"The Scarlet Flower" is rightfully included in the "golden fund" of Russian fairy tales. It is not the first generation of children that is read to it; films and cartoons are made on it. It is accustomed to perceive it as a national one, and not all fans of the love story of a beauty and a monster know who wrote The Scarlet Flower.
For the first time, Russian readers got acquainted with "The Scarlet Flower" in 1858, when the famous writer Sergei Timofeevich Aksakov published his autobiographical book "The Childhood of Bagrov the Grandson", which tells about the writer's childhood spent in the South Urals.
In it, he talked, in particular, about how, in childhood, during an illness, the housekeeper Pelageya told him fairy tales. A magical story about a merchant who brought his daughter a scarlet flower and about all-conquering love was among these stories. In order not to interrupt the narration, the writer did not include the text of the tale recorded from the words of Pelagia in the text of the book, but placed this story in the appendix. In the first edition, the tale was called "Olenkin's Flower" - in honor of the beloved granddaughter of the writer Olga.
The housekeeper Pelageya is a real character. She served a lot in merchant houses, including Persian merchants. And I heard many famous oriental fairy tales there. She had the gift of a storyteller, a "great craftswoman" to tell fairy tales, for which she was especially loved in the Aksakov family. She often told little Seryozha fairy stories at night, and he especially liked "The Scarlet Flower". When Sergei Aksakov grew up, he told it himself, and many of his contemporaries, including Pushkin and Gogol, admired the imagery and poetry of his style.
The literary adaptation of the "Scarlet Flower" by Aksakov retained the melodiousness and poetry of the folk language, making the fairy tale truly bewitching.
Some believe that "The Scarlet Flower" is a "Russified version" of the fairy tale "Beauty and the Beast" (in another version of the translation - "Beauty and the Beast") Leprince de Beaumont, published at that time in collections of translated moralizing stories for children. However, Sergei Aksakov got acquainted with this story much later, and, according to him, was surprised a lot by the plot resemblance to his beloved fairy tale from childhood.
In fact, the story about a girl who was taken hostage by an invisible monster and fell in love with him for her kindness is very ancient and widespread since antiquity (for example, the story of Cupid and Psyche). Such tales were told in Italy and Switzerland, in England and Germany, in Turkey, China, Indonesia … This story is also popular among the Slavic peoples.
In Russian literature before Aksakov, this story was also literally processed by Ipollit Bogdanovich - in the poem "Darling", which was published in 1778, 80 years before the release of "The Scarlet Flower". However, this story owes its popularity to Sergei Aksakov, who managed to tell his favorite fairy tale of his childhood so that millions of people fell in love with it.
