Cinderella: The poetics of the plot in historical poetics. From genesis to modernity

The article sets out to reconstruct the Cinderella story along the lines of the changing scholarly hypotheses about the subject. The study considers theories about the origin and development of the Cinderella plot found in writings by A. Veselovsky, A. Lang, M. R. Cox, and R. Nazirov. The principal difficulty in the study of the Cinderella story is the insurmountable challenge of establishing the time of its emergence in world folklore and its exact place of origin. Relying on the analyses of the Cinderella tale produced by the mentioned scholars, as well as existing studies of the plot and its essential elements by various scholars of folklore and anthropologists, the author traces the evolution of the Cinderella story from its putative origin in oral tradition to interpretations in modern literature. Drawing on the findings of her predecessors, O. Pospelova proceeds to reconstruct the evolution of the Cinderella tale from a solar myth about a goddess of the dawn into a domestic fairytale and an initiation narrative. The story was further developed in novels of various genres, compelling the reader to reflect on the problem of social and gender inequality.