage of time has not affected the popularity of Shahrazada's stories; along with countless reprints and secondary translations from the edition of Galland up to the present day, publications of "Nights" appear again and again in many languages of the world, translated directly from the original. The influence of "A Thousand and One Nights" was great on the work of various writers - Montesquieu, Wieland, Hauff, Tennyson, Dickens. Pushkin also admired the Arabian tales. Having first met some of them in a free arrangement by Senkovsky, he became so interested in them that he acquired one of the editions of Galland's translation, which was preserved in his library.
It is difficult to say what attracts more in the fairy tales of "A Thousand and One Nights" - the amusing plot, the bizarre interweaving of the fantastic and the real, vivid pictures of urban life in the medieval Arab East, fascinating descriptions of amazing countries or the liveliness and depth of experiences of the heroes of fairy tales, the psychological justification of situations, clear, a certain morality. The language of many stories is magnificent - lively, imaginative, juicy, alien to minutiae and omissions. The speech of the heroes of the best fairy tales of "Nights" is brightly individual, each of them has its own style and vocabulary, characteristic of the social environment from which they came.
What is the “Book of a Thousand and One Nights”, how and when was it created, where were Shahrazada's fairy tales born?
“One Thousand and One Nights” is not a work of an individual author or compiler, but the collective creator is the entire Arab people. In the form in which we now know it, "A Thousand and One Nights" is a collection of fairy tales in Arabic, united by a framing story about the cruel king Shahriyar, who took a new wife for himself every evening and killed her in the morning. The history of the origin of the "Thousand and One Nights" is still far from clear; its origins are lost in the mists of time.
The first written information about the Arab collection of fairy tales, framed by a story about Shahriyar and Shahrazad and called "A Thousand Nights" or "One Thousand and One Nights", we find in the writings of Baghdad writers of the 10th century - the historian al-Masoudi and bibliographer ai-Nadeem, who speak about him as about a long and well-known work. Already at that time, information about the origin of this book was rather vague and it was considered a translation of the Persian collection of fairy tales "Hezar-Efsane" ("Thousand stories"), supposedly composed for Humai, the daughter of the Iranian king Ardeshir (IV century BC). The content and nature of the Arabic collection mentioned by Masoudi and Anadim are unknown to us, since it has not survived to this day.
The evidence of the named writers about the existence in their time of the Arabic book of fairy tales "A Thousand and One Nights" is confirmed by the presence of an extract from this book dating back to the 9th century. Subsequently, the collection's literary evolution continued until the 14th-15th centuries. More and more fairy tales of different genres and different social origins were put into the convenient frame of the collection. We can judge about the process of creating such fabulous vaults by the report of the same Anadim, who says that his elder contemporary, a certain Abd-Allah al-Jahshiyari - a person, by the way, is quite real - conceived to compose a book of thousands of fairy tales “Arabs, Persians, Greeks and other peoples ”, one for the night, each sheet in volume of fifty, but he died, having managed to type only four hundred and eighty stories. He took material mainly from professional storytellers, whom he recalled from all parts of the Caliphate, as well as from written sources.
The collection of al-Jahshiyari has not survived to us, and other fabulous vaults called "A Thousand and One Nights", which are sparingly mentioned by medieval Arab writers, have not survived either. In terms of the composition of these collections of fairy tales, apparently, they differed from each other, they had only the title and the fairy tale frame in common.
In the course of creating such collections, you can outline several successive stages.
The first suppliers of material for them were professional folk storytellers, whose stories were initially recorded under dictation with almost stenographic accuracy, without any literary processing. A large number of such stories in Arabic, written in Hebrew letters, are kept in the State Public Library named after Saltykov-Shchedrin in Leningrad; the oldest lists date back to the 11th-12th centuries. Later, these records came to booksellers, who subjected the text of the fairy tale to some literary processing. Each tale was considered at this stage not as an integral part of a collection, but as a completely independent work; therefore, in the original versions of fairy tales that have come down to us, which were subsequently included in the Book of a Thousand and One Nights, there is still no division into nights. The breaking down of the text of the fairy tales took place at the last stage of their processing, when they fell into the hands of the compiler who was compiling the next collection of "Thousand and One Nights". In the absence of material for the required number of "nights", the compiler replenished it from written sources, borrowing from there not only small stories and anecdotes, but also long knightly novels.
The last such compiler was that unknown by name scientist sheikh, who in the 18th century in Egypt compiled the latest collection of fairy tales "A Thousand and One Nights" in the 18th century. Fairy tales also received the most significant literary processing in Egypt, two or three centuries earlier. This edition of the XIV-XVI centuries "The Book of a Thousand and One Nights", usually called "Egyptian", - the only one that has survived to this day - is presented in most printed editions, as well as in almost all known manuscripts of "Nights" and serves as specific material for studying the fairy tales of Shahrazada.
From the previous, possibly earlier, collections of the "Book of a Thousand and One Nights" only single tales have survived, not included in the "Egyptian" edition and presented in a few manuscripts of separate volumes of "Nights" or existing in the form of independent stories, which, however, have - division at night. These stories include the most popular fairy tales among European readers: "Aladdin and the Magic Lamp", "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" and some others; The Arabic original of these tales was at the disposal of the first translator of Galland's Thousand and One Nights, by whose translation they became known in Europe.
When researching "A Thousand and One Nights", each fairy tale should be considered separately, since there is no organic connection between them, and they existed independently for a long time before being included in the collection. Attempts to group some of them into groups according to their alleged origin - from India, Iran or Baghdad - are insufficiently substantiated. The plots of Shahrazada's stories were composed of separate elements that could penetrate the Arab soil from Iran or India independently of one another; in their new homeland, they were overgrown with purely native layers and since ancient times have become the property of Arab folklore. So, for example, it happened with the framing fairy tale: when it came to the Arabs from India through Iran, it lost many of its original features in the mouths of storytellers.
More expedient than an attempt to group, say, on a geographical basis, should be considered the principle of uniting them, at least conditionally, into groups by the time of creation or by belonging to the social environment where they lived. To the oldest, most stable collection of fairy tales,