ABSTRACT
During the nineteenth-century national awakening in Central and Eastern Europe, orality and folklore became preeminent factors in the development of national literatures and philologies. Slavic fairy tales such as those collected by Alexander Afanas'ev in the nineteenth century or the Jewish ones collected during An-sky's ethnographic expedition in the beginning of the twentieth century were a source of inspiration for Yiddish authors. In Petrograd during World War I, the Yiddishist Nokhum Shtif was working for the Vilna publisher Boris Kletskin. Der Nister's text and Chagall's images exemplify a dynamic exchange, where modernist thinking and the simple perspective of children intersect to effect a creative transformation of Jewish cultural heritage. In 1915 and 1916, when Marc Chagall was working in a Petrograd war office, he provided Der Nister's Mayse mit a hon and Dos tsigele with five and three illustrations respectively, in India ink and opaque white on paper.
