 |
| (wikimedia) |
- The story, The Two Friends, is a Russian folktale with shades of Rip Van Winkle. Two friends, both male, grow up together and are very close. They make a promise to each other to invite the other to their weddings, even if one is dead. Well, not long after, one of them dies. The remaining man decides to marry one day, and is on his way with a group to his wedding. As they pass the graveyard, he stops to invite his old, dead friend to his wedding. The friend jumps out of the grave and invites his old friend in for a drink to toast his upcoming marriage. He agrees and the two enter the grave for a drink. When they have the first drink, 100 years passes. They have a second drink and another 100 years passes. The same thing happens with after a third drink. Finally, the bridegroom says he must leave to go get married. However, when he exits the grave he sees that the graveyard is an overgrown wasteland that hadn't been cared for. He heads back to the village, which is nothing like what he left, being 300 years older. Everyone that he knows has died, and everything is different. The man goes to a priest and tells his story. The priest does a bit of research and finds an old story, from 300 years prior, about a bridegroom who goes missing in a graveyard and is never seen again. The woman he was supposed to marry moves on and marries someone else.
- I would focus my story more on the differences in the world in the 300 years that have passed. A person from 1717 could not begin to comprehend the world of 2017. The differences are so vast and so all consuming that it would be impossible to understand them. I would start out describing the typical village of the 18th century in Russia, do a quick telling of the events in the graveyard, then focus the majority of the story on what this 18th century guys sees about the 21st century world.
Bibliography: Russian Fairy Tales by W.R.S. Ralston. Web source.
No comments:
Post a Comment