THE UGLY DUCKLING

(This is the beginning of my Hans Christian Andersen triptych, where the Danish fairytale genius serves as an introduction to an essentially political discussion. Written years ago, during the sway of the George W. Bush Administration, even the political part of it cannot be called dated, to say nothing of the timelessness of the man who furnishes us with the metaphor.)

In this Sonnets section, I have written about the genius of Aesop, also remembering the other two fabulists of genius, La Fontaine and Krylov, and also about the genius of my friend Grigori Permyakov, who applied the structuralist approach to the broad field of folkloristics. How, then, can I fail to pay tribute to the superlative creative master of generative folklore, whose genius is second to none, the great Hans Christian Andersen?! His sublime creations have become indistinguishable from the best of world folklore, which is, of course, the mother’s milk of all human civilizations. In this sense he can also be compared to Homer and to the Bible in their nourishing impact on the human mind and on the human soul.

The title of this entry carries in it a complex allegory. Among my Apte Dictums there is one that talks about Andersen. It goes like this: “There are at least two creative geniuses, whose genius is best described by the titles of their works. Hans Christian Andersen is the Ugly Duckling, and Mozart is the Magic Flute.” What is the meaning of the Ugly Duckling allegory then? It is commonly known from his extant photographs that Andersen was an outwardly unattractive man, although his indwelling genius must surely have furnished his features with a divine glow. But, in a sense, he was indeed an ugly duckling, and here comes the allegory. A rather unattractive man in the physical adolescence of his immortality, he developed into a thing of stunning beauty in his historical maturity, for all time…