Scheherazade, she is Scheherazada, Shahrazada is the daughter of the vizier, and later the wife of the king Shahriyar, a character in the cycle of fairy tales “1000 and 1 night.” She told her famous fairy tales to the king.
To whom and why did she tell the tales of Scheherazade
Shakhriyar had a brother, Shahseman, who was cheated on by his wife. Heartbroken, he shared this news with the king. After that, Shakhriyar decided to make sure of the loyalty of his own wife, but she turned out to be even more dissolute than his brother's wife. He executed her and all his concubines, deciding that no woman in the world is capable of being faithful. Since then, the king every day ordered an innocent girl to be brought to him, spent the night with her, and executed her the next morning.
This continued until it was the turn of the vizier's daughter to go to the king. Scheherazade was not only very beautiful, but also extremely intelligent. She figured out how to stop Shahriyar's cruelty and not die herself.
On the first night, when Scheherazade was brought before the king, she asked permission to entertain him and tell a cautionary tale. Having received consent, the girl told him fairy tales until dawn, but morning came at the most interesting place. Shakhriyar liked listening to her so much that he decided to postpone the execution and find out how to proceed. And so it happened: Scheherazade told all sorts of stories every night, leaving the most interesting for later.
After 1000 and 1 nights, Scheherazade came to the king with a request to have mercy on her, and brought three sons born of him during this time. Shahriyar replied that he had long decided not to execute her, since she had shown herself to be a chaste and faithful woman, and now he regrets the murder of innocent girls.
Who came up with 1000 and 1 Nights?
The very story of Scheherazade is the framing and binding of the cycle. All fairy tales in the collection can be divided into three types. Heroic stories include stories with a large share of the content of a fantastic plot. It is believed that they are the earliest in time of occurrence, and constitute the original core of "1000 and 1 nights". A later group of fairy tales reflects the life and customs of the merchant population, most often these are various love stories. They are called urban or adventurous tales. The last included in the collection are roguish tales, which are distinguished by irony in relation to the representatives of the authorities and the narration on behalf of the poor.
Fairy tales known to us from European editions, such as "Ali Baba and 40 robbers", "Aladdin's magic lamp", in fact, were not included in any Arabic manuscript.
The history of the origin of "1000 and 1 nights" is still unclear until the end. It is believed that the tales are Arab, however, there are many hypotheses about the origin of the collection. Individual stories from there were known long before the appearance of the cycle. Not without reason it can be argued that initially folk art was edited by professional storytellers, and then it was already written down by booksellers.
For many centuries of compilation and formation, the book has absorbed the cultural heritage of Arabs, Indians, Persians, and even Greek folklore.
The collection had a great influence on the work of many writers, such as Gough, Tennyson, Dickens. Pushkin admired the beauty of "1000 and 1" nights, which is not surprising, since fairy tales have a vivid narrative, a colorful description of the East of that time, a combination of a fantastic and quite real plot.
