Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

BABA

Baba[12] comes from the Indo-European, whence it spread into many languages. In Slavic languages, the principal meaning of baba is an old woman, grandmother, lady. In colloquial Russian, a baba can be any woman (e.g. horoshaya baba, a good-looking woman), likewise in other Slavic languages. Baba can be a married woman (e.g. moja baba, my wife). Baba can also be a female with bad traits: a fishwife, a gossip, a quarrelsome nag, a shrew. Baba is also a colloquial expression for a cowardly, fearful man. Babica means a midwife, whence the word babinje, which means the postnatal period. Slavs also use the word baba to refer to female mythic characters, particular days, atmospheric effects, astronomical events, illnesses and so on.

Female demons are often called babas. Mother Wednesday (baba Sereda) watches over the weavers at their looms and stops women from using them on Wednesdays (or it might be any other day). White Lady (Belaja baba) is a watery demon, while Bannaja baba (banniha, bajnica, baennaja matushka, obderiha) is a spirit that lives in the traditional Russian steam bath (banya). In Ukraine, the Wheaten Lady (Žitna baba) is the spirit of the fields; and the Wild Lady (Dika baba) is the female demon that leads young men astray. Witches, fortune-tellers and healers are all called – baba.

Baba also turns up in the names of illnesses (babice, bapke, babushki, babuha, babile, etc.). In Bulgaria, Baba Šarka is a folk name for measles. Baba Šarka is homeless, footloose and gluttonous. When she turns up in someone’s home, nobody is allowed to prepare any food for nine days. Then Baba Šarka abandons the inhospitable house to look for somewhere more generous. Baba Drusla and Baba Pisanka also bring sickness into the house.

Baba is also connected with the popular concept of time. Baba Marta personifies the third month of the year, especially in Bulgaria, but also in Serbian and Macedonian folklore. In Croatia and Serbia, Baba Korizma (Lent) walks with seven sticks, and she throws away a stick for every week of fasting. In Serbia, snowy days in March are called ‘baba’s days’, ‘baba’s billy-goats’ or ‘baba’s kids’. In Romania and Ukraine, Baba Jaudocha (also Jeudocha or Dokia) is accountable for all wintery precipitations. Snow falls when she shakes her fur coat. Many regions have a carnival custom of ‘burning the baba’. In Croatia, people mark New Year’s Eve symbolic ally by burning a doll, called Baba Krnjuša, so that the new year can take her place.

In Slavic folklore, astronomical and meteorological phenomena are also named after baba. Moonlight is called ‘Mother Moonshine’, and the moon itself is ‘Baba Gale’. ‘Baba’s belt’ is a metaphor for rainbow, and ‘baba’s millet’ for hail. Bad weather usually comes out of ‘baba’s smock’ in the sky. In Poland, when there are dark spots on the moon, people say ‘Baba is churning butter’ or ‘Baba’s baking bread’. When it is rainy and sunny at the same time, Polish children chant ‘Rain is falling, sun is shining, Baba Yaga’s butter’s churning’. When the first snow falls, the Casubians say ‘The old woman has gone to the dance’. Carpathian farmers use the expression ‘the old woman is freezing cold’ to describe the high mountains dusted with the first snow. In time of drought, Polish peasants believe that an old witch is squatting in an oak tree (meaning, in a nest), keeping eggs warm and that the drought will go on until the chicks hatch. In Bulgarian folklore, baba is a picturesque synonym for day and also for night.[13]

So, lots of things are called baba. In Slavic harvest festivals, the last sheaf is called the baba, and the peasants celebrate the end of harvest by dressing this sheaf in women’s clothes. One kind of mushroom is called a baba, in Slavic languages, as is a butterfly, two kinds of fruit (a pear and a cherry), a cake or pastry (called babka in Polish) and a fish. Baba crops up in the names of mountains, towns and villages (Velika Baba, Mala Baba, Stara Baba, Babina Greda, etc.). ‘Baba’s summer’ is a colloquial expression for a long mild autumn, an Indian summer.

