Donor (fairy tale) by Giambattista Basile. In the Grimm Brothers' variant of "Cinderella", the protagonist is aided not by her fairy godmother but by her dead mother, as is the heroine of the Finnish variant, "The Wonderful Birch". A great variety of other figures may also take this place. In "Vasilissa the Beautiful", the heroine is aided by a wooden doll that her dying mother had given her; in "Rushen Coatie", by a red calf sent to her by her dead mother, a calf that can continue to aid her after its death; in "Katie Woodencloak" by a mysterious dun bull; in "Tattercoats",
Russian fairy tale Pushkin wrote several "skazka" in the 1820s and 30s : Between 1855 and 1863, Alexander Afanasyev completed a collection of nearly 600 folk tales and variants in his three volume work entitled "Narodnye russkie skazki" [National Russian Tales] (For translations see Alexander Afanasyev § Works) Russian fairy tale A Skazka – () (Russian fairy tale or Russian folktale) is a Russian word literally meaning "story", but used to mean fairy tale or a fantasy tale. The term can be used in many different forms to determine the type of tale or story being told. A "volshebnaya skazka" [fairy tale] is