A new model of society in post-Soviet Russia introduced novel family
patterns to everyday life as well as to children’s literature, with traditional parent
and children’s functions becoming subject to rethinking. The tendency to reconsider
parental functions can be observed in texts from different genres, but it appears most
overtly in modern fairy tales which, on the one hand, link modernity with the
national folkloric code but, on the other, aim to overcome the code. Unlike many
contemporary Russian authors for children, who leave little narrative space for
parents, Sergey Sedov makes the mother central to his ‘‘Fairy Tales About Mums.’’
He describes various situations in which this figure regains the depth and comprehensiveness
of a Jungian Great Mother Archetype. The author combines
different fairy tales, cultural stereotypes and literary themes to create the image of a
new mother who possesses various roles, some of which place her in opposition to
the gender stereotype of patriarchal Russian folklore. This article uses structural,
typological and motive methods of analysis to trace the transformation of the
mother’s image from the traditional folktale canon to determine its activity-related
and axiological aspects and to analyse various manifestations of the mother in terms
of the tales’ semantic and aesthetic integrit

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• Mother As Donor, Hero or Villain: New Sides of The Mother’s Image in Sergey Sedov’s ‘‘Fairy Tales About Mums’’