Many Bulgarian sayings are linked with the word baba. The expression ‘There’s one thing baba knows, and she never stops saying it’ is used for someone who is forever telling you the same thing. ‘Baba’s fiddle-faddle’, ‘baba’s babbling’: these are synonyms for nonsense, silliness. There are similar sayings in the language of the Croats, Bosnians and Serbs. ‘There went the old woman with the cakes’ is a saying that refers to a missed opportunity. ‘Baba wants what baba dreams’ is a saying with unambiguous sexual connotations, but it means that when somebody mentions something, that’s what they’re hoping for, which is, in fact, a popular equivalent of Freud’s theory of parapraxis. ‘The old woman’s busy fiddling and faddling’ (Trla baba lan da joj prođe dan) is what people say when somebody fritters away their time, loafing around or being pointlessly active. Mixing ‘old women and frogs’ (babe ižabe) means mixing things that would otherwise have no connection with each other. ‘Any old woman can do that’, or ‘even my old woman can do that’, means that anybody can do whatever it is, even the most incompetent person. ‘Whatever grannie says, she only talks about cakes’ is another way of referring to somebody who won’t stop talking about the same thing. ‘Too many midwives, crippled child’ means that too many cooks spoil the broth. ‘If grandma had balls, she’d be grandpa’ is another saying. At the same time, babo or baba means father in some languages (Farsi, Arabic, Turkish, Italian), but it can also refer to an older male member of the family, any old man or a holy man.

All things considered, the Slavic world is positively teeming with babas! On the other hand, let us not forget that all these ugly, sexist notions, proverbs, sayings and beliefs involving ‘grandmas’ were thought up by ‘grandpas’. Who, naturally, reserved the more heroic parts for themselves.

BABA YAGA

Baba Yaga, along with her innumerable variants in Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian (Igaya, Iga, Yega, Yagaba, Yagabova, Egabova, Egibitsa, Yegiboba, Yaganishna, Yagivovna, Yagichina-Babichina, Yaga-bura, Egibishna, Yagishna, Yega, Lyaga, Oga, Aga Gnishna, Yagabaka), and in other Slavic languages (Indži-baba, Ježibaba, Jedibaba, Jedubaba, Babaroga), is a female anthropomorphic being, an old hag-cum-sorceress, a witch. There have been many interpretations of her name. Some authors hold that Jagok, Egga, Iga, Yuga, Yazya, Yaza, Yeza, Yagishna, Ajshi-baba, and other similar designations all have a single Old Slavonic stem: ega or esa, which is close to the Lithuanian engti and the Latvian igt, and which mean, approximately, evil, horror, nightmare, sickness.

Baba Yaga lives in a forest, or on the edge of a forest, in a cramped little hut that stands on hen’s legs and turns around on the spot. She has one skeleton-leg (‘Baba Yaga, bony leg!’), dangling breasts that she dumps on the stove or hangs over a pole, a long sharp nose that knocks against the ceiling (nos v potolok ros), and she flies around in a mortar, rowing herself through the air with a pestle, wiping away her traces with a broom.

Baba Yaga is a unique oral–textual ‘patchwork’ of folklore and mythico-ritual traditions (shamanism, totemism, animism, matriarchy), and her status, function and authority change from tale to tale, from one zone of folklore to another, from male story-tellers to female. Baba Yaga is a text that is read, studied, told, adapted, interpreted and reinterpreted differently at different times.

Baba Yaga’s origins are not all that clear. One theory has it that she was the Great Goddess, the Earth Mother herself. Another, that she was the great Slavic goddess of death (Yaga zmeya bura); a third, that she was the mistress of all the birds (hence the hut on hen’s legs and the long nose like a beak); a fourth theory has it that she was a rival of the Slavic goddess Mokosh, and that she evolved over time from a great goddess into an androgyne, then into the goddess of birds and snakes, and then into an anthropomorphic being, until she finally acquired female attributes. Some associate her with the Golden Baba, an archaic goddess from the age of matriarchy, and they see the hen’s legs beneath her hut as the vestige of a fertility cult.

