The tale of A. Pushkin of "The priest and his worker Balda"

The Tale of the Priest and his Worker Balda seems as the most simple of all Pushkin's fairy tales. However, this is a very specific simplicity, which can be called ̒the simplicity of complexity᾿. The story contains different levels, which are not apparent immediately. Traditionally, The Tale of Balda has been interpreted as an acute socio-political satire; another approach is connected with the peculiarities of folk tales poetics and their literary transformation, determined by the difficulties of combining the folk fairy-tale function of the character and the nature of the literary tale hero. Both of these approaches raise a number of questions, the main of which is what was the Priest punished for, after all. The third interpretation, which is presented in the second part of the article and considers Pushkin's fairy tale in the Christian context, allows to reveal the deeper connotations of Pushkin's entention, giving the opportunity for a fresh, comment parts of the text, usually overlooked by researchers, focuses only on the “superficial layer” of meaning of the text.