Hear about the principle types of Russian folktales.

Folktales are our oldest stories, and they distill a people’s character and experience in deceptively simple texts. Hear from Dr. Barbara Henry from the University of Washington at this talk on at the principle types of Russian folktales. Then, explore one of Russia's most well-known tales, “The Magic Swan-Geese.”

Barbara Henry is an associate professor in the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and an affiliate of the Stroum Jewish Studies Center at the University of Washington, Seattle.

She teaches courses on 19th and 20th century Russian literature and culture, Russian folktales, and Yiddish literature.

She is the author of Rewriting Russia: Jacob Gordin’s Yiddish Drama (University of Washington Press, 2011), a study of the playwright’s adaptations of Russian literary texts for New York’s Yiddish theatre. She is co-editor, with Joel Berkowitz, of Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage (Wayne State University Press, 2012), which examines the Yiddish theatre as a component in the creation of a modern Jewish identity.

Dr. Henry’s current research includes a monograph about the underworld descent motif in pre-Revolutionary Russian literature, and an annotated translation of the memoirs of the Yiddish actor Avrom Fishzon (1848-1922). Dr. Henry is a contributing editor for the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project (https://yiddishstage.org/), and she can be seen on YouTube in “So, Why Yiddish?” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsMfS359jk4), a close reading of a poem by Aaron Tseitlin that has been viewed more than 27,000 times.


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