Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov (Penguin Classics) (57 page)

There are many treatments of Baba Yaga tales for children. For adult readers, we recommend not only Russian and North American
books on Baba Yaga. Dubravka Ugrešic´
Baba Yaga Laid an Egg
(2008) is great fun and also intellectually rewarding. Before her international literary success, Ugrešic´ was a prominent specialist in Russian literature and culture.
Baba Yaga Laid an Egg
touches on a number of Yagian issues: the relationship between daughters and their aging mothers, the relationship between writers and their admirers, and the relationship between biographical experience and artistic invention. In the book’s final section, Baba Yaga anagrams into a Bulgarian folklorist, and then … Well! We suggest that you read it.

Sibelan Forrester

Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 2010

 1
.     J. Thomas Shaw,
The Letters of Alexander Pushkin
(Indiana University Press, 1963), vol. 1, p. 189.

 2
.     Haney,
Intro
., p. 27.

 3
.     A. S. Pushkin,
Skazki
, ed. V. S. Nepomnyashchy, p. 189.

 4
.     Nearly all these thoughts about Catherine the Great are Professor Olga Meerson’s, shared with me in private correspondence.

 5
.     A. S. Pushkin,
Polnoye sobraniye sochinenii v desyati tomakh
(Moscow: Nauka, 1964), p. 172.

A-T 1001; Haney 661 and Af. 151 and 152 include many of the same motifs. The tale Pushkin recorded from Arina Rodionovna contains two more episodes. In one, the priest sends Balda to fetch a bear from the forest; in the other, Balda heals a tsar’s demonically possessed daughter.

Pushkin’s focus on the priest’s ‘business dealings’ with a band of devils made this poem unpublishable. Vasily Zhukovsky published a bowdlerized version in 1840, four years after Pushkin’s death. Pushkin’s complete text was first published in 1882.

In 1933 Mikhail Tsekhanovsky invited Dmitry Shostakovich to collaborate on a cartoon film based on this poem. The film was never completed, and the incomplete footage was lost during the Siege of Leningrad. Shostakovich did, however, create the Concert Suite ‘The Priest and his Servant Balda’, and, nearly seventy years later, his pupil Vadim Bibergan revised and completed the film-score version; a recording was released in 2006.

Shostakovich himself wrote, ‘the screenplay … has succeeded in
retaining satirical sharpness and the entire palette of Pushkin’s brilliant tale … The film is sustained at the level of a folk-farce. In it there is a mass of sharp, hyperbolic situations and grotesque characters … The tale sparkles with fervour, lightness and cheerfulness. And to compose music for it was likewise an easy and cheerful task.’ (
http://www.deutschegrammophon.com/special/?ID=shostakovich-balda
)

 1
.     I have followed the many Russian illustrators who have depicted Balda as
whirling
a rope, but it is possible that Pushkin intended Balda to be twisting material together in order to
make
a rope. In Haney 661 (a version probably influenced by Pushkin’s) Balda says, ‘I’m weaving this rope out of sand and then I’m going to catch all the devils in the lake.’ (Haney,
Complete
, vol. 7, p. 7) The lines ‘where the sea, / only a moment before, / had been / flat, calm and on the level’ are largely my own addition. I needed a rhyme to prepare for the devil’s appearance – and the only word that came to mind was ‘level’. My hope is that Pushkin would have enjoyed the irony of the devil being, as it were, summoned by the phrase ‘on the level’.

 2
.     Pushkin’s final version is
Vyshiblo um u starika
(‘Knocked out the old man’s mind’). What I have translated here – simply because I could make it work better in English – is Pushkin’s earlier, manuscript version: ‘
Bryznul mozg do potolka
(‘His brain showered up to the ceiling’).

Afanasyev sees Balda as related to Thor and Perun (the Slavic thunder god): ‘The terrible power of his fingers can be understood in relation to the mythical understanding of lightning as a divine hand, the hand with which the thunder god kills the celestial bulls and tears off their cloud-hides.’ (
The Poetic Outlook of the Slavs on Nature
[Moscow: 1994], vol. 2, pp. 746–53) In the penultimate episode of the similar Af. 151, the devillet challenges Shabarsha to throw the old devil’s iron club up into the clouds. The devillet then asks Shabarsha why he is waiting. Shabarsha replies, ‘I’m waiting for that storm cloud to draw near – then I’ll throw the club up onto it. My brother the blacksmith’s sitting up there, and some more iron’s just what he needs.’

