The Tale of the Priest and of his Workman Balda (Russian: Сказка о попе и о работнике его Балде, Skazka o pope i o rabotnike ego Balde) is a fairy tale in verse by Alexander Pushkin. Pushkin wrote the tale on September 13, 1830 while staying at Boldino. It is based on a Russian folk tale which Pushkin collected in Mikhailovskoe early on. The Tale of the Prist and of his Workman Balda consisits of 189 extremely varied lines that range from three t...
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The Tale of the Priest and of his Workman Balda (Russian: Сказка о попе и о работнике его Балде, Skazka o pope i o rabotnike ego Balde) is a fairy tale in verse by Alexander Pushkin. Pushkin wrote the tale on September 13, 1830 while staying at Boldino. It is based on a Russian folk tale which Pushkin collected in Mikhailovskoe early on. The Tale of the Prist and of his Workman Balda consisits of 189 extremely varied lines that range from three to fourteen syllables but made to rhyme in couplets. During the summer 1831 Pushkin read the tale to Nikolai Gogol who liked it a great deal. The Tale was first published posthumously by Vasily Zhukovsky in 1840 with considerable alterations due to censorship; the Priest character was replaced by the merchant.
The poem tells about a lazy priest who was wandering around the market looking for a cheap worker. There he met Balda (Балда in Russian means a stupid or not very serious person) who agreed to work for a year without pay except that he...
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