A Not so Fairy Tale: Two Readings of the Tale “How Potjeh Sought the Truth”

In relevant literature, Croatian Tales of Long Ago (1916) by Ivana Brlic Mazuranic are usually classified into two thematic groups – the fairy tales of ancient Slavic paganism and the fairy tales of Slavic Christianity. Thus, the tale “How Potjeh Sought the Truth”, which opens the Tales, is described as belonging to pre-Christian, proto-Slavic period. This paper deals with the correlations between Slavic mythological and Christian layers in the mentioned tale. As it often happens with such multi-layered texts, the research was added one more dimension. Beside the interpretation of the relationship between Christian and Slavic mythological elements, a different reading key of the tale emerged as the author's intimate autobiography "packed" into a fairy tale (which will be discussed in the second part of the paper).