Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Dec 29 2021 New Russian edition

Once upon a time, not that long ago, actually quite recently, in a country, not that far away, there lived a King. Well, not really a king, he was not called a King or an Emperor or even a Tsar, but anyway he was the guy calling the shots, so he might as well have been a King. So, for the sake of simplicity, in this fairy tale, we’ll call him a King.

He did not inherit the country from his father, or from anyone for that matter, far from it, he had to fight for it. And there were lots of others who would have liked to be the king as well, so it was a long and hard fight, but in the end he won and became the King.

There had of course been lots of kings in the country before him, but since most of the previous kings had not been, what you would call ‘good kings’, the people in the country had not been very happy in the past.

In fact, some people were not happy with the new king either and wanted to change things, some of those unhappy people even wanted to depose the King. That was of course not acceptable to the King, and he had some of those people thrown into the dungeons, ‘where they belong’. But he could not catch them all, as some had moved to live in other countries, and he had to find other solutions for them.

As is traditional in fairy tales, the King sent his hunters after these people, in disguise and in true cloak and dagger style, of course. The hunters managed to get rid of some of them, some with poison, not in fairy tale poisoned apples, but in tea or on doorknobs, and some with other unpleasant means. Some even had to be poisoned a few times first, and when that did not work, had to be thrown into the darkest dungeons.

In this country there was a kind of a mirror, not an ordinary mirror, but a magic one. When someone looked into it, it showed them the truth from the past and sometimes from the present as well. As the previous kings, especially one of them, had not been very nice to the people, usually what people saw was not very pleasant and it made them sad, but they knew it was the truth.

Looking into the mirror, people found out about what had really happened in the past, and they remembered their parents and their grandparents and the old stories they had told them. When they joined together what they themselves remembered, and what their parents and grandparents had told them, and what the mirror showed them, a new and true memory was born. Because of this the people called this mirror Memorial.

The King did not like this mirror, because it showed people that the previous kings had not been good kings, and if that was true, they might think that he was not a good king either. He wanted the people to think that he was a Good King; not a bad and dark one, but Good, and as the saying goes, White as Snow.

So, the King decided to get rid of the mirror, but there was a problem, how to get rid of a magic mirror? One cannot put a magic mirror in prison, or poison it, or break it; so the King decided to ban the mirror and told everyone that no-one can look into it anymore.

And to this day, the King rules the country from his throne, and the people cannot see the past by looking into the magic mirror. And it looks like all they can do is work, like the seven dwarfs in the mines looking hopelessly for gold and precious stones, and live unhappily ever after, or at least until they get a new King.

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