Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Fairy Tales

PREFACE, ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, AND TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

 xiii PREFACE, ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, AND TRANSLATOR’S NOTE hat could be more intriguing than a book about a famous witch? This collection offers twenty-nine fairy tales featuring Baba Yaga, along with images that show how artists have imagined her for over more than two centuries. We love Baba Yaga and want to present her here in all her richness and complexity. This book is meant for many kinds of readers. Those with a Russian background will find familiar tales, an introduction that presents a variety of ways to understand Baba Yaga, images from a variety of sources, and some recommendations for further reading. Specialists in Russian culture and in folklore will reach for the volume to learn more about Baba Yaga or perhaps will assign it to students in courses on Russian folklore or fairy tales. The book will also appeal to readers who are simply curious about this colorful folkloric figure. The brief bibliography (pages liii–lv) includes many of the sources mentioned in the introduction, along with a filmography and the sources for images . The tales are taken from two famous nineteenth-century collections: the 1855–1863 compilation of Aleksandr Afanas’ev, the best-known and most often translated in the West (Narodnye russkie skazki), and the tales collected by Ivan Khudiakov, first published in 1861–1862 (Velikorusskie skazki).1 Afanas’ev was an editor more than a collector, though his well-developed sense of what constituted “real” folklore led him to exclude versions that had been spoiled by the educated collectors who had written them down. Some of the tales in Afanas’ev’s editions had appeared in earlier printed Illustration by Ivan Bilibin (1876–1942).  Preface, Acknowledgments, and Translator’s Note xiv version, making them even further removed from the oral originals than the handwritten recordings he worked with in the archives of the Russian Geographical Society. His versions tend in general to be longer, more poetic, and less conversational than Khudiakov’s; many though not all of them have something of a literary finish.Khudiakov recorded most of his tales from the tellers themselves, often identifying the place and teller in brief notes that we have included after the tales taken from his collection; his versions are less stylistically elegant or elaborate than Afanas’ev’s. Juxtaposing Afanas’ev’s and Khudiakov’s versions makes for interesting differences, especially when the plots overlap. We might compare the pleasure of reading variants of the same tale to that of hearing a familiar song performed by a new singer, and sometimes the voices of individual tellers come strongly through the layers of time and translation. Where the tales include variants (different versions of the same plot, perhaps told by different individuals at different times), these are included in the notes that follow the tales. The variants are interesting to general readers as well as to folklorists, and including them was something of an innovation in Afanas’ev’s collection. Martin Skoro conceived the idea for this book some years ago. He gathered images of Baba Yaga and found information about her in numerous books and on the Web. Sibelan Forrester selected and translated a group of folktales that feature Baba Yaga and was primarily responsible for writing the introduction to the book. Helena Goscilo brought striking images of Baba Yaga from her own collection and added incisive analysis of the images, along with valuable comments on the introduction and translations. We are grateful to have the foreword from Jack Zipes, a folklorist and scholar we tremendously admire. His comments and suggestions also contributed signi ficantly to the introduction and the translations. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to the Slavic Collection of the Library of the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, whose shelves hold nineteenth-century editions of Afanas’ev and Khudiakov. Thanks also to McCabe Library at Swarthmore College and to the magical powers of Inter-Library Loan. Swarthmore College supported this project with research funding (a James A. Michener Faculty fellowship) and the opportunity for me (SF) to teach a course on Russian Folktales; I owe particular thanks to Provost Tom Stephenson for  Preface, Acknowledgments, and Translator’s Note xv support of the edition. I am grateful to Robert Chandler, one of the foremost translators from Russian in the world today, for comments on the introduction and some of the translations, and for including a briefer version of the introduction as...