ИСТИНА

The talk is about gender identity of the characters of this fairy-tale. It cannot be preserved in the Russian translation because of specific features of the grammatical systems in question. English has shed most of its gender system, thus it’s easy to assign the character any gender according to the purport of the story. The original fairy-tale contains only three female personages: the Moon, the Professor’s daughter and the nightingale. Everybody else is masculine. This gender picture gets distorted in translation, the Russian noun for the nightingale being masculine, the Sun belonging to neuter, while the Lizard, the Daisy, the Butterfly, Love, Philosophy and Power can only be feminine.