A-T 555; see also Af. 75. Pushkin follows a version recorded by the Brothers Grimm. His draft includes one more episode: tired of being a tsaritsa, the old woman becomes a ‘Roman pope’.

 1
.     Haney,
Intro
., p. 26.

 2
.     My knowledge of Afanasyev’s life is drawn mainly from Haney,
Intro
. and from Lise Gruel-Apert’s introduction to her French translation of his folktales (Afanassiev,
Contes populaires russes
[Paris: Imago, 2009]).

 3
.    
http://www.swarog-fond.ru/article/articles/afanasiev.htm

A-T 244A; Af. 72. Folklorists classify this not as a ‘magic tale’ but as an ‘animal tale’. Strictly speaking, it does not belong in this collection. We have included it because it is so perfectly told, and as a reminder that the magic tale is not the only genre of folktale. The animal tale is older and at least as widespread. The Sanskrit collection of animal fables known as the
Panchatantra
, probably composed in the third century
BCE
, derives from far older oral traditions.

A-T 511 + 403; Af. 101 (Haney 290). The earliest written version of this tale-type is in the
Mahabharata
.

 1
.     A tsar (the word is derived from ‘Caesar’) is the Russian equivalent of an emperor. A tsar’s wife is a tsaritsa; their son is a tsarevich; their daughter is a tsarevna.

 2
.     The name Yagishna sounds like a patronymic. This new wife may well be a daughter of Baba Yaga. See
Appendix
.

 3
.     Haney makes the interesting suggestion that the wicked stepmother of so many magic tales may stand in for the mother-in-law:

There is little doubt that well into the nineteenth century the bride’s mother-in-law played a dominant and dominating role in her life. [ … ] the bride was expected to join her husband’s mother’s household. Here she would be treated as a very junior member of the kitchen staff, abused by her mother-in-law in far too many instances,
and by her sisters-in-law as well. That was not her only concern. She had constantly to be alert for the predatory advances of her father-in-law, brothers-in-law and uncles. This is attested to by many folktales and folksongs. (
Complete
,vol. 3, p. xliv)

 4
.     Ivan is the most common Russian name and Ivan Tsarevich is the archetypal hero of Russian folktales.

A-T 480B*; Af. 104; see also Haney 270. Evidently a somewhat literary version, this is one of the seven tales republished in 1899–1902 with illustrations by Ivan Bilibin.

 1
.     A common drink, lightly alcoholic, made from old bread.

A-T 552A + 400
₁
+ 554 + 302
₂
; Af. 159 (Haney 161). Another of the tales illustrated by Bilibin.

A-T 403; Af. 265. Another tale illustrated by Bilibin; also a somewhat literary version.

 1
.     It was believed that thieves often took the hand of a corpse with them. As they went about their business, they would touch sleeping people with it. The sleeper would then remain in a ‘dead sleep’.

A-T 402 + 400
₁
; Af. 269 (Haney 221). The slightly different version illustrated by Bilibin incorporates details from Af. 267. We have included a few of these – e.g. the account of the father’s reaction to the loaves and carpets brought by the elder brothers’ wives. This is the only time we have combined different variants of a tale.

 1
.     Propp writes that the frog princess

is an animal, but at her wedding she dances. We can easily recognize the ritual dance of the times of totemism. She is the creator, the
designer of the forest and waters. This is a very ancient, still totemic hunting stage of the princess. It is at this stage that the world is created through dance. Later the forest and the dance will disappear. The princess becomes the giver of water, sometimes she herself is water: ‘And he noticed that wherever the princess went, wherever her horses stepped, springs appeared, and [the hero] followed her by the trail of springs she had left.’ (Af. 271, variant) (Propp,
Theory and History
, p. 143)

 2
.     These details are omitted from the version published with Bilibin’s illustrations.

A-T 510B; Af. 290. In a version recorded by Karnaukhova (no. 15), the daughter is scheming and seductive. It is she, not her father, who makes the advances. Having aroused her father’s interest, she says she will marry him if he buys her a dress with stars on it. Then she asks for a dress with the moon on it, then for a dress with the sun on it. Having secured the dresses, she makes her escape.

