Tale is a fundamental genre of oral folk poetry, which is called folklore. This genre is best known among a wide range of readers, ie, humans have already reached the adult age and the more fairy-tale love all children. Fairy tale – it's an epic, mostly prose fiction adventure, magic or domestic nature for the most part set to fiction. Tales called various types of oral prose (it can be preachy and didactic stories about animals (animals, birds, reptiles, etc.), fairy tales, everyday and adventurous stories, satirical jokes), it follows from this distinction, and some difficulties in determining its specific genre features. Tale is very close to the following types of oral prose: the saga, legends, tales, from which it differs in that the storyteller gives (told) her and the audience perceive the story teller primarily as a poetic fiction, as the play of fantasy, illusion, and embellished a reflection of reality has no place in a real life, ie is a figment of the imagination storyteller. Tale reflects the outlook of the people, their thoughts and desires at different stages of its development. Living in perpetual centuries and passed from mouth to mouth, the tale is changing along with changing generating its reality, adapting to and reflecting it (reality) in itself (the tale). In many fairy tales reflect the early public relations, primitive ideas about the elements of nature and their origin, totemism, animism, and other practices of initiation is even less clear interpretations.

For tales of the existing under feudalism, is characterized by such images, like a king, knight, king, prince, queen, princess and attendants court (court Hunters, grooms, hired soldiers, cooks ) In the era of capitalism in the tales of growing interest in the topic of money, technical innovations, trade, capital, and in fairy tales figures as the hero of the merchant (trader). In this tale is portrayed dramatically contrast of wealth and poverty, power and powerlessness, are increasingly heard in these tales an inducement to the class struggle (no money and no sense, see the example given in the example of a fairy tale:). In modern times, some fairy tales, which managed to reach this day, continue their lives in books and the Internet, and other tales just leave the national life, many tales become the property of children, others continue to attract the attention of adult listeners, the fourth riveting the attention of people involved in history and culture. In fairy tales the world's peoples have much in common, because of similar cultural and historical conditions of life of different peoples. However, fairy tales and have a distinct and unique national character and reflect the lifestyle of a people, geography, work in these conditions, particularly domestic environment in which the tales are prevalent. Storytellers bring to the executable of tales their individual traits, so each story is usually known in many variations, and paraphrases of various treatments. Russian folk tales are varied in nature; national specificity is manifested in the form of the hero, in the language of domestic detail, the nature of the landscape, the image of social relations and ways of Russian, mostly impoverished peasant life. In the poetic work of any people can distinguish the most typical group of tales (see the definition of fairy tales:) – this is the tale of the animals, magical, adventurous novellisticheskie and domestic. Each type of tale is of particular morphological structure.