Котаракът в чизми или хитрата лисица
Puss in Boots or the Clever She-fox

Summary/Abstract: One of the best-known of all stories about helpful animals is „Puss in Boots”, the story of а poor young man’s rise to wealth and social recognition with the help of fraudulous manipulations. Contrary to the normal structure of fairytales, the real hero is the animal helper, and there is no polarization of good and evil. The present study gives а survey of the two main groups of this widespread international tale­type: the western cat redaction which is clearly determined by the literary adaptations of Straparola, Вasile, Perrault and the Grimms – it was above all Perrault’s version, “Le chat botté”, which decisively influenced the worldwide reception on the tale – and the eastern redaction, less known in folk narrative research, whose hero is the fox and which is exclusively а part of oral systems of communication. With the exception of one single text, the Bulgarian variants of АаTh 545В: “The Miller and the She-fox” all belong to the eastern group. The reader is first presented with different approaches to the tale-type: there are psychological and literary-sociological interpretations, the story has been related to initiation rites, and it has been discussed by followers of the Indian theory and the geographic-historical or Finnish school. According to the latter, AaTh 545В originates in Central Asia from where it has spread west­wards, which means that the helpful animal was first а fox and that the cat is а later development. In the case of oral traditions, it is much more complicated that in the case of literary ones to determine filiations, spheres of influence, the active part of narrators in modelling their narratives and thereby their conceptions of the tales. Traditional elements and innovative traits – which belong to other narrative conventions of which are individual additions – intermingle. These problems are studied in the light of the variability of Bulgarian variants of AaTh 545В, taking, among others, the example of an interpolated episode about а nocturnal mishap of the parvenu at the royal court, an addition not required by the plot structure which is especially well-documented in the Bulgarian material. Among others, the points are made that these texts from the oral tradition reveal а great interest of the tellers in the parvenu’s difficulties to adapt himself to the new social situation and that the stories became popular as funny tales about greed, credulity and match­making politics.

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