"How I carried the mail during the war..." (Are space and time in a fairy tale always unreal?)

Folklore studies generally consider time and space in everyday tales, unlike fairy tales, as non-fantastic but close to reality. At the same time, they are unreal, just as the main character. A comparative analysis of two texts was undertaken: handwritten notes of Stepan Nikiforovich Zhirnovsky (1951) and a tape recording of Pavel Platonovich Plotnikov (2000), both having plots of the same type and registered in the Irtysh region. The story of 1951 is of a stand- ard type, with a typical everyday tale main character: an agile person, a rogue, taking advantage of any situation. His action takes place in a unreal time and space, despite the narrative being in the first person as a “true story.” When telling the story of 2000, the storyteller calls it a “tale”, but the listener is immersed in real space and time (real Sibe- rian villages during the Great Patriotic War). The credibility is confirmed by introducing the names of the people who lived at that time. The hero of the first-person narrative is not a pattern but a real man involved in complicated, absurd, and cruel life situations (although these are typical tale plot episodes). The listener realizes the hero’s terrible deeds as committed not out of malice but by accident, feels sympathy, and believes in his experiences as if it was a story of a real person from the not-so-distant wartime years. All the credit goes to the narrator, who masterfully adapts the traditional tale story to real-life circumstances.