Baba Yaga appears as a spinner and weaver, roles which always symbolise power over human destiny (Baba Yaga gives the heroes a ball of thread that will lead them to their goal), but also as a warrior who sleeps with a sword over her head and fights against knights (sometimes she appears as a mother of dragons). In some tales, Baba Yaga has power to turn people to stone (like the Medusa); in others, power to command the forces of nature: winds, tempests and thunder (which is why she is sometimes associated with the Slavic god Perun). Vladimir Propp, whose influence in this field of research has been immense, holds that Baba Yaga is the mistress of all the forest fauna, of the world of the dead, and also the priestess of initiations.

The elusive and capricious Baba Yaga sometimes appears as a helper, a donor, sometimes as an avenger, a villain, sometimes as a sentry between two worlds, sometimes as an intermediary between worlds, but also as a mediator between the heroes in a story. Most interpreters locate Baba Yaga in the ample mythological family of old and ugly women with specific kinds of power, in a taxonomy that is common to mythologies the world over.

Along with many points of contact with other ‘babas’, Baba Yaga has earned her own name and individuality. Although Baba Yaga is widespread around the Slavic world, ‘the problems of Baba Yaga’s genesis, mythological nature, function and semantics in fairytales are highly complex and provoke continual debate.’[14] Some authors even maintain that the name Baba Yaga is unknown in Slavic mythology, and that she belongs exclusively to the world of fairytales. What’s beyond dispute is that Baba Yaga sprouted in mythological soil, but also that, as a character, she took shape in Russian folktales between the 18th and 20th centuries, when hundreds and hundreds of versions of these tales were written down. Baba Yaga grew out of the complex and long-lasting interaction between folklore and mythico-ritual traditions, the tellers of folktales, folklorists and commentators; out of the blending of Indo-European and pre-Indo-European mythologies. Maria Gimbutas includes Baba Yaga among the ‘goddesses inherited from Old Europe, such as Greek Athena, Hera, Artemis, Hecate; Roman Minerva and Diana; Irish Morrígan and Brigit; Baltic Laima and Ragana; Russian Baba Yaga, Basque Mari, and others, are not “Venuses” bringing fertility and prosperity […]. These life-givers and death-wielders are “queens” or “ladies” and as such they remained in individual creeds for a very long time in spite of their official dethronement, militarisation, and hybridisation with the Indo-European heavenly brides and wives.’[15]

BABA YAGA / WITCH

Baba Yaga has a fanciful character, and researchers are cautious when it comes to defining her status. Some maintain that Baba Yaga is simply a (Slavic) witch, while others are ready to grant her a much more complex and individualised role in the system of Slavic demonology.

Let us look first at ordinary witches: who they are, what they look like and what they do. According to Tihomir R. Ðorđević, witches are mainly old women with ‘devilish souls’. ‘A woman is called a witch if she possesses a sort of devilish soul,’ according to Vuk Karadžić, ‘which emerges while she sleeps at night and turns into a butterfly, a hen or a turkey which flies from house to house, eating people up, especially little children: when she finds someone asleep, she hits them with a rod of some kind on the left breast, their chest splits open, she plucks out their heart and eats it, then she closes up the hole again. Some of the victims die straight away, others live on for a while longer, according to her whim as she eats their heart; and then they die, just as she intended.’[16]

Slavic languages have many names for witches: ved’ma, vid’ma, vedz’ma, veštica, veštićina, czarownica, wiedzma, jedza, cipernica, coprnica, štrigna, štriga, morna, brina, brkaća, konjobarka, srkaća, potkovanica, rogulja, krstaća, kamenica, ćarovnica, mag’josnica, and others besides. Synonyms have a protective function, and the protection they offer is mostly used to protect children. People often refer to a witch as she over there, for fear of uttering her name.

