THE TALE OF THE PRIEST AND OF HIS WORKMAN BALDA BY A. PUSHKIN

The Tale of the Priest and his Worker Balda seems the most simple of all the Pushkin’s fairy tales. However, this is a very specific simplicity, which can be called ‘the simplicity of complexity’. The story contains different levels, which are not apparent immediately. Traditionally, The Tale of Balda has been interpreted as an acute socio-political satire; another approach refers to the peculiarities of folk tales poetics and its literary transformation, determined by the difficulties of combining the folk fairy-tale function of the character with the nature of a literary tale hero. Both of these approaches raise a number of questioins, the main of which is why the Priest was punished, after all. The third interpretation, which is presented in the second part of the article and considers Pushkin’s fairy tale in the Christian context, allows us to reveal the deeper connotations of Pushkin's intention, giving the opportunity to comment differently some parts of the text, usually overlooked by researchers that are focused only on a "superficial layer" of the meaning of the text.