“Chicken Ryaba” is perhaps the shortest and simple tale for babies. She is the first of the world fairy tales, which parents begin to introduce their child to.

Decoding fairy tales - creative process and everyone can see their own meaning.

I give my vision of the meanings of the symbols of a particular story. And this is how I see the fairy tale about the hen Ryaba.

This is a tale of possibilities in life.

Windows of new opportunities, new paths and directions are constantly opening for us, and we are given certain chances. If we don’t have time or don’t want to, or maybe we just don’t see them, then we miss the gifts of fate given to us. And sometimes we are not ready to fully use the full potential of what is provided and we cry over a missed opportunity, a missed chance.

But this does not mean that there will be no more of them. There is always hope that in the future a new window of opportunity will definitely open - it’s like trains in the subway, you didn’t have time to get on, another one will come later. True, subsequent chances may be less attractive, but within the capabilities of the level of development where the person is at the moment.

The fairy tale about the hen Ryaba describes a wonderful opportunity in the form of a magnificent gift from fate - a golden egg, but neither the grandfather nor the woman, that is, the man himself, could take advantage of it - they did not break it, although they tried.

Naturally, the person is upset that he missed such a great opportunity, but there is also consolation in the form of the hen’s words that a new one will definitely appear, although not as great as before (the egg is simple).

Take it while they give it ;)

IN English language There is an expression called golden opportunity, which literally translates as “golden opportunity.” Why not the golden egg of opportunity from the Ryaba Hen?

How do you like this unusual option this fairy tale?

Once upon a time there lived an old man and an old woman, they had a Tatar hen that laid an egg in the closet under the window: motley, brightly boned, tricky! I put it on the shelf; The mouse walked, shook its tail, the shelf fell, and the egg broke.

The old man is crying, the old woman is sobbing, the stove is on fire, the top of the hut is shaking, the girl-granddaughter hanged herself out of grief. Mallow comes and asks: Why are they crying so much?

The old men began to retell:

-How can we not cry? We have a Tatar hen that laid an egg in the hut under the window: motley, colorful, boney, tricky! I put it on the shelf; The mouse walked, shook its tail, the shelf fell, and the egg broke! I, an old man, am crying, the old woman is sobbing, the stove is on fire, the top of the hut is shaking, the girl-granddaughter hanged herself out of grief.

When the breadmaker heard it, she broke all the bread and threw it away. The sexton comes up and asks the breadmaker: why did she throw away the bread?

She told him the grief; the sexton ran to the bell tower and broke all the bells.

The priest comes and asks the sexton: why did you break the bells?

The sexton recounted all the grief to the priest, and the priest ran and tore up all the books.

And this official version transcript of this tale:

The hen laid a golden egg as a gift to the old men. It was accidentally broken by a mouse.

Why are the grandfather and woman crying, because they themselves wanted to break it, but could not?
The fact is that they cry not because it broke, but because the egg turned out to be empty.
The egg is the prototype of all life on Earth. This is a symbol of the infinity of life, because without death there is no rebirth.
In general, since ancient times there has been a sacred meaning in beating and eating eggs - it is no coincidence that there is such a custom on Easter to beat and eat eggs (although the ritual of beating may also be associated with the death of Kashchei, i.e. evil). In any case, the egg had to be full, the world had to be filled.
The chicken reassures the old people: “I will lay you another egg - not a golden one, but a simple one,” that is, a viable one, from which life will be reborn.

Ekaterina Sapezhinskaya
“Ryaba Hen”: what is the moral of the tale?

1. Everyone knows the tale of the Ryaba Hen., but the reader sometimes does not suspect that it has an author - Konstantin Dmitrievich Ushinsky. He took only an outline for the primer - an idea from Russian folk fairy tales. Named Ryaboi chicken, came up with a unique story with a golden egg and a happy ending.

Our goal is to try to reveal and understand the multi-layered content fairy tales« Chicken Ryaba» .

3. Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp saw in the composition fairy tales in general and tales about chicken Ripple in particular the comic nature. The scientist spoke about the insignificance of events at the beginning fairy tales. “The insignificance of these events sometimes stands in comic contrast with the monstrous increase in the consequences arising from them and with the final catastrophe (beginning - an egg breaks, end - the whole village burns)».