Like many other mythical beings, witches have a talent for metamorphosis. (In contemporary popular culture they are ‘morphs’.) A witch can turn herself into a bird, a serpent, a fly, a butterfly, a frog or a cat.[17] Most often they turn into a black bird (raven, crow, black hen and magpie). There is also a popular belief that moths are really witches, so it is best to throw them on the fire or scorch their wings. The next day, you need to find out which ‘baba’ in the village ‘got burned in the fire’, ‘roasted right through like a roasted devil’ or simply passed away. That baba is – was – a witch. ‘A hen with scorched feathers, or any other bird that a witch turns into, can also give the witch away.’ There is a sort of moth that is actually called a witch. People believe that any woman who is touched by the wings of this ‘witch’ will be barren.

It was believed that when a witch falls asleep, a butterfly or bird flies out of her mouth, ‘and if she turns over, the butterfly or bird cannot return whence it came, so it will die, and so will the woman. It can happen that the bird or hen flies away, the sleeping woman’s husband turns his wife around so that her head is where her feet were, the hen cannot go back into the woman’s mouth and the woman dies. When the grieving husband puts his wife back in the position she had when she fell asleep, the hen can go back into the woman again, and the woman comes back to life.’[18]

Witches can be recognised by ‘the wart of some kind that every one of them has on her head, the same as the long cockscomb on a strutting cockerel’. Witches are cross-eyed, they are prone to vomiting (hence the saying ‘He threw up his guts like a witch’) and they don’t sink in water. A witch has the ability to change her physical size, ‘she can make herself absolutely small, so that she can pass through the narrowest crack, through a keyhole, and emerge on the other side.’ (T. R. Ðorđević)

In Herzegovina, a witch is a woman with a moustache ‘like a young man’s first whiskers’. Baba, a character in P. P. Njegoš’s epic poem The Mountain Wreath says: ‘It is an easy thing to recognise a witch: grey hair and a cross under her nose.’[19] Hence, a witch has ‘big whiskers and hairy thighs’; a witch is ‘plethoric, with a foul temper and a cross under her nose’; witches are always ill-humoured, they always wear an evil expression and they have ‘shaggy legs’. A witch is ‘whiskery, with bushy eyebrows, bent-backed, her eyes sunk deep in her head’. A witch has ‘thin little moustaches, bloodshot eyes and sharp teeth, but the moustache is the surest sign’. Hairiness is not such an issue in Bosnia. On the contrary, the Bosnians maintain that a witch is ‘a woman with no hair in her armpits or her lower body’.[20]

Mythical beings are distinguished from humans by their physical size: they are significantly smaller or larger than people. In Istria,[21] they believe that the plague is a gigantic woman. According to Serbian beliefs, the witch called karakondžula is a large fat creature. In Montenegro, they used to believe that Mother Wednesday was an enormous female, ‘wide as a haystack’, with great bosoms, grey hair and steel teeth.

Like other mythical beings, witches have some kind of physical defect, which may be expressed as a surplus, a deficiency or an imbalance. It is sometimes believed of witches that they have a rudimentary tail, or even rudimentary wings. Slovenian folklore mentions preglavica, a headless woman in white who only appears at midday. Her Russian counterpart is called poludnitsa. The Croats believed in faceless female demons: dead mothers coming back to give suck to their babies. Great dangling dugs are not reserved to Baba Yaga alone. The Serbs used to believe in the existence of the giant mother (divska majka) who would knead dough with her breasts. The kuga in Konavle[22] and the koljara in Montenegro have great dangling dugs that they can sling over their shoulders. The goddess Kshumai (worshipped by the Kaffirs of the Hindu Kush), the mythical peri (Farsi: pari) and the Arabic salauva – they all have the same traits. Alavardi (also Alabasti) is an immemorial mythical being familiar to many Asiatic peoples. She is a tall woman with pendulous breasts that she tosses over her shoulders.

Witches may have only one eye and no nostrils, or only one nostril. One of Baba Yaga’s legs is made of bone (or iron). Blindness or monocular vision is typical of mythical beings. Baba Yaga is blind (or grumbles that her eyes hurt). She identifies her ‘guests’ – random passing travellers – by their human scent, because, as far as we know, she cannot see them.

