Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov (Penguin Classics)

by Unknown

  What does Baba Yaga’s name mean? The first half is easy: baba in traditional Russian culture meant a married peasant woman, one at least old enough to have children. (In Russian now, baba is an insulting word for a woman: it suggests low class, slovenliness, lack of emotional restraint, or sexual availability of an aging or unattractive kind.) When Russians build a snowman, they call it not a man, but a snow baba. Suffixes bring out different shades of the basic meanings of Russian nouns: babka is a midwife (usually an older woman with experience around pregnancy and childbirth); babushka is an affectionate term for ‘grandmother’ (and, in the West, the headscarf old women in Russia traditionally wore); and a babochka is a butterfly, or else the visually similar bow tie. This last word is linked to an ancient belief that, when a person died, the soul left the body in the form of a bird or a butterfly (compare the Greek psyche, which meant both ‘soul’ and ‘butterfly’). If a butterfly fluttered by, it was the soul of a little grandmother, presumably en route to a better place. Thus, baba can mean ‘woman’ or ‘old woman’ – though age is described in Russian folktales in a way that might surprise us. The ‘old man’ and ‘old woman’ in a tale are old enough to have children of marriageable age, but often only just – they might be in their late thirties. Baba Yaga is far older than that.

  The second part of her name, yaga, is harder to define. One school of thought relates the word to verbs for riding – and it does sound rather like the Russian verb yekhat’ (to ride), or the German word Jaeger (huntsman). Another theory is that yaga originally meant ‘horrible’, ‘horrifying’, and should be compared to the words jeza (shiver) or jezivo (chilling, horrifying) in South Slavic languages. If Baba Yaga originally played a role in a secret corpus of myths or initiation rituals, the taboo on such material might have discouraged people from saying her name in other contexts. Maks Fasmer’s monumental Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language has a longish entry for ‘yaga’, pointing out cognate words in other Slavic languages and arguing against several theories of the word’s origin. The amount of space Fasmer devotes to all this suggests that we will never know the word’s true origins. Baba Yaga is well known in Ukrainian and Belarussian tales, and figures very much like her appear in Czech and Polish tales.

  In Russian, Baba Yaga’s name is often not capitalized. Indeed, it is not a name at all, but a description – ‘old lady yaga’ or perhaps ‘dreadful old woman’. There is often more than one Baba Yaga in a tale, and thus we should really say ‘a baba yaga’, ‘the baba yaga’. We do so when a tale would otherwise be confusing. Otherwise, we have continued the western tradition of capitalizing Baba Yaga. There is no graceful way to put the name in the plural in English, and in Russian tales multiple iterations of Baba Yaga never appear at the same time, only in sequence: Baba Yaga sisters or cousins talk about one another, or send travellers along to one another, but they do not live together. In some tales our witch is called only ‘Yaga’. A few tales refer to her as ‘Yagishna’, a patronymic form suggesting that she is Yaga’s daughter rather than Yaga herself. (That in turn suggests that Baba Yaga reproduces parthenogenetically.) The frequent lack of capitalization in Russian publications also hints at Baba Yaga’s status as a type rather than an individual, a paradigmatic mean or frightening old woman. This also suggests that Baba Yaga may be a euphemism for another name or term, too holy or frightening to be spoken, and therefore long forgotten.

  Other names in the tales

  Many Russian personal names are recognizable in English, since they are related to familiar Biblical or western names. Marya is the folk form of Maria, though it is pronounced ‘MAR-ya’. The second part of Marya Morevna’s name is a patronymic, formed from her father’s name. It means ‘Daughter of the Sea’; like Baba Yaga, she evidently comes from a distant past. Vasily and Vasilisa are forms of the name Basil (which does not produce a woman’s name in English). Ivan is the most common name for a Russian fairytale hero, whether he starts as a prince or as a fool. Ivan is the same name as John; the relationship is easier to see if one compares the medieval Russian form, Ioann, to the German form of John, Johannes. Hans (short for Johannes) is the most common name for the hero of German folktales, while Jack (a nickname for John) is the hero of many British and American folktales.

