Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov (Penguin Classics) (54 page)

The landlord wanted to take the former Ivan to court. But where would he find him now that Ivan had walked free? And anyway, everyone always welcomes a soldier. Who was going to give him away into punishment?

The landlord made a complaint to Tsar Agey. The tsar summoned the landlord and asked, ‘What wrong has the old soldier done you?’

‘What do you mean, your Highness?’ said the landlord. ‘He turned me into a bear. I was a fool and believed him, and your soldier gave away all my goods and wares. He gave all my food and drink away to guests, and he ate all he could himself.’

Tsar Agey laughed at the landlord. ‘Be off with you!’ he said. ‘Get yourself some more goods! There’s no law against wit, and no profit in being stupid.’

After this, the tsar wanted to hear a tale himself: let the old soldier present a tale to him! Let him present what never had been and never would be as if it were really happening. ‘He can’t be smarter than I am,’ he said to himself. ‘I’m the tsar. The old soldier won’t pull the wool over my eyes. I’ll just have a good laugh at him.’

Tsar Agey ordered former soldier Ivan to be found, wherever he might be, wherever he was up to no good.

Ivan heard the tsar’s call, and he appeared at once. ‘Here I am, your Highness. What do you want?’

The tsar had the samovar put on the table and ordered Ivan to drink some tea. Ivan poured some tea into a silver mug, then poured a little out into the saucer. He almost sat down again on the carved chair, but he sat on a stool instead.

‘You’re a smart fellow, Ivan,’ said the tsar. ‘I hear you turned a landlord into a bear. Can you present a story like that to me? Can you pull the wool over my eyes too?’

‘I could, your Highness. I’m accustomed to that kind of thing. But I’d be afraid.’

‘Don’t be afraid, soldier. I love a good yarn.’

‘I know you do,’ said Ivan. ‘But this time it’ll be me spinning the yarn, not you. But what time is it, your Highness?’

‘The time – what’s the time got to do with it? By now it must be after midday.’

‘It’ll start any minute!’ said the former soldier. And then he called out all of a sudden, ‘Water! Water, your Majesty! High water’s sweeping down on your palace! Quick! We must swim for it! I’ll tell you a story later, somewhere dry.’

The tsar couldn’t see any flood, and there was no water anywhere. But he could see that the former soldier was drowning. He was choking, his mouth snatching at the air above him.

‘What’s up, soldier?’ shouted the tsar. ‘Come to your senses!’

Suddenly there’s nothing for the tsar to breathe either. His chest’s full of water. Now his stomach’s full of water too. And now it’s swirling into his guts.

‘Save me, soldier!’

Soldier Ivan grabs hold of the tsar.

‘Hey, Agey, swim this way!’

Tsar Agey swims for all he’s worth. Ahead of him is a fish. The fish turns round towards him.

‘Don’t be afraid, Agey,’ says the fish. ‘It’s me, Agey – your soldier for many a day!’

The tsar looks at himself: now he’s become a fish too. ‘We won’t drown now!’ he says joyfully.

‘We certainly won’t!’ answers Ivan-fish. ‘We’ll live!’

They swim on further. Out of the palace they swim, into free water. All of a sudden Ivan-fish is no longer there. Ivan-fish has vanished. There’s only the soldier’s voice, calling from somewhere off to the right: ‘Hey, Agey! Turn tail! Catch your fins in that net and you’ll be gutted and scaled!’

The tsar hears, but there’s no time to think. He swims straight into a fisherman’s net. Ivan-fish is there too.

‘What are we going to do now, soldier?’ asks the tsar.

‘We’re going to die, your Highness.’

But the tsar wishes to live. He struggles and struggles. He wants to leap free, but it’s a strong net.

The fishermen drag the net in. Agey sees one of them grab
Ivan-fish. The fisherman scrapes Ivan’s scales off with a knife and throws him into the pot. ‘No!’ thinks the tsar. ‘No one’s going to scrape the scales off Tsar Agey!’

The fisherman grabs the tsar-fish and beheads it. He tosses that head away, then throws the carcass into the pot. Just then the tsar hears the voice of the former soldier: ‘But your Highness, old fellow – where’s your head?’

The tsar wants to retort, ‘Well, where’s your skin? They’ve scraped all your scales off! Why didn’t you save me, you devil?’ – but he can’t. The tsar can’t speak at all – he remembers he’s lost his head.

