Folklore, unlike official historiography, is not subject to “ideological orders.” It exists freely by its own mysterious laws, selectively preserving in the people’s memory events of the most diverse scale and significance. In this book, N. A. Sindalovsky carefully gathered tales and legends born in Saint Petersburg from the day of its founding to the present day.
Taken together, all of this is not only extremely curious and entertaining. What the author relates lets us see more vividly how our predecessors lived and what shaped their psychology; it helps us understand their fantasies and fears and their concerns, and it helps us grasp the mechanism by which myths arise and mass consciousness is formed in a world without television.