Tales of Uncle Remus

The original includes a number of collections published in 1880-1948, in particular:

• Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880)
• Nights with Uncle Remus (1883)
• Uncle Remus and His Friends (1892)
• The Tar-Baby and Other Rhymes of Uncle Remus (1904)
• Told By Uncle Remus: New Stories of the Old Plantation (1905)
• Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit (1907)
• Uncle Remus and the Little Boy (1910)
• Uncle Remus Returns (1918)
• Seven Tales of Uncle Remus (1948)

In Russian, "Tales of Uncle Rimus" was first published in 1936 in the retelling of M. A. Gershenzon and has since been reprinted many times.

Starting to work for the Atlanta Constitution, replacing another editor, Harris began writing separate stories about Uncle Remus in a newspaper column with the goal, as he himself said:

On July 20, 1879, Harris published The Story of Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Lees, as Uncle Rimus told her in Atlanta Constitution. This was the first of 34 plantation fables to be collected later in the book. The stories, mainly collected directly from African American folklore, were revolutionary in the use of dialects, animal characters, and description of landscapes ^[1] .

Harris was not going to continue to write uncle Remus's tales, but when the former editor left the newspaper again, Harris continued. He understood that the significance of the stories he had heard from the slaves on the plantation was great enough. Harris began to record stories, this work was not an easy task for him ^[2] .

The character of fairy tales Brother Rabbit is a trickster using his mind against adversity, although he does not always succeed. Brother Rabbit is surrounded by friends and enemies, such as Brother Fox, Brother Bear, Brother Wolf and others. These stories are very different from fairy tales in the Western tradition: instead of a single event in a separate story, the saga tells about creatures working on the plantation from time immemorial ^[3] .

Harris said that “ Uncle Tom’s Cabin ” by Harriet Beecher Stowe became a book that influenced the choice of characters - the narrator Uncle Remus and the little boy. After reading this work in 1862, he said that the novel “left the most vivid impressions in my memory compared to everything I have ever read” ^[4] .

The first book with the tales of Uncle Rimus was published at the end of 1880 ^[5] . Then other books of this cycle were published. The last three - after the death of the author.

Tales, a total of 185, have become very popular among both black and white readers. Few outside the southern states heard the dialects used in fairy tales; Harris was the first to record them in good faith. For North America and foreign readers, the stories became a “revelation to the unknown” ^[6] . Mark Twain noted in 1883 that “in terms of describing the African American dialect, he is the only master in the country” ^[7] .

The stories introduced the international reader to the American South. Rudyard Kipling wrote in a letter to Harris that the tales “ran like wildfire through English public schools ... We found ourselves quoting whole pages of Uncle Remus that were woven into the fabric of school life” ^[8] .

James Weldon Johnson called the collection of stories "the greatest work of folklore that America has produced" ^[9] .

Stories from "Tales of Uncle Remus" were filmed in the animated films " Song of the South " (1946), " Blacks " ( Coonskin , satire Ralph Bakshi 1975) and "The Adventures of Brother Rabbit" (2006), in the Hungarian animated series "Tales of Uncle Remus" ( Rémusz bácsi meséi , 1967), as well as in Soviet cartoons “Brother Rabbit and Brother Fox” (1972), “ Housewarming at Brother Rabbit ” (1986).

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