In Chinese culture, hedgehog spirits refer to several types of spirits. These can be animal-demons that can transform into humans and interact with humans. Unlike other animals, for example, foxes, hedgehogs were not very popular characters. Several stories about them can be found in ‘Taiping guang ji’, ‘Taiping yu lan’ (10^th century), as well as in a collection of tales about the weird, “Kui che zhi” (12^th century). In most cases, hedgehogs, in the form of elderly people retaining some zoomorphic features, encounter humans in the yard or in the house and do not harm them. Another type of were-hedgehogs are sacred animals, the cult of whom spread during the Qing era and remains popular to this day. Those spirits, having settled in the family, ensure its prosperity and acquire the ability to shapeshift into humans only upon achieving immortality. Stories about various hedgehog spirits are presented in the collection by Li Qingcheng, “Zuicha’s Tales of the Weird” (“Zuicha zhiguai”), published in 1892. Those stories take place in Tianjin, where the cult of the white hedgehog was very popular. In some of those, the character displays features of different types of spirits.

In this paper, the author offers a perspective on the evolution of the Hairy Maiden (Mao-nü) legends in written and oral Chinese tradition, from the twelfth century to the present day, on material of poems, short stories and records of the collectors of the Song – Qing eras, as well as memories of Hebei from the 1920s – 1940s and modern collections of fairy tales and legends. Attention is also paid to the pre-Song history of the character. The author suggested that it could be considered a borrowing. Field research data from 2014–2016 were used in the research.

Mao-nü lives in wooded mountains, she is benevolent towards people. Stories about her can be divided into two distinctive groups. In the first group, she is a supernatural being for whom there is no return to human existence. In the second group, she returns to human existence, leaves the liminal zone and is doomed to die. W. Eberhard and Li Jianguo constructed the schemes close to the invariant of the Mao-nü plot. However, there are a few stories that do not correspond to those schemes as a whole, or their parts, in which the Hairy Maiden acts as a magical assistant.

The paper describes the concept of Mao-nü as a deity and traces the connection of the Mao-nü stories to the Daoist hagiography (from “Lie xian zhuan” and on). The author also provides data on the perception of Mao-nü in the visual arts.

The paper elaborates on the evidences that prove the direct descendance of the plot of the revolutionary opera “The White-Haired Girl” from ancient folklore. It describes further how the “revolutionary play” influenced the circulation of stories concerning the White-Haired fairy. An attempt is made to determine the ways in which the stories about the Hairy Maiden are connected to the stories about the “wild hairy people”, including the builders of the Great Wall. The author notes that for contemporary stories about Mao-nü, the proximity to written sources and links to the Huashan mountains are characteristic.

In Russian research on fairy tales, there are two approaches to the tale of the wife of the water snake. One approach (that of E.A. Kostyukhin) denies that such plot type belongs to the fairy-tale genre and relates it to the folk novella. Another one (that of G.I. Kabakova) focuses on the etiologic finale, perceiving it as an alternative to compensating the fairy tale shortcoming. The author applied the structuralist method in the analysing of fairy tales about wife of a water snake. As a result, a typology of the plot type 425M was created. He managed to identify its invariant scheme, as well as describe all digressions from it (variations and variants). Characteristic of the 425M plot invariant is the complicated initial part, in which the author suggests to single out a block of zero, or imaginary, shortcoming, and a block of true, actual shortcoming. The structural-semiotic plot scheme correlates with the motivational scheme proposed by G. Kabakova, but enhances it with an emphasis in inversion of the basic semantic opposition of its own, human and alien, non-human, which makes it possible to explain why the final transformation becomes the compensation for the shortcoming. The final transformation of the heroine (and / or her children) into birds and reptiles is considered to be an example of mythological mediation. The heroine eliminates the shortcoming with an action asymmetrically opposite to the action of the antagonist action, namely, with the transformation, due to which a new opposition “cuckoo – water snake” is formed, which removes the former “insider – outsider”. The daughter triumphs over her mother without causing the latter direct harm, and is reunited with her husband.

The article discusses a masterpiece of Old Russian literature of the 17^th century, “The Tale of the Possessed Woman Solomonia”, in the context of Russian and Finno-Ugric mythology. The plot of the Tale is compared to two close plot sets: about people given away to spirits of nature (lost / cursed) or taken away by said spirits (the plot of the North Russian and Finno-Ugric mythological narratives), and about the supernatural or enchanted wife (husband) (the plot is common in Russian fairy tales and in non-fairytale prose of the Finno-Ugric peoples). Consideration of the Tale in a wider mythological context allows to talk not only about the folklore origins of the Old Russian literary masterpiece or thematic unity of the literary and oral texts, but also about the work of cross-genre transmission for mythological motifs, about the logic and ideology of the plot composition in texts of different genres. In particular, it is assumed that, from the point of view of comparative mythology, the motif of sexual persecution of Solomonia by demons can be considered not a result of the influence of Western European demonology with its idea of the succubi and incubi, but an inverse of the mythological model of exogamous marriage regarding of its content, structure and function. The article offers an extension of the context in which one can think about the plot of the Old Russian tale and about weaving yet another thread into the canvas of interpretations.

The paper dwells upon the image of the dead in tales of the two plot types, namely, T 366 “Trup upomina się o swoją własność” (АТU 366 “The Man from the Gallows”) and T 470* “Zmarły urażony” (АТU 470А “The Offended Skull”), formally classified by the author of the Polish folk prose index as fairy tales, but they are in fact in full compliance with basic genre conventions of mythological tales (fabulates). Therefore, the dead in those plot types act not as the fairy-tale but mythological character. Nominations, as well as certain other features, of the “otherworld” characters in those narratives reflect the duality of folk perceptions regarding a person’s lot after their demise. The dead are perceived as scary creatures that pose danger – but the reason for that lies in the humans’ own trespassing against the dead: disturbing their rest. The degree to which the dead are portrayed as demonic, that is, ungracious and vengeful towards the humans, varies and is expressed both in the plot types being compared in general and in specific textual realizations of the same plot.

The article considers the history of creation of a previously unpublished work by E.M. Meletinsky, preceding the first draft of his doctorate thesis and monograph “The hero of fairy tale”. A typewritten copy of it was preserved among the documents seized during the scholar’s second arrest in 1949 and later donated to the library of Petrozavodsk University.

During his time as a post-graduate student in the Central Asian University (then-name of National University of Uzbekistan) Meletinsky was already interested in historical poetics and folklore studies. That resulted in the “Fairytale plots in question about their everyday meaning” article.

The fact that it was the first ever Meletinsky’s work on fairy tales is obvious not only from the documents and memoirs of Meletinsky himself, but from the very structure of the article: in the first chapters the author, taking a problem posed by A.N. Veselovsky in “The poetics of plots” – “to check Russian data about the third sibling, the little fool, the cinderwench against other people’s fairy tales” – as a basis, dwells extensively the motif of the youngest sibling in world fairy tales and the history of studying it, but in the last chapter he moves to the analysis of another motif – the tales about a “poor orphan”. Namely that motif, being in stadia way older, takes centre stage not only in the 1948 thesis, but in all of Meletinsky’s works on fairy tales prior to the second arrest, both published and unpublished.