Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Fairy Tales ed. by Sibelan Forrester, Martin Skoro, Helena Goscilo (review)

The collected tales in Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Fairy Tales offer readers an experience akin to a fairy-tale museum visit. Each of the twenty-nine Russian stories stands as its own exhibit, a tale complete unto itself. Annotations quietly follow the collected narratives in the endnotes, and the editors have adorned the pages with depictions of Baba Yagas taken from art, film, theater, and even a pair of shoes. The ornamentation includes modern folk art by British painter Rima Staines, classic Russian illustrations by Ivan Bilibin, and contemporary interpretive forms such as Mike Mignola’s illustrations for the Hellboy comics. All depictions present perspectives with generally minimal context, mirroring the spare editorial hand given to each tale. Readers stroll from story to story, absorbing the variable narratives, which sometimes feature a Baba Yaga (as in “Ivanushka,” translated from Khudiakov 52) and sometimes include her only in passing (as in “The Bear Tsar,” translated from Afanas’ev 201). The collection follows no distinctive pathway, and stories do not build on one another. Even the editors recognize the ambling nature of their anthology, including “Finist the Bright Falcon II,” twelve stories before what ostensibly seems to be the “first” version, “The Feather of Finist the Bright Falcon.” The body of the resulting book can therefore feel disconnected, but the tales remain independently readable, offering readers the chance to pick up the book and begin reading anywhere.

Editors Sibelan Forrester, Martin Skoro, and Helena Goscilo herd together myriad different Baba Yagas, many of whom are far from the terrifying cannibal witch living in a hut surrounded by human skulls—although that Baba Yaga most certainly does appear, devouring her own children unwittingly in “Baba Yaga and the Kid.” Instead, the Baba Yagas in this collection most frequently offer help to other stock Russian fairy-tale characters, such as the paradoxically royal everyman Prince Ivan—sometimes diminutively called Ivanushka—or Koshchei the Deathless. The extensive “Mar’ia Morevna” (translated from Afanas’ev 159) weaves Baba Yaga, Ivan, Koshchei, and the eponymous warrior princess into a Three Princesses tale (AT 301). In many ways Baba Yaga as a book uses the figural Baba Yaga as an axis on which revolves a broader Russian fairy-tale cosmology. Even in tales that do not explicitly name a character Baba Yaga, the editors give the reader characters who implicitly must be Baba Yagas by dint of their tales’ inclusion among those found in this collection, as with the three unnamed grandmothers in “The Feather of Finist the Bright Falcon.” The one discernible editorial choice in tale arrangement is the ultimate position of the quintessential Baba Yaga story, “Vasilissa the Beautiful.” Forrester and colleagues seem to be saving the best for last, making cover-to-cover readers encounter many faces of Baba Yaga before coming to her best-known form and narrative.

The strength of the collection is in the interwoven textuality of the stories. Repeatedly, characters are asked, “Are you doing a deed or fleeing a deed?” or Baba Yaga will cry out, “Until now the Russian spirit was unheard by the hearing and unseen by the sight, but nowadays the Russian spirit appears before my eyes!” (121). The wild witch’s house on its signature chicken feet turns around and around until a character inevitably says the charm, “Little house, little house! Stand with your back to the forest and your front to me” (69). In some ways the tales serve almost as a guidebook to surviving an encounter with Baba Yaga, describing the proper way to address her and how one might enlist her aid. These threads, which travel through the collected tales much like one of Baba Yaga’s magical balls of thread, guide a hero to his or her destiny, connecting the works in a way that is otherwise lacking...