Hare

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Beyond this basic legend regarding Peter the Great, hares have enjoyed a long and deep cultural symbolism in Russian history. Hares appeared frequently in Russian animal tales as a “cowardly animal.” As with all other animals in stories, storytellers used stock phrases to refer to hares, such as “the hare who runs away,” “the little gray fellow,” or “the rascally hare” (Sokolov, 436). The hare certainly lived up to these characterizations in folktales; for example, in a tale entitled “Who is More Cowardly Than the Hare?,” a hare on the verge of drowning himself due to his cowardliness chose not to after observing that a frog was afraid of him (Haney, 63). In another tale, “The Fox, the Hare, and the Cock,” a fox living in an ice house drove out a hare living in a bark house when the ice house melted. The hare sat around in despair, until a cock came and drove out the fox with a scythe (Gerber, 28). Hares were not always simply cowards, however; as the phrase “the rascally hare” suggests, hares could also act swiftly and trickily. In the tale “The Fox and the Hare,” the hare is “poor in strength, [but] he’s frisky at running and full of youthful pranks” (Haney, 33). This tricky nature of the hare was not necessarily negative; as noted by Russian folktale scholar Vladimir Propp,