SYNOPSIS. What is this book about
Here is a collection of children’s fairy tales, united by:
– a single terrain on which events unfold;
– common heroes;
– events that, to one degree or another, follow one another and sometimes lead to the next story.
Thus, fairy tales can be considered both individual works and something whole.
Setting: a “fairy-tale” area somewhere in the Poltava region, an area known to be a haven of witches, evil spirits and filled with other attributes of the supernatural. In a forest, cut off on one side by a river, on the other by swamps, and on the north by a ledge of rocks from the rest of the world. Previously, there were military men there who had suffered from the local supernatural, and as soon as they had the opportunity to get out of there, they immediately left these places, leaving all their real estate there. There was also a depot, which over time began to fall into disrepair, like everything else in this forest, until wandering trains settled in it.
In the swamps, in a house abandoned by the military, stylized as a hut on chicken legs, lived an old woman – Baba Yaga, who considered herself an old resident of the forest, who melted spoons and forks from scrap metal, which she fished out abandoned steam locomotives from the swamp, and therefore was hostile to the appearance of steam locomotives. And since she was a vindictive and vindictive person, this enmity began to result in constant skirmishes and intrigues on her part.
A little about each of the fairy tales:
001. Like Baba Yaga, Chu-Chukhina wanted to melt the train into spoons.
Here we meet the two main characters – Baba Yaga and the locomotive Chu-Chukhin, who, having gotten lost in the forest, almost became a victim of an insidious old woman and was not melted down into spoons and forks, but thanks to the ingenuity and help of a hut on chicken legs (a military project abandoned in forest) he manages to escape from history.
002. How the little locomotive Chu-Chukhin saved Kolobchuk.
Kolobchuk is the hero of fairy tales, Kolobok, who now lives in the depot near the trains, but before he came to them, he suffered hardships and persecution from his grandmother and grandfather, who live just beyond the railway bridge across the river, and from the flattering brethren. And only the help of Chu-Chukhin, and the cunning of Kolobchuk himself, allowed him to get out of this mess. In this story, a cunning fox appears, which at the end of the fairy tale ends up in Baba Yaga’s house.
003. The story of the Ghost Engine and how Baba Yaga wanted to get to Chu-Chukhin.
Baba Yaga, already angry at the engines, persuaded by that very Fox, decided to get to Chu-chukhin, as one of the informal authorities in the depot, through witchcraft, calling to life the spirit of the engines from the Swamp of Old Engines. But her idea failed, since the ghost engine turned out to be not evil and took the side of the train.
004. How the engines met Alenka.
The girl Alenka, who was going to visit her grandfather and grandmother (they live across the railway bridge and who made Kolobchuk at one time), decided to take a shortcut and went through the forest and swamps. She met Baba Yaga and, naturally, she lured her to her place. Aleka ran away, hid in the swamps until the Ghost engine accidentally found her and took her to the depot with the engines.
005. How the trains looked for the magic fern at night.
Baba Yaga cast a spell on the engines and the only way they found to remove this spell was the color of the fern. It grew in a remote corner of the forest, in the abode of the Walking Oaks, and bloomed only once a year, just on the next weekend.
The engines performed a ceremony on the river bank and set off. From the other side, Baba Yaga and her cohort moved to the same place. In the clearing they collided. And it is not known how all this would have ended if the forest spirits had not intervened in this matter and kicked everyone out of their monastery. And only Maslenka the Cat, a mechanic at the depot, hid in one of the trees, waited for everything and in the morning brought a fern flower.
006. How the Cat Bayun wanted to help Baba Yaga!
Having complained in a letter to her old bosom friend Kot Bayun, Baba Yaga thereby summoned him to her. The cat assessed the situation and decided to shake off the old days, since he himself was from these places. Having come up with a plan, he decided to lull the locomotives to sleep, enchant them, as he did with the birds in the forest and in the swamp, and direct them towards the swamp, where Baba Yaga would be waiting for them. And everything would have been fine if I hadn’t taken with me two cats – Baba Yaga’s assistants, who ruined the whole event.