4. Fairytale plot« Chicken Ryaba» known in East Slavic folklore, in the folklore of Poles, Romanians, Lithuanians and Latvians. In Romanian and some Lithuanian variants, the cause of grief is not related to the egg.

5. Vladimir Toporov (founder "master myth theories") built the plot fairy tales to the motif of the World Egg, which is split by a mythological hero.

Toporov believed that fairy tale« Chicken Ryaba» is an extreme degenerate version of the mythological concept.

6. According to Lyudmila Grigorievna Moshchenskaya, in « Chicken Ryaba» reflects the deep layer of mythopoetic ideas, fairy tale contains a cosmogonic model of the world, divided into upper, middle and lower worlds. Wherein middle world (Earth) embody grandfather, grandmother and Ryaba chicken, lower world (underworld)- a mouse, and the upper world is a golden space egg. The duality of experience, the nature of the central acting heroes fairy tales, mice and chickens, allows you to view the plot in two keys: positive, creative (breaking an egg is the creation of a starry sky) and negative, destructive.

7. Boris Zakhoder believed that « Chicken Ryaba» - This fairy tale about human happiness: “Happiness is a golden egg - people beat it this way and that, and a mouse ran by and waved its tail...” This interpretation meets support: "Try tell happiness and the ease of its loss are somehow clearer, more imaginative, more holistic... Everyone understands that a fairy tale about it».

8. Marina Evgenievna Vigdorchik in the article “Analysis of Russian fairy tales"Ryaba hen"in object relations theory" writes: “A golden egg laid by a hen is a symbol of a child who has special significance for his parents. […] This interpretation consistent with the next part fairy tales, Where we're talking about about how both grandfather and woman beat an egg. They beat - they educate, they try to bring the egg into line with their ideas, and the bitterness of disappointment sets in when at one moment a certain “mouse” achieves what they themselves could not achieve in relation to the egg. Who is she, this mouse? And her symbolic meaning and her actions (wag tail) indicate that this is a woman (daughter-in-law, who is perceived by the son’s parents as a rival, behaving frivolously. Parents can only find consolation in what remains with them " Chicken Ryaba"

I’ve been telling my child a bedtime story about the chicken Ryaba for six months, and every time I’m tormented by guesses as to what its moral is.

Finally, I decided to do a little research on this topic. And here is the result!

Firstly, I learned that there are a lot of variations on the theme of the fairy tale about the chicken Ryaba. Here are examples:

Attempts to interpret its meaning are also very broad, from simple statements such as “what we have, we don’t keep; if we lose it, we cry”, “we haven’t lived richly, so there’s nothing to start with” or “old age is not a joy: they have less strength left for two than a mouse” to whole parables, for example, about love: “5 years ago, when I was a student, a certain aunt-professor told me that the golden egg is Love, which my grandparents did not save. The grandfather beat and drank, walked..., the grandmother beat and walked, did not wash the floors and did not wash the shirts. A mouse is a little nasty thing like gossip or some household trifle. Like, if you beat Love for a long time and diligently, then in order to completely smash it, a little thing is enough. Well, a simple egg is a habit that my grandfather and grandmother received instead of love. Chicken Ryaba, respectively, Fate or Supreme Intelligence. And she is pockmarked because she is pockmarked, i.e. black and white, i.e. combines both the black and white sides of life” or about the ecological end of the world: http://barmalei.livejournal.com/87435.html

Here are a few more interpretations: http://www.mirovozzrenie.ru/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=17&Itemid=215

Perhaps all these interpretations are not without meaning, but the most plausible decoding (as it seems to me) is offered by E. Nikolaeva in the book “111 tales for child psychologists” « (if you don’t have the strength to read the whole thing, pay attention to at least the last 5 paragraphs):

“Once upon a time there lived Grandfather and Baba. And they had Chicken Ryaba. The hen laid an egg. Yes, not simple, but golden. Grandfather beat and beat, but did not break. Baba beat and beat, but she didn’t break it. The mouse ran, waved its tail - the egg fell and broke. Grandfather is crying, Baba is crying, and the Chicken is clucking: “Don’t cry, Grandfather, don’t cry, Baba. I will lay another egg for you - not a golden one, but a simple one.”

