Notes
185 NOTES FOREWORD 1. Gustav Henningsen,“‘Ladies from the Outside’: An Archaic Pattern of the Witches’ Sabbath,” in Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries, ed. Ben Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 195. PREFACE, ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, AND TRANSLATOR’S NOTE 1. Aleksandr Afanas’ev’s Narodnye russkie skazki has been published in a number of editions, beginning in 1855; the most complete editions usually included three volumes and are edited by the foremost Russian folklorists of the day. The tales Afanas’ev collected are now also available on the FebWeb web site. Ivan Khudiakov’s collection Velikorusskie skazki was first published in Moscow in 1860–1862, and they have also been reprinted more than once, though they never gained the fame of Afanas’ev’s collection. 2. Robert Chandler, ed., Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov, trans. Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler, with Sibelan Forrester, Anna Gunin, and Olga Meerson (London: Penguin Books, 2012). The appendix, “Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East,” appears on pages 419–33. INTRODUCTION 1. Etimologicheskii slovar’ russkogo jazyka (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo“Progress,” 1973), vol. IV, 542–43. 2. Fasmer points out that“yazi-baba” in Ukrainian means both‘witch’ and . . . a hairy caterpillar. 3. The word for‘sea’ in Russian is more, pronounced MORE-yeh. It is neuter in gender, not a man’s name like the sources of most patronymics. Perhaps Mar’ia Morevna’s father is the king of the sea; he is the heroine’s father in some Russian wonder tales that do not feature Baba Yaga. 4. Joanna Hubbs, Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 46. 5. Boris A. Rybakov, Iazychestvo drevnei Rusi (The Pagan Religion of Old Rus’) (Moscow:“Nauka,” 1987). 6. The old calendar marked the changing seasons around February 1— Groundhog Day?—May 1, August 1, and November 1. Thus, Midsummer Night’s Eve is called“midsummer” even though we now count the summer as beginning, rather than reaching its middle, on the solstice. 7. The length of the Russian term for a female cousin, dvoiurodnaia sestra, encourages speakers to abbreviate to its second half, sestra, which means just ‘sister.’ 8. Even modern Russian observes in a proverb that“God loves trinity.” Notes 186 9. Mistakes come in threes, too: Prince Ivan tries to rescue Mar’ia Morevna three times, even though Kashchei the Deathless has warned that he will kill him after the third time, and the kid in “Baba Yaga and the Kid” lets Baba Yaga provoke him into yelling three times even after his brothers, the cat and the bird, repeatedly warn him not to. 10. The shape of the wonder tale—the variety of folktales that begin once upon a time and end happily ever after—was brilliantly generalized by Vladimir Propp in Morphology of the Folktale (1928; English translation 1968), and by Joseph Campbell in Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Pantheon Books, 1949). 11. Rus’ is the old name for the East Slavic land that was ruled from Kiev or Kyïv. The word is the root of“Russian” and also of“Ruthenia” and“Rusyn.” 12. This is the case in one version of“The Feather of Finist, the Bright Falcon.” The shift from Baba Yaga to helpful old woman minus chicken feet may be due to the rise of Orthodox religion as it displaced or“overwrote” pagan elements of traditional Russian folk culture. 13. The idea that dawn would be distinct from sunrise reflects an archaic worldview . The sun was the ruler but not the cause of the blue daytime sky. The sky grew pale long before the sun appeared and remained pale after the sun set, especially in northern latitudes, and in northern Russia in winter the sun might not rise at all. 14. The Russian word for“red,” krasnyi, comes from the same root as the word for“beautiful,” so the sun is at once red and beautiful. 15. Baba Yaga never seems to have a son, though she may have a grandson . . . 16. These powerful figures tend not to appear in great numbers in any one tale. They fulfill the same testing and rewarding function, or else one or two of them will suffice to signify the magical or ritual realm. 17. Even in the nineteenth century, hunting strongly shaped Russian experience: see Ivan Turgenev’s first big literary success, A Sportsman’s Sketches (1852), which presents both peasants and nobles as...
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