Butalske zgodbe Frana Milčinskega so besedilo, ki od nastanka do danes nagovarja široko bralsko občinstvo. Iz literarnega prostora so stopili v druge medije, jezik in folkloro. Temeljit ...literarnoteoretski pretres so doživeli šele v zadnjih desetletjih, ko je Barbara Simoniti v njih prepoznala nonsensno besedilo. Skozi hermenevtično analizo prepoznavam Butalce kot besedilo, ki gradi na številnih referencah, od ljudskega slovstva do Biblije, in odpira temeljna vprašanja, od odnosa med opazovalcem in opazovanim do odnosa med družbo in drugim. Vse te elemente omogoča dejstvo, da gre za besedilo, ki je v svojem bistvu komično in hkrati ambivalentno ̶ vsakokratna analiza vedno pušča nek nedoločljiv ostanek.
This article investigates correlations between Fran Milčinski’s Butalci and humorous Slovenian folk narratives about Lemberg. A small market town, called Lemberg, is famous for being the centre of ...numerous jokes and humorous stories. Slovenian writer Milčinski’s popular stories about the people of the fictional town of Butale are regarded as a literary work, and have become part of the nation’s narrative repertoire. Nevertheless, as their comparison with the Slovenian and foreign narrative tradition demonstrates, almost all the stories in the book are based on popular, internationally known humorous folk tales about “numskulls”.