The tale “Sleeping Beauty” by Ch. Perrault in the mirror of libretto by I. A. Vsevolozhsky and M. Petipa

The premiere of the world-famous Russian ballet “The Sleeping Beauty”, composed by P. I. Tchaikovsky, I. A. Vsevolozhsky and M. Petipa, took place on the stage of the Mariinsky Theatre on January 3, 1890, and became a significant event in the cultural life of Petersburg. Since then, the ballet has been performed on stages around the world, undergoing various revisions and updates, but the original author’s libretto has sometimes been neglected and replaced with adaptations and reinterpretations of the story during subsequent productions. In this article, we will focus on the text of the libretto that was published immediately before the premiere of the play. According to its authors, the content of the libretto is “based on Perrault’s fairy tales”. We will analyze how the key literary basis of this fairy tale – the famous French tale by Charles Perrault “Sleeping Beauty” (“La Belle au bois dormant”, 1697) – is transformed in the ballet narrative. The study of various functional, semantic, and stylistic aspects of the libretto’s narrative, as well as a comparative analysis of similarities and differences between the fairy tale and the libretto, allows us to identify several features associated with the transformation of the folklore and mythological story of “Sleeping Beauty” (Aarne-Thompson classification No. 410) from literature into the art of ballet. It also helps us answer the question of whether the text of a libretto is simply a “translation” from literature into synthetic art, or whether it is a qualitatively different work that endows the original tale with new features and meanings.

ATU 410, “Sleeping Beauty”, ATU 410, libretto, scenario, literary fairy tale, I. A. Vsevolozhsky, M. Petipa, Ch. Perrault