The tsar clasped his head in his hands. Then he came back to his senses. He looked around: he was in his palace the same as always; he was sitting in an armchair and Ivan the retired soldier was sitting opposite him on a stool, drinking tea from a saucer.

‘Ivan, was it you who was a fish just now?’

‘Yes, your Highness, who else could it have been?’

‘And who was thinking when I lost my head?’

‘Me again. There wasn’t anyone else.’

‘Leave my tsardom at once!’ the tsar yelled at Ivan. ‘Let there be neither sight nor sound of you ever again. May you be forgotten by all my people and never remembered!’

The former soldier left the tsar’s presence – and all he’d had to drink was half a saucer of tea. As for the tsar, he straight away made a proclamation throughout all his tsardom: let no one dare take into their home Ivan the retired soldier!

Off Ivan wandered. But wherever he went, people closed their doors to him. All they would say was, ‘The tsar has forbidden us to take you in.’

At first, Ivan had no luck at all. He went as far as his own kinfolk – and they didn’t want to know him either. They just said, ‘The tsar has forbidden us to take you in.’ Ivan walked on further. What would he find there?

He came to a hut and asked to stay the night: ‘Let me in, good man!’

‘I would, but it’s forbidden,’ the man answered. ‘Still, I might let you stay if you tell me a tale. You really can tell tales, can you?’

Ivan thought for a moment.

‘Yes, I suppose I can.’

The peasant let him in for the night.

Ivan began to tell a tale. At first his host listened with only half an ear, thinking, ‘He’ll just tell a pack of lies and then ask for a bowl of kasha.’ Halfway through the tale he smiled. Then he began to listen more deeply. Towards the end of the tale he quite forgot who he was. He was no longer a peasant, but a bandit. Or he was Tsar of the Ocean. Or not just one of the poor but a very wise wanderer – or perhaps a fool. But really nothing was happening at all. There was only an old soldier – sitting close by, twitching his lips and muttering away. Coming back to his senses, Ivan’s host asked for another tale. The soldier began again. Soon it was growing light outside and they still hadn’t lain down to sleep. Soldier Ivan was telling his hundredth tale and his host was sitting opposite him, crying tears of joy.

‘That’ll do,’ said Ivan. ‘All I’ve done is make up a tale. Why waste tears?’

‘Because of the tale you’ve told,’ the host replied with a sigh. ‘It’s a joy to the heart and food for thought.’

‘But Tsar Agey just got angry with me,’ said Ivan. ‘He said I must leave his tsardom and go where my eyes look.’

‘That’s the way of the world,’ said the host. ‘The people’s meat is the tsar’s poison.’

Ivan got up and began to say goodbye to his host.

‘Take anything you like from in here,’ said the host. ‘Nothing of mine matters to me any longer – and there must be something you’ll need for the road.’

‘I’ve got everything I want already. There isn’t anything I need. But thank you!’

‘Whatever you own, it’s not to be seen!’

The old soldier grinned. ‘So there’s nothing I can call my own, yet you’ll give me anything of yours that I like? Don’t you think I must have something to give in return?’

‘You win!’ answered the host. ‘Well, goodbye! Come again – you’ll always be welcome!’

After that, Ivan wandered from village to village, from the
home of one stranger to the home of another stranger. Wherever he went, he had only to promise to tell a story and people would take him in for the night: a story, it appears, is stronger than a tsar. There was just one thing: if he began telling stories before they had eaten, the people listening to him never felt hungry and supper time never came. So the former soldier always asked for a bowl of cabbage soup first.

It was better like that. After all, you can’t live on stories alone, without any food.

Though only a few of the tales say it in so many words, most Russians would agree that Baba Yaga is a witch. The Russian word for witch is
ved’ma
. The word root
ved
- means ‘to know,’ and related words in Modern Russian mean ‘news’ (as in the title of
Pravda
’s one-time competitor, the Soviet newspaper
Izvestiya
), as well as information or consultation, and the particle
ved’
means ‘indeed’ (as if commanding one’s listener ‘know this!’). The word
witch
has a similar linguistic history: the root of the word is
wit
. This verb still shows up in ‘to wit’, ‘unwitting’, the old-fashioned ‘God wot’, and of course in keeping one’s
wits
about one. Feminists and Wiccans have worked to reclaim the word witch in its sense of ‘wise woman’ or ‘woman who knows’, but in both Russian and English the words as commonly used suggest age and ugliness first, power second.

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.

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 fairy-tale 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.