  One other important character whose name needs explanation is Koshchey or Kashchey bessmertny, ‘Koshchey the Deathless’. His first name probably comes from the old Slavic Koshchnoye (Kingdom of the Dead), but it also suggests the word kost’ (‘bone’) and Koshchey is often portrayed as a skeletal old man. Unlike Baba Yaga, Koshchey is always a villain, though he does possess a certain sense of honour: in ‘Marya Morevna’, he spares the life of Prince Ivan three times because Ivan once (unintentionally) set him free, restoring his monstrous strength with three bucket-sized drinks of water. It turns out, of course, that the epithet ‘deathless’ does not mean that he cannot be killed, only that his death lies somewhere outside him: it is the tip of a needle in an egg, in a duck, in a hare, in a trunk, etc., all located across the sea or in a distant forest. If I can tell you this, then the hero can find this out, too. The hero journeys to the tree, unearths or unpacks the alienated death, and then slays Koshchey to release the maiden. With Koshchey as well as Baba Yaga, the references to bones are ambiguous. Bones are the leftovers of a body after death, but they are also a repository of life force, a link between two incarnations. The Frog Princess hides leftover swan bones in her sleeve, then brings the swans to life. In at least one version of ‘Marya Morevna’, Koshchey must be burned after Ivan kills him, and his ashes scattered to all the winds to ensure he will never come back. Baba Yaga’s epithet ‘bony leg’ may mean that one of her legs consists entirely of bone – or just that she is old and skinny in a culture that valued plumpness. Her fence of human bones, topped with skulls, shows another link with Koshchey, and in some tales he has a bogatyr (giant warrior) horse he won from her: they are allies in villainy.

  Besides names, many of the characters are identified by fixed epithets: ‘fair maiden’, ‘fine’ or ‘goodly’ young man. The tales often say no more than this, leaving the listener (or reader) to fill in whatever standard image of beauty or goodliness we prefer. The bogatyr is a traditional Russian warrior-hero, featured in epic songs but sometimes making a kind of guest appearance in folktales as well. In some tales we even meet bogatyr animals.

  The objects around Baba Yaga

  In most tales, Baba Yaga lives in an unusual house: it stands on chicken legs, or sometimes on just one chicken leg. Some scholars suggest that this underlines her connections with birds, though the geese, swans and eagles that are often her servants are much more impressive than a chicken, that most domesticated of fowls. At the same time, chicken legs might suggest that her dwelling, alive and mobile, cannot fly and probably does not move too fast or too far. One of our students recently returned from studying in Sweden, where she visited a swamp with houses built on top of tree stumps standing in the water. With their gnarled roots, she said, the stumps looked surprisingly like chicken feet. Some of the tales specify instead that Baba Yaga’s house stands on spindle heels. Given the importance of the spindle in women’s traditional crafts, and in other parts of the tales (Prince Ivan may have to snap a spindle to free and recover his princess), this, too, seems to come from the deep past. Often Baba Yaga’s house turns around, as if in imitation of the spinning of the earth. The word ‘time’ in Russian, vremya, comes from the same vr-root of turning and returning as the word for spindle, vereteno. A spindle holding up a rotating house where a frightening old woman tests her visitors and dispenses wisdom suggests truly archaic rituals.

  In Russian, Baba Yaga’s home is most often called an izba. The izba is a house made of hewn logs, a kind of construction common all over northern Russia and Scandinavia. (Immigrants brought it to the United States in the form of that most American Presidential birthplace, the log cabin.) The word izba is often translated as ‘hut’, but it does not signify a shoddy p
iece of housing or even necessarily a small one. What does it tell us that Baba Yaga’s house is an izba? It is a traditional peasant house, a house in the country (not a city), made of wood, and most often situated near a forest. When the hut or house is turning around, the hero or heroine must order it, in rhyme, to stop turning. Intriguingly, everyone in the tales knows what to say to make the house stop turning – even the first sisters or servant girls in tales like ‘The Brother’, who fail to retrieve the baby Baba Yaga has kidnapped. In ‘The Frog Princess’, the prince says, ‘Stay as your mother made you. Stay with your back towards the sea and your door towards me.’ Baba Yaga’s house can be in the forest, in an empty field, or on the seashore; it is always on the border of another world.

