Subject: (urth) The Death of Koshchei the Deathless

From: William H. Ansley <wansley at warwick.net>
Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2000 01:35:16 +0000

I found the story "The Death of Koshchei the Deathless" in _Strange
Travelers_ very entertaining. Although I could tell it was based on "fairy
tale" material. I didn't recognize that it was from a specific story until
I read the note at the end. The title did seem tantalizingly familiar until
I got to that point however.

_The Red Fairy Book_ by Andrew Lang is available on line, if anyone is
interested in reading the original story Wolfe based his on. It is
interesting to see what he kept and what he changed. The Lang version of
the story is also interesting in its own right. The story seems to have
been cobbled together from bits and pieces and the pieces don't all fit.

This URL should take you to a page that allows you to choose from variously
compressed versions of a text file containing _The Red Fairy Book_:

http://sailor.gutenberg.org/by-title/xx1352.html

This URL is a direct link to download an uncomressed text version of the
book (its about 663 kB):

ftp://sailor.gutenberg.org/pub/gutenberg/etext96/rdfry10.txt

William Ansley

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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From: Ron Hale-Evans <rwhe at apocalypse.org>
Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 10:03:38 +0000

At 01:35 AM 1/17/00 -0500, you wrote:
>interested in reading the original story Wolfe based his on. 

Haven't read either the Wolfe or the Lang yet, but wasn't Koshchei the
Deathless the grand-high-god-over-everything in James Branch Cabell's
mammoth series _The Biography of Dom Manuel_? I believe he appears in
_Jurgen_, among other novels.

Ron H-E
--
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From: Alex David Groce <alex_groce at gs246.sp.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 13:18:13 +0000

He's definitely in _Jurgen_ (I haven't actually read _Jurgen_ or any other 
Cabell, but I was told this long ago by someone who did their Master's
Thesis on Cabell when they noticed I was reading a Wolfe story with that
title).  From what I gleaned then, the Koscheis in question are from the same
source/root, but radically differ.

"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." John 8:32
--
Alex David Groce (agroce+ at cs.cmu.edu)
Ph.D. Student, Carnegie Mellon University - Computer Science Department
8112 Wean Hall (412)-268-3066
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~agroce