What do I think of Nicholas Kotar’s book published by Waystone Press? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.
So we’ve all had it happen to us before. You wake up one day and realize that you’ve found out you’re in a Russian fairy tale. Yep. Happens to everyone at one time another. How do you make it? How do you survive?
Nicholas Kotar is an accomplished novelist who is going to explain this to us. It is quite surprising because many of us have never read a Russian fairy tale before. I know I certainly haven’t. I have read Russian literature, but not the fairy tales.
Kotar goes through many of the characters that you will find in such a fairy tale. The interesting thing to me at this point is that there are recurring characters that show up in these stories. In our fairy tales, there may be recurring themes, but it looks like in Russian fairy tales, the same characters are the villains and the heroes and the aids.
Nothing is as it seems in a Russian fairy tale. The grandmother could be the villain. The idiot could be the one who’s the hero. Many of us might be surprised that the female warrior might be the one who is really the more powerful, and this before any idea of women’s equality.
The themes are also the same in many tales. The hero does meet a character with whom he will have to undergo some trial to demonstrate he’s worthy. Only then can he go on to face the villain and save the princess or do whatever is needed. It’s not always a romantic thing either. One such story involved a boy who was just twelve going and rescuing his mother.
Also, many of these tales do see an influence of Christianity in them. This is interesting since we don’t know exactly when these tales appeared. It could be Russian had no pagan past before their conversion to Christianity that was recorded so they decided they needed to correct that and made one.
Finally, why do these tales matter? That’s the last section of the book and likely the most important one. It’s actually important that fantasy be a part of our reality. Chesterton and Lewis both spoke very approvingly of fairy tales. Maybe we should take them seriously too.
In closing, this is a genre many of us aren’t familiar with, and now I’m left considering maybe I should get familiar with it. Maybe you should too.
In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)