Abstract“Is it a coincidence, or is it a symptom of the age that, in a relatively short time, so many fairy tales and folktales have appeared?” a Dutch journalist asked in August 1942 (G.H. 1). Indeed, although fairy tales had been popular in Dutch children’s literature for many decades, the Second World War proved to be a particularly fertile period for this genre. Children’s literature, and literature in general, did not suffer as much from the war as one might expect. Although the production of books was gradually and increasingly hampered by paper shortages and limitations set by the Nazi regime, in the first years of the war the literary and cultural market in the Netherlands flourished. The fairy tale took a special position in the new literary climate produced by the Second World War. This article describes how the war and the German occupation influenced the production, translation and reception of fairy tales in Dutch. Drawing on the title of Jack Zipes’ Why Fairy Tales Stick (2006), I explore why the fairy tale “stuck” and even boomed in Dutch literature between 1940 and 1945, and how the tales were transmitted and transformed to fit the new political, pedagogical and literary context. Two figures are of particular interest for the reception of fairy tales in this period: the folklorist Jan de Vries and the children’s author A.D. Hildebrand who translated an entire fairy-tale series during the war. Within the broader discussion, these two figures will receive particular attention because of the elaborate and complex ways in which they dealt with fairy tales.
Looking for national and genre identity in the modern Russian and Hungarian author fairy tale (on the example of the texts by A. Kabakov, A. Stepanov and A. Mosonyi)