  When Baba Yaga goes out, she often rides in a mortar, rowing or punting herself along with a pestle, perhaps sweeping away her tracks with a broom. Her power lets her travel by means of these everyday housekeeping implements, much as western Europeans believed that witches rode on broomsticks. Her mortar and pestle may themselves be magic objects like the fairytale flying carpets and invisibility hats, but she never gives or even loans them to other characters. For many centuries the mortar and pestle were crucial parts of a woman’s tool kit, used to prepare herbs for cooking or medicine, or to break grain for porridge or baking. Old photographs of Russian peasant households show large, deep mortars that could have held a substantial measure of grain, though they could hardly have accommodated an adult. Ivan Bilibin’s famous picture of Baba Yaga in flight is in harmony with the old photographs: the mortar is a tall, relatively narrow tube, not bowl-shaped. As the food-related mortar and pestle hint, Baba Yaga’s house is stuffed with edible riches – the golden apples a child plays with until his rescuer finds him, or the stocks of grain, meat and drink listed in ‘Vasilisa the Beautiful’, nourishing raw materials to transform into the good things of Russian peasant life: linen, wheat, poppy seed.

  Baba Yaga’s house may be surrounded with a fence of bones, perhaps topped with skulls (or with one pole still untopped, waiting for the hero’s head), but even an ordinary fence and gate can play important roles in the story. While Baba Yaga is sharpening her teeth in preparation to eat the heroine, the girl pours oil on the hinges of the gate and manages to escape. Baba Yaga scolds the gate for letting the girl out, and the gate answers her back. Baba Yaga is also associated with the bathhouse, which in Russia resembles a sauna. In some tales she asks the heroine to stoke the bathhouse fire (sometimes with bones for fuel), to bathe her children (frogs, reptiles and other vermin), or to bathe Baba Yaga herself. Many of the tales mention Baba Yaga’s stove. The traditional Russian stove is a large construction of brick and plaster (in a fancier house, it would be covered with ornamental tiles), the size of a small room and certainly the dominant object in any room it occupies. Some stoves were built so that they heated, and took up parts of, two separate rooms. The stove would incorporate shelves, ovens and hobs, nooks or hooks for storing cookware. Such a stove would hold the fire’s heat, gently diffusing it into the house. This made it a favorite place for sleeping. The upper shelves, high above the fire and safely distant from vermin or cold drafts, would stay warm through the night. The stove is also associated with the womb, and not only in Russian: the English expression ‘one in the oven’ connects baking with the rising belly of a pregnant woman. Joanna Hubbs writes that the stove is also a repository of dead souls, the ancestors.1 Even more than an ordinary peasant stove, Baba Yaga’s is a conduit from death to rebirth.

  To escape from Baba Yaga, characters in the tales may themselves employ very ordinary objects – sometimes stolen from Yaga’s own house – and these, too, recur from tale to tale. Thrown behind as a character flees, a comb or brush turns into a thick forest, as if the wood from which they were carved were coming back to life. A mirror, already magical in its ability to show the gazer his or her own face, turns into a wide, deep sea. Throwing a kerchief or towel will create an impassable river, often a river of fire. Embroidered handkerchiefs or towels may create or turn into bridges over impassable waters, or they may convey secret messages. Towels in the Russian village bore beautiful ritual embroidery and were used in traditional ceremonies (such as welcoming a guest with bread and salt). To find the house of Baba Yaga, the hero or heroine may receive a ball of thread (once known as a clue in English), like the one that took Theseus in to the Minotaur. Baba Yaga lives (or, every baba yaga lives) in the heart of the labyrinth, and the hero or heroine enters this labyrinth to face his or her worst fears and vanquish them.

  One final traditional element in the tales deserves explanation. Several tales mention searching for lice, or just ‘searching’ in a character’s hair. This must have been a useful grooming practice, since lice are itchy and unpleasant; also, it feels good to have someone riffle through one’s hair and touch one’s scalp – especially if the hair is worn in long shaggy braids, like Baba Yaga’s. Lice were surely common in old Russia, as they were in Western Europe at the time, but the reader should remember that ‘searching for lice’ can also mean playing with someone’s hair in a pleasant, affectionate way.