Mythical beings give themselves away by the noises they make (they whistle, laugh, clap their hands, etc.). If a human catches their attention, certain mythical creatures will repeat the human’s words over and over, like an echo. Baba Yaga uses repetitious phrases and can be recognised by her remarkable wheezing breath: ‘Oof… oof… oof.’ Many of those attributes – specifically ‘noisiness’, hand-clapping, whistling, repeating words (echolalia) – could be put down to autism, while simple infirmity, difficulties with walking, blindness and dementia were due to sheer old age. In folklore, however, such longevity has been crowned with a mythic halo. This is why it is believed that witches live ‘for a very long time indeed’, longer than mere mortals, and ‘give up the ghost’ only with great difficulty. Baba Yaga herself is about a hundred years old. There is a folk belief that witches continue to do evil after they are dead. Therefore, when a witch dies, ‘it is worth slitting the tendons at their ankles and under their knees with a black-handled knife so that she will not return home from the grave and do people harm’.[23]

In some areas of Slavic folklore, Baba Yaga is considered to be the ‘aunt of all witches’; elsewhere she is seen as the ‘mistress of all witches’, or even as ‘the devil’s sister’, while in Belarus, she has a difficult role to play: death delivers the souls of the deceased to Baba Yaga, and she and her underling witches have to feed these souls until they gain the requisite feathery lightness.

Now we come to the first, and completely random, correspondences between your author’s manuscript and Baba Yaga. It is not without significance that the author gave one of her heroines, Pupa, a medical vocation: gynaecology. Midwives, sorceresses, healers, ‘witches’ all had an important and irreplaceable role in childbirth.

Although the physical appearance of your author’s heroines has no link with the aforementioned signs for recognising witches – otherwise every older woman could be a witch – let us mention some details anyway. The author’s mother wears a wig and often lets out a sort of groaning noise – uh-hu-uh-hu! Baba Yaga is well known for her puffing: Oof, oof, oof! Pupa has a beak-like nose, she is uncommonly thin, half-blind and highly sensitive to smells. Kukla has big feet. Beba has conspicuously large breasts and the little girl Wawa has eyebrows that meet in the middle.

By the way, in not-so-far-off times, all middle-aged women were bound to look like ‘witches’. Our own time is char ac terised by panic over ageing, obsessive efforts to delay and disguise the onset of old age. Fear of ageing is one of the strongest phobias among contemporary women, and increasingly among men as well. This very fear gives powerful impetus to the cosmetics industry. Naturally, the ‘anti-Baba Yaga’ industry feeds this fear and lives off and by it.

Hair removers help to keep our skin smooth: they lift the hairs from joined-up eyebrows, moustaches, whiskers from our chins, armpits and legs (no more shaggy thighs!), and the latest fashion is not only for removing the shameful hair but for styling it. Wigs, hair restoration and transplants have practically done away with female baldness. Dental implants have put a stop to toothlessness, and if they had been invented in the times when artists’ canvas overflowed with portraits of lovely ladies, their faces would have stretched in beaming grins; instead, they all had pursed lips or wore an enigmatic smile like the Mona Lisa. The cosmetics industry, the growth of plastic surgery, along with its increasing affordability: all this is changing the physical appearance of the inhabitants of the richer portions of the globe. The recent achievement of the first face transplant may stimulate a new appetite: for a total makeover, the transform ation of mortal ‘frogs’ into deathless ‘princesses’. The age-old belief that witches drink blood has turned, today, into the real and highly profitable practice of blood transfusion or replacement, a therapy that is widely believed to rejuvenate the organism and prolong life. Only rich people can indulge in such treatments, which they do in exclusive private clinics. The Astana cycling team from Kazakhstan and its star Aleksandr Vinokurov were asked to withdraw from the Tour de France in 2007 after Vinokurov tested positive for using blood transfusions as doping.

To end with, let us just add – as solace for witches! – that a negligible minority of humankind (let’s call them ‘vampires’) still drinks the blood of the majority of humankind (let’s call them ‘donors’), and does it so ‘innocently’, through a clear plastic tube, just as if they were sucking juice through a humble straw.

