The Mythopoeic Image of the “King of Birds” in Alexander Pushkin’s “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish”

This article offers a comprehensive study of the sources and semantics of the enigmatic bird “Strophilus” featured in a draft of Alexander Pushkin’s “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish.” In a scene omitted from the final version, the old woman expresses a desire to become the Pope. The study engages in a polemic with the hypothesis put forward by the renowned Pushkin scholar and Germanist Mikhail Muryanov. Relying on Medieval Latin lexicography, Muryanov identified the bird “Strophilus” with the “trochilus” (the wren), a bird considered a parodic “king of birds” in Western European folklore. The author of this article proposes an alternative interpretation. To substantiate it, a broad range of sources is examined — from Russian folk vocabulary and spiritual verses (“The Verse about the Book of the Dove,” “The Verse about St. George the Brave”) to the works of Orthodox scholars, including Maximus the Greek. The article argues that “Strophilus” represents one of the numerous graphic and phonetic variations of the name for the ostrich, which derives from the Greco-Latin “struthio” (cf. strufokamil, stratim, strafil, etc.). Within the context of literary and folklore traditions, the ostrich (“Strafil”) was conceived as the mighty “mother of birds” or the true “king of birds.” This symbolic status makes its appearance in the description of the absurd papal tiara crowning the ambitious old woman as a female pope symbolically justified. The scene can thus also be interpreted as a satire on Catholicism. The research not only clarifies the specific source of Pushkin’s image but also demonstrates the impressive depth with which the poet integrated heterogeneous folkloric and literary motifs into a unified artistic system.