  Baba Yaga in the Russian pantheon

  How is Baba Yaga related to other figures in Russian lore? The female figures best known today are rusalki, sometimes translated as ‘mermaids’ though they do not live in the sea. They are said to be the spirits of girls who committed suicide out of disappointed love, or the spirits of babies who died unbaptised (victims of infanticide?), and they are described lolling in the branches of trees or beside streams, combing their long hair, which is often said to be green. They tempt men off the path, intending to drown them, or they may torment children. Rusalki are most often represented as young and lovely (though the green hair recalls waterweeds, suggesting their connection with nature). At the same time, their activities are not so different from Baba Yaga’s: they are younger, lovelier dangerous females, tickling children to death instead of eating them. If we see Baba Yaga as the crone face of the triune goddess (maiden, mother, crone), as Joanna Hubbs suggests in Mother Russia, then rusalki embody the maiden face. In many ways the rusalka resembles the South Slavic vila; some western readers may already know of vilas, since they play a role in the Harry Potter novels.

  Thanks to a list of the Kievan pagan pantheon recorded in the historical chronicles of old Rus’ (the East Slavic land that was ruled, before the Mongol invasion, from Kiev or Kyïv), the name of one goddess has come down to us from the East Slavic past: Mokosh. Her name suggests wetness – in Russian the root mok-means ‘wet’ or ‘soak’ – and she may be linked with Moist (or Raw) Mother Earth, Mat’ syra zemlya, mentioned in songs and proverbs about planting or burial. This image of the earth invokes both the damp, chilly soil that is planted in the spring, and the earth as a mother’s body to which the dead return – a cold, clammy body, unlike the body of the human mother. The Slavic pagan underworld was called preispodnya, ‘close-under-place’. That suggests a world or afterworld in the near underground, close to the surface. Though Baba Yaga is most often found in the forest, her role in the mysteries of death and rebirth also links her to the harvest and the space underground where grain ‘dies’ in order to be reborn.

  Mokosh is also connected to the Christian Saint Paraskeva, whom Russian peasants called Paraskeva-Pyatnitsa, or ‘Paraskeva-Friday’. Friday was traditionally the day of the goddess. English Friday is named after Frigg or Freya, the Anglo-Scandinavian goddess of love, just as the French Vendredi is named after Venus. Paraskeva in Russian folk religious belief was a patron of women. She protected them in childbirth, but she also demanded that they respect her by refraining from ‘women’s tasks’, especially spinning, on Fridays. Paraskeva’s day was celebrated on October 28, according to the Julian calendar. Her day is close to Halloween and the Day of the Dead, the old cross-quarter day of November 1 that marked the beginning of winter; this suggests that Paraskeva, like Mokosh and Baba Yaga, is a queen of both harvest and death, a guardian of the myst
eries of winter, of the unprepossessing dry seeds that hold life until the following spring. As Moist Mother Earth ‘eats’ the bodies of the dead, so Baba Yaga eats human beings. Paraskeva’s role of guarding women in childbirth also ties into some of Baba Yaga’s concerns. Images of Paraskeva on Russian icons may show her holding a spindle – the device that sometimes supports Baba Yaga’s hut. Folk narratives about Paraskeva mention that women who spin on Fridays make her dirty, and the ‘dirty’ saint’s tangled hair recalls Baba Yaga’s grey braids.

  Another, more occulted possibility is that Baba Yaga is ‘the devil’s grandmother’, who shows up in a Russian saying approximately equivalent to ‘go to hell’: Idi k chertovoy babushke, ‘Go to the devil’s grandmother’. This suggests an interesting cosmogony.

  Many of the tales involve a single Baba Yaga (especially those where she tests a daughter sent away by her stepmother, or where she or her avian minions kidnap children), but many others include three Baba Yagas, usually sisters or cousins,2 whose houses serve as way stations for a hero or heroine in quest of a lost or distant beloved. Baba Yaga’s trinity is not a Mozartian threeness, where hearing a motif twice lulls listeners into expecting the same result a third time, only to surprise them with something different. Baba Yaga’s threeness is an exact, folkloric trebling, with ritual answers that are repeated the same way each time. Her threeness also suggests a connection with the three Fates.