THE HUT

‘The fence around the hut is made of human bones, skulls with eyes intact are stuck on the posts: instead of bolts on the gate – human legs; instead of a latch on the door – a hand; instead of a lock – a mouth full of sharp teeth.’

Baba Yaga’s hut terrifies the passing traveller. The first things the hero or heroine sees are the skulls; beyond the hut itself there is most often nothing at all. (‘There stands the hut, the path no further runs. Only the darkling dark, nothing else to see.’) The hut looks highly unwelcoming. Often there isn’t so much as a window or a door; the hut stands on hen’s legs and turns eerily around on the spot.

If he wants to enter, the passing traveller has to know how. Heroes like Prince Ivan (Ivan Tsarevich) usually blow into the hut and call out: ‘Little hut! O little hut! Stay still, little hut, as you once did, with your front to me and your back to the forest.’ Or: ‘Little hut, o little hut! Turn your eyes to the forest and your door to me. I shan’t stop here long, just a single night. Let the lone traveller in.’

Girls, by contrast, are warned in advance what they must do to humour the dangerous hut: ‘There, my girl, a birch tree will whip your eyes, so tie it down with a ribbon; there the door will creak and thump, so oil the hinges well; the dogs will attack you, so throw them some bread; the cat will scratch your eyes, so give it some ham.’

Vladimir Propp argues that the myths of many tribal cultures contain two worlds: the world of the living and the world of the dead. A wild beast stands on the boundary (wild animals guard the entrance to Hades), or perhaps a hut with zoo morphic traits. In many tribal cultures a hut like Baba Yaga’s is involved in the initiation rites for young males when they enter the adult world. First they have to be devoured (by the hut itself, whose door puts us in mind of jaws) in order to be born again and join the adult world.

Thus the hero stands before Baba Yaga’s hut and says: ‘Little hut, o little hut, turn your front to me and your back to the forest.’ The young man is afraid, many have died on this spot, which is proven by the skulls on the fence, but even so, he pleads to be let inside (‘Let me come in, to eat salted bread!’). Meanwhile Baba Yaga in her hut murmurs, satisfied: ‘All alone you came to me, like a lamb to the slaughter.’

When they gain entry to the hut, the heroes come face to face with a new terrifying sight: ‘On the stove, on the ninth brick, lies Baba Yaga with her bone leg, her nose touching the ceiling, her slobber seeping over the doorstep, her dugs dangling over the lug,[24] sharpening her teeth.’ The descriptions of Baba Yaga vary: stretching from one corner of the hovel to the other, in some accounts, she rests one leg on a shelf and the other on the stove; sometimes she tosses her breasts onto the stove or hangs them ‘over a pole’, or even ‘shuts the oven door with her breasts’, while snot trails out of her nose, and she ‘scoops up soot with her tongue’. Very occasionally the descriptions are unambiguously sexual: Baba Yaga leaps out of the hut with ‘sinewy rump’ and ‘polished cunt’. Baba Yaga has become so much a part of her hut, growing into it, that the hut dances up and down instead of her, or spins on its axis like a child’s top.

How do the heroes cope with their fear? Before their first meeting with Baba Yaga, they appear very impudent: ‘Come on, old girl, what’s all the fuss about? What’s all the racket for? I want food and drink, get the steam-bath ready, then I’ll tell you all the news.’ We recognise a stereotype in the tone and substance of these words: this is how men in patriarchal societies address their women. One does not expect such behaviour from a young man when he meets an old woman for the first time, but curiously enough, the magic formula does the trick. Hearing the tone and substance of his retort, Baba Yaga is tamed in a trice, and she does everything he asks straightaway. The young traveller’s uncouth familiarity is the key that unlocks her door.[25]

The hero comes face to face with vagina dentata, and behold! He lives to tell the tale.

Let me add at once that, while the obscenity of old women is nothing rare in the mythico-ritual world, it is rarely sexual. Obscenity has its ritual nature and its obvious purpose. Baubo is the famous old girl who pulled up her skirts and exposed her genitