Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov (Penguin Classics) (29 page)

As for the forest spirit, you have to be feeling brave even to mention him. He made wild hooting noises, he led people into impassable thickets, he made them lose their way. He did not have a single good deed to his name. He had an evil temper. All he ever wanted was to scare people, to lead them astray, to bring them to a bad end and then plait a tangle of grasses and weeds over the scene of the crime.

Only the spirit of the pools and rivers was in any way beautiful. But if she allowed herself to be seen, it was so that her tender beauty would lure people to their doom. She made people feel pity for her – that was how she touched them so deeply. You would see her sitting there on a branch – a little woman, though she wasn’t really a woman at all, since her lower half was the tail of a fish. And so there she would be, sitting just above the water, hiding this tail of hers in the weeds. A little woman, shy, tender and delicate – and always weeping bitterly. Had she merely sat there and beckoned, most people wouldn’t have come any closer. But how could they help coming closer when they saw her weeping? They felt pity for her. Her lure was pity. A very dangerous goddess indeed.

But Baba Yaga is the most terrifying of them all, and the most interesting. And the most Russian. Other nations did not have goddesses like Baba Yaga.

Baba Yaga lived on the edge of the forest, in a windowless, doorless hut that stood on chicken’s legs. Though, in fact, the hut always did have a door – facing the forest. So the brave young hero, having somehow learned the words of the spell, had only to say, ‘Little hut, little hut, turn your face towards me and your back on the forest!’ And the hut would turn round.

Baba Yaga lived alone. Alone except for a tomcat. Total solitude was too much even for Yaga. The cat gave off a sense of warmth and cosiness. It purred and it had soft fur. That was why Yaga liked to have a cat around.
¹
As for people, she hated them and never sought them out. People came to her of their own accord to discover various wise secrets, and they always
managed to cheat her. She knew only too well that every human approach brought with it deception and hurt.

‘I can smell the smell of a Russian’ meant that she could expect trouble.

Some ‘brave young hero’ would tell her a pack of lies, make some false promises, discover from her all that he needed to know, cheat her and somehow manage to slip away. She could expect neither gratitude nor honest payment.

And every time she heard the words of the spell, every time the hut turned round on its chicken’s legs, Yaga knew there was going to be trouble. And every time, she still stupidly believed in the honesty of the human soul: ‘It’s just not possible. They can’t all be like that.’

One day a poor little orphan girl turns up. Her stepmother has thrown her out; her stepmother has sent her off to a certain death. Baba Yaga knows very well that no human whelp, however little, however poor and pitiful, is without its share of guile. And as well as guile, this little pup of a girl will have brought with her a little comb, a little towel and a piece of fatback. The girl will feed the fatback to the cat – and the cat will betray his owner. That warm, soft, purring puss, that flatterer and caresser – he too will betray her. And the squeaking gates will betray her – the girl has only to smear them with oil. Wherever she looked, Yaga saw treachery and betrayal. It was a sad and tedious business.

There she sat, cross as cross can be, sharpening the fang that stuck out of her mouth.

‘I should eat up every one of these boys and girls. But they’re cunning, they don’t give me a chance. They show up at the door, they pay homage to my great wisdom, they cheat and they lie – and then they take to their heels, every time.’

The treacherous cat and the dishonourable gates release the cunning little runt of a girl. Yaga rushes off in pursuit. The girl throws down her comb – and a dense forest appears. Yaga gnaws her way through the trees. The girl throws down her towel – and a broad, flowing river appears. Yaga begins to drink up the river – but the girl is soon far away, out of reach. And the vile little creature has run off with all Yaga’s secrets.

So there she was again – back in her hut with its chicken’s legs. Staring into the forest. B-o-r-e-d. Waiting for winter.

Spring always brings with it anxiety. Nature’s busy having a good time. People and animals make love. They give birth to cunning little children. All this is bad news. Then comes summer. In the summer heat the forest seethes with life. And the forest does what it has to do; the wind scatters its seeds. The forest feels pleased with itself. Stupid old fool of a forest. It loves life, the immortality of the earth.

Then it’s autumn. The first dusting of snow. Yaga cheers up.

And then – at last – winter.

The winds begin to blow. The eight grandsons of the God Stribog.
²
Fierce and vicious – creatures after her own heart. Very soon blizzards would be covering up paths; whirlwinds would be whirling their crystal dust, snowstorms singing their songs. At last!

Baba gets into her mortar and pushes off with her pestle. The mortar knocks against hillocks; it bumps, leaps and jumps; it soars up and flies through the whirl of snow. She has strands of ice in her hair; you can see her bony, protruding knee. She is terrible and powerful; she is free as free can be. She flies over the earth like the song of the storm.

Who has ever seen her? As knights dying on a battlefield glimpse the Valkyries, so those who are freezing to death see Yaga through their closed eyes.

Yaga leaps out of her mortar. She sings and dances. She seizes a soft young birch. She twists, twirls, bends and snaps it. There’s a loud moan, and powdered snow flies up into the air like silver smoke. Then Baba Yaga throws herself at a scarecrow. He’s stuffed with straw and he’s been wrapped round some rosebushes for the winter. She throws her arms around him and dances with him. Wild and drunken, she shakes him, then hurls him against the ground.

‘Let me go,’ begs the scarecrow. ‘Don’t torture me. I don’t want you! I’ve got a rose for a heart.’

Baba Yaga howls and weeps. On she whirls, crazed and vicious. Roaming the fields and valleys again, looking for someone new to torment.

A traveller! He’s just got out of his sleigh, he’s looking for the road. Aha! She spins him round, knocks him into a snowdrift, flings snow into his eyes.

Where was he going? To some Masha or other. Some sweet, jolly, warm little Mashenka. What does he want with her now? He’s all white now, whiter than white. His eyelashes and eyebrows are white. White, icy curls are poking out from under his cap. Wonderful, free and wonderful is the song of the blizzard. It enchants him. Mashenka? What does she matter to him now? No more than a colourful rag on a fence. Can he even remember her? Eyes of green crystal are looking into his soul. He feels both terrified and full of joy, and his soul sings and laughs. For never, never has it known such ecstasy.

Baba Yaga! Terrible old hag! Accursed man-eater! Oh, how wonderful you are with your song and your crystal eyes! You are a GODDESS. Take me into your death – it is better than life.

The blizzard falls silent. It’s warm and dark in the little hut on chicken’s legs. The broom stands in the corner, exchanging winks with the pestle. The faithless cat is purring sleepily, stretching his back, pretending …

Baba Yaga is lying on the stove. Water drips onto the floor from her icy hair. Her bony leg is sticking out from some rags.

Sad and tedious. Everything is so sad and tedious.

(1879–1950)

The year 1936 saw the publication not only of Teffi’s
The Witch
but also (in Yekaterinburg, from 1924 to 1991 known as Sverdlovsk, in the Urals) of the first of Pavel Bazhov’s cycle of tales about the Mistress of the Copper Mountain, a beautiful and alluring – yet often surprisingly honourable – figure who is seen as presiding over the region’s metal ores and semi-precious stones. Though little known in the English-speaking world, these tales have always been hugely popular in Russia; between 1942 and 2004 at least two new editions were published each year, most of them intended for children.

Bazhov’s work is not easily categorized. ‘The Mistress of the Copper Mountain’ was originally intended for an anthology of Urals folk literature; it was apparently commissioned from Bazhov as an example of ‘workers’ folklore’. But publication of the anthology was delayed and the story was first published, in a prestigious Moscow literary journal, as a tale
written
by Bazhov and only later, when the Urals anthology finally appeared, as a tale
recorded
by Bazhov. It eventually became clear that these tales are original literary creations, though they do indeed incorporate elements drawn from oral folklore.

In 1937 or 1938 (the dates are unclear), at the height of the Purges, Bazhov only narrowly avoided arrest. He and his wife Valentina then withdrew from the world, staying out of sight in their own home. For several months, perhaps even a year, neither of them appeared on the street; their only link with the outside world was through Valentina’s sister. During this period of self-confinement, Bazhov wrote his two greatest tales, ‘The Stone Flower’ and ‘The Mountain Master’. Like the artist Boris
Sveshnikov, who produced his finest drawings while in a labour camp in the mid 1940s, and like Mikhail Bulgakov, who completed his third draft (the last complete draft) of
The Master and Margarita
in what could be called ‘inner exile’ in 1937, Bazhov seems to have achieved an extraordinary degree of creative freedom while in the eye of the storm, at the height of the Great Terror.
¹

There are many parallels between Bazhov himself and the tales’ young hero, Danilushko. Both disappear, for some time, from the everyday social world – Bazhov into his own house and garden, Danilushko into the realm of the Mistress of the Copper Mountain. Just as Bazhov, during his period of self-confinement, reaches a level of creativity that he was never able to attain before or afterwards, so Danilushko spends time in a magical glade – the heart of the Mistress’s realm – that the Mistress does not allow him ever to remember. And like a returning prisoner, Danilushko is ordered not to speak of where he has been. The parallel between Danilushko in his underground realm and a Gulag inmate working in a mine is remarkably close. Nevertheless, this parallel went unnoticed, or at least unremarked upon, and we cannot even be sure that Bazhov was aware of it himself; it seems to have been ‘hidden in plain view’ – as one can say both in English and in Russian.
²
The Malachite Casket
was published as a book in 1939, and a second, expanded edition was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1943.

Bazhov’s own life story was as dramatic as any of his tales; after confinement within the magic kingdom of his own home, he awoke to sudden fame. Mark Lipovetsky has suggested that his tales owe much of their popularity to their resonance with the fantasies and terrors of the time.
³
The Soviet Union was, after all, a world where vast numbers of people lived through experiences that the citizens of most countries encounter only in nightmares or fairy tales. There is nothing unusual – from a historical point of view – about mass murder, but only in Stalin’s Russia were hundreds of thousands of people snatched up without warning, swept away to a distant realm of snow and ice and then returned to their homes after the passing of ten,
twenty, even thirty years. Early Soviet propaganda claimed that, thanks to the Party, fairy tales had become reality; there may be more truth in this than is immediately apparent. If folktales have remained important in Russian culture, this may not be only because Russia remained a predominantly peasant country for so long. It may also be because the dramatic extremes of folktale, more than most supposedly realist literature, encapsulated people’s real, lived experience.

As for the Mistress of the Copper Mountain herself, similar though she may be to the seductive mermaids or
rusalki
of Russian folklore (see Appendix, pp.
424
–
5
), she is still more similar to a poet’s Muse. Born in 1879, Bazhov was a young man during the heyday of Symbolism – the period commonly known as the Silver Age of Russian Literature. His tales are a late bloom from this period; like many of Teffi’s stories, they draw much of their power from the tension between Symbolist aspiration and the reality of the era.

Bazhov’s tales speak for themselves. His own life story, however, deserves to be told in more detail. Anna Gunin, the translator of the four tales included in this collection, has provided the following account.

Pavel Bazhov was born in 1879 into a line of Urals ironworkers. His father and grandfather were serfs, spending their working lives in the region’s iron factories. Encouraged by a teacher at a local elementary school, the young Bazhov began memorizing entire volumes of Pushkin. A friend of the family, Nikolay Smorodintsev, persuaded Bazhov’s parents to continue their son’s education. A gymnasium school would have been beyond their means, but with Smorodintsev’s help, Bazhov gained a place at the Yekaterinburg pre-seminary school, normally reserved for the sons of clergy. At fourteen, Bazhov enrolled at the Perm seminary, which he attended for six years. The seminary housed a clandestine library, with books on populist and Marxist politics, economics and science, and for three years Bazhov was in charge of this. At the seminary Bazhov learned Greek, Latin and Old Church Slavonic; he was introduced to poets and thinkers of antiquity, and he expanded his knowledge
of Russian literature, discovering the short stories of Chekhov, in particular, who became his favourite author. He excelled in his studies, graduating third in his year, and he yearned to go to university. The seminary, however, would not support further secular study, and Bazhov decided to work as a teacher.

In 1905 Bazhov was arrested for subversive political activities and spent two weeks in prison. He later described himself as having been an ‘anarcho-populist’ revolutionary. Two years later he began teaching in a girls’ school, and here, among his pupils, he met his future wife, Valentina. They married in 1911. Over a fifteen-year period, Bazhov spent his summers hiking and cycling through the Urals, an area that had long enjoyed a relatively independent existence and still had its own distinct culture. There he gathered folklore and observed the lives of local people, studying the various metal and stone workers at their trade and learning from them the details of their crafts.