Ask your parent to tell you this story. It's hard to find a person who doesn't know her. You can start by asking whether the parent has read this fairy tale to the child. If you read it, let him retell it. If there is a hitch in the story, you can help. And when the parent tells the whole story, it’s worth asking a few questions.

Grandfather and Baba wanted to break an egg?
If you wanted to, then why did you cry?
Why didn’t Grandfather and Baba pawn the shells at the pawnshop if they were gold?
What was in the testicle when it broke?
How often has a parent thought about the situation when telling a fairy tale to a child?
Why does a parent read this particular fairy tale to a child if it is full of contradictions?
What can we expect from reading this fairy tale?

Moral: often, when communicating with a child, we do not think about what we are really doing, and therefore we offer him something to which we ourselves do not know the answer.

Comment: Most parents will report that they have never thought about the content of the fairy tale. Those who say that they have always been confused by its content will add that they have never found an explanation strange behavior Grandfather and Baba. Here it is worth paying attention to the fact that, remaining perplexed, we often do not change our behavior and do not trust the child, for example, after consulting with him about the content of a fairy tale. After all, you could just ask the child about what Grandfather and Baba are doing, why are they crying?

It is quite possible that the psychologist will hear a parent’s counter-question about how one can consult with a one-and-a-half-year-old child to whom the parent read a fairy tale? Then you can simply ask, how often does the parent even ask for the child’s opinion? And this in itself can be a separate topic for conversation.

However, if the parent remains confused about the previous one (that is, the psychologist clearly grasped the context of the unconscious), then it is better to develop the “fairytale” direction further, rather than rise again to the level of consciousness.

We can say that the parent just retold this fairy tale word for word, because he remembered it not when he read it to the child, but when his parents read it to him, still a child. Information received in early age, we store our whole life and perceive it without criticism, because at this age we have not developed critical thinking. Therefore, when reading a fairy tale as an adult, we continue to treat it without a shadow of doubt.

But a fairy tale is only an excuse for discussing what a parent is doing when reading a fairy tale or otherwise interacting with a child. When communicating, the child remembers all the statements of the parents and, just like a fairy tale, treats them uncritically. Therefore, already as an adult, a person sees in the mirror not himself, but the image that he formed under the influence of the words of people significant to him: “You are such and such. You won’t amount to anything” or: “You will grow up, work hard and achieve everything you want.” These words and the attitude towards a child under 5 years old form a scenario that entangles a person with invisible threads and forces adults to act not in accordance with the real situation, but in accordance with those ideas about themselves and their purpose that were formed in childhood.

When we read a fairy tale to a child, he reacts not to it, but to our attitude towards it.

A fairy tale told in childhood allows us to understand many features of adult behavior. In addition, this fairy tale is not an everyday one, it is not easy to interpret. It differs from others in that it is told to all children of our culture, therefore it bears the imprint of this culture.

The version of “The Ryaba Hen,” which the parent will most likely remember, appeared in the 19th century, when the great teacher K. D. Ushinsky for some reason took away the ending from this very ancient fairy tale. And the ending can be found in the three-volume work by A. N. Afanasyev “Russians folk tales" When reading this version, it turns out that after Grandfather and Baba cried, the granddaughters came, found out about the egg, broke the buckets (they went for water), and spilled the water. The mother, having learned about the egg (and she was kneading the dough), broke the kneading bowl, the father, who was in the forge at that moment, destroyed the forge, and the priest, who was passing by, demolished the bell tower. And the peasants, having learned about this event, in different versions of the tale, hanged themselves or drowned.

What kind of event is this, after which no stone was left unturned?

Most likely, such details will confuse the parent, so you can continue that repeated different corners world events, actions and heroes participating in them, K. Jung called archetypes - ancient ideas. They are transmitted through fairy tales to people of the same culture. At a moment of extreme stress, a person begins to behave in a way that is not characteristic of his personality, but exhibits behavior that is common to a given people. If we take into account that this fairy tale is not an everyday tale, but carries the characteristics of our culture, then we can read it differently.

Someone gave Grandfather and Baba something they had never encountered. The egg as an archetype, which is regularly found in myths and fairy tales of all nations, is a symbol of the birth of something. It is golden because it does not look like what the Hen was carrying before. That is why Grandfather and Baba do not run to the pawnshop to pawn a golden shell and then buy a mountain of ordinary eggs. Gold, like the egg itself, is only a symbol here. But the old people are trying to destroy something that they have never encountered before in their lives. But you could wait, put it aside and see who will hatch from it. But they don’t do that, and are in a hurry to destroy this new thing. And here another archetypal hero appears in the story - the Mouse. We write her name with a capital letter, because this is also not a small rodent, but a symbol. It is not without reason that in many Russian fairy tales she is the key subject who resolves the problems that arise. The mouse as an archetype is a substitute for God. And then the one who gave takes away what people do not know how to use. And then another archetype arises in the fairy tale.

But it will be better if the psychologist does not simply say what kind of archetype this is, but helps the parent feel its existence. The psychologist may tell him that he would like to prove the existence of this archetype, and not just report it. After all, it was precisely to introduce it into the unconscious of every child of a given culture that this fairy tale was created, and for this reason it is passed on from generation to generation.

The psychologist asks the parent to completely trust him for two minutes, close his eyes, listen to his voice and compare what he hears with what is happening at that moment in his soul. If the parent agrees to such an experiment, then the psychologist, in a slow, clear voice appropriate for suggestion, says: “Imagine that there is Someone about whom you know that any word he says will surely come true. And now this Someone comes in and tells you: “From this moment on, nothing new will ever, EVER happen in your life. Just an eternal repetition of what you have already experienced. Never anything new. The eternal cycle of already accomplished events."

What do you feel? - you ask the parent already in a normal voice. Obviously, he will say that he either didn’t believe you (the worst case scenario), or that he felt scared, unpleasant, or bad (you succeeded). Then you say that right now a person felt the reality in himself of the most important archetype, which all people of the same culture pass on to each other from generation to generation - this is the archetype of Miracle. We live because we know for sure that if not today, then tomorrow, if not tomorrow, then the day after tomorrow, a miracle will definitely happen to us. Everyone has their own. But for everyone it is extremely attractive.

There is one difference between the Russian archetype of miracle and the similar archetype of other nations (and everyone has it, since it is this that allows us to survive when there is simply no hope, when life drives us into a dead end). For many Russian speakers, this miracle happens for nothing, “for free,” since many of our fairy tales tell how a miracle happens without any effort on our part. And here the psychologist has the opportunity to talk about the fact that a miracle will definitely happen to the child and to any other person, but not for free, but through teamwork. This is a long way to create a miracle, but very effective. If you manage to conduct such a mini-training with a parent, then future cooperation with him is guaranteed.”

Once upon a time there lived a grandfather and a woman, and they had a chicken, Ryaba.
One day a chicken laid an egg, not an ordinary one, but a golden one.
Grandfather beat and beat, but did not break. The woman beat and beat, but did not break.
The mouse was running, its tail touched it, the egg fell and broke.
The grandfather is crying, the woman is crying, and the chicken is clucking:
- Don’t cry, grandfather, don’t cry, woman: I will lay you not a golden egg, but a simple one.

The meaning of the fairy tale

Life has always been compared to an egg, and Wisdom too, which is why the saying has survived to this day: “This information is not worth a damn.”
The Golden Egg is the hidden Ancestral Wisdom, which no matter how much you hit, you can’t take it in a swoop. And if you accidentally touch it, this integral system can be destroyed, broken into small fragments, and then there will be no integrity. The Golden Egg is information, wisdom that concerned the Soul, you need to study it little by little, you can’t take it rudely.
A simple testicle is simple information. Those. since the grandfather and woman had not yet reached this level, were not ready for golden (deep) Wisdom, the chicken told them that she would lay a simple egg, i.e. will give them simple information.

It seems like a small fairy tale, but there is so much deep meaning embedded in it - whoever cannot touch the Golden Egg, start learning with simple, superficial information. And then some immediately: “give me sacred Wisdom, I’ll figure it out now”... and in mental asylum to the "great ones". Because you cannot suddenly approach the knowledge of Wisdom; everything is given gradually, starting with a simple testicle. Because the World is diverse, multi-structured, but at the same time it is brilliant and simple. Therefore, even hundreds of human lives may not be enough to know the small and the great.