A-T 313E; Af. 294.

A-T 559; Af. 297; Haney 314. The earliest written version is in the Norse Eddas. See Introduction,
p. xii
.

A-T 735A; Af. 303; see also Haney 392–7.

A-T 875E; Af. 328; see also Haney 529. Marina Warner remembers Angela Carter saying that this was her favourite among all the tales she chose for her
Virago Book of Fairy Tales
. Warner goes on to say that ‘Angela liked it because it was as satisfying as “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, but “no one was humiliated and everybody gets the prizes” [ … ] its heroine is an essential Carter figure, never abashed,
nothing daunted, sharp-eared as a vixen and possessed of dry good sense. It’s entirely characteristic of Angela’s spirit that she should delight in the tsar’s confounding, and yet not want him to be humiliated’ (Introduction to Angela Carter,
The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales
[London: Virago, 1992], p. xi).

 1
.    
http://www.livelib.ru/author/8576

 2
.    
Velikorusskie skazki v zapisyakh I. A. Khudyakova
(Moscow/Leningrad: Nauka, 1964), p. 48. Milman Parry and Albert Lord drew similar conclusions, in the twentieth century, from comparing Homeric and southern Slav epics.

A-T 480A*; Khudyakov,
op. cit
., no. 53 (in 2001 edition); see also Af. 103, 113.

A-T 480; Khudyakov,
op. cit.,
no. 14; see also Af. 95–7 and 99.

 1
.     N. E. Onchukov,
Severnye skazki
, p. 14.

A-T 551;
Zhivaya starina
, 1897, vii, pp. 113–20; see also Af. 171–8 (also: A-T 400
₂
and Af. 232–3). Many versions of this have been recorded; Afanasyev includes eight under the title ‘The Bold Knight, the Apples of Youth and the Water of Life’. Often the tsar’s reason for sending his three sons on their quests is stated more explicitly. In Af. 171, the old, blind tsar hears of a garden with apples that restore youth and ‘water of life’ that restores sight; Af. 172 begins, ‘Once upon a time there was a tsar with three sons. He sent out his sons to search for his youth.’ The little-known version we have translated is
remarkable for its inclusion both of archaic elements – e.g. the forthright words with which Ivan Tsarevich addresses the three baba yaga figures – and of such modernisms as the offers of ‘coffee and tea’.

 1
.     Compare:

The folktale horse is a hybrid creature, combining a horse and a bird. He is winged. The cult role of the bird passed on to the horse when the horse was domesticated. Now it is no longer a bird that carries the souls of the dead, but a horse. But it must have wings in order to fly in the air. Along with that, its nature is fiery: smoke pours from its ears, sparks scatter from its nostrils, etc. It also reveals traits of a chthonic nature. Before it begins to serve, it is under the ground. It has a link with the world after death. There are tales in which the hero received the horse from his dead father. The horse’s functions are fairly various. The first is carrying the hero through the air, over thrice-nine lands, to another kingdom. Later he helps the hero vanquish a dragon. He is wise, prescient; he is the hero’s true friend and advisor. (Propp,
The Russian Folktale
, chapter 7)

 2
.     In a version of this tale first published by the Sokolov brothers in 1915, the image of the horse and well is treated differently. When the hero is in the maiden’s chamber, the hero ‘watered his horse in her well, but he did not cover up the well. He left some clothing behind.’ The maiden then rides after the hero, catches up with him and says, ‘Please return. I am not sorry that you watered your horse. What is precious to me is that you did not cover the well’ (Mark Azadovsky,
Russkaya skazka
, p. 194).

A-T 303 and A-T 301A;
Zhivaya starina
, 1912, II–IV, pp. 357–65; republished in Azadovsky,
Russkaya skazka
, vol. 1, pp. 224–36; see also Af. 155 and Haney 158. Recorded in 1896 by A. A. Makarenko from Yefim Maksimovich Kokorin, a Siberian peasant who lived on the bank of the Angara, 750 kilometres from its confluence with the Yenisey. Makarenko describes Kokorin – ‘Chima the Blind’ – as