Zajednički motivi u 1001 noći u Vukovoj zbirci narodnih pripovedaka i pesama
The Common Motives in Arabian Nights and in the Collection of Folk Tales and Poems collected by Vuk St. Karadžić

Summary/Abstract: A large number of motives of folk tales and poems, and especially of fairy-tales, is common to many peoples distant from each other both in time and space. In most of the cases they have a general human character, but they can also deal with fantastic images and ideas which may have a common source, or they may also appeare in an identical form, without any influence from any other side. This is proved by a large number of common themes in Arabian Nights and in the Collection of folk tales and poems of Vuk St. Karadžić. At the beginning of this study, in its introduction, a short survey is given of the history of studies of Arabian Nights in Europe, pointing, at the same time, to the relatively small interest for those tales in the Arab world. With regard to Yugoslavia, although a good number of translations of certain tales from Arabian Nights exist, and in spite of even a complete translation of the whole book, to be true not from Arabic original, but from the Russian translation of Sale, so far nobody occupied himself with the problems related to Arabian Nights. In that respect the present study is an innovation. After a short introduction, the full list of the titles of all the tales from Arabian Nights is given from the Bulaq edition which was the only source for this work. The chapter which deals with some peculiarities of Arabian Nights explains in a few words its origin and its development through centuries (from VIII to XVI century) up to the moment when it was written in the present form. Different phases through which the collection has passed have been pointed out, as well as the three main layers of sources from which it had its origin (Persian, Indian and Arabic). The Arabian Nights stories are specific in that they form one whole connected by the story of Shahrazade, although the collection is made up of different material (novels, animal stories, fables, fairy-tales, legends, short stories, long short-stories and anecdotes) in which even some verses can be found. However, regardless of the popular origins of these stories like of all other falk-tales, their author, namely, being unknown, they differ from the genuine folk-tales by the adoption of certain charasteristics of writtien literature, since along with their oral transmiasion they were also written down whereby they experienced a certain change by additions and revisions made by individual writers or scribes in agreement with their own taste and the spirit of their age and partly under the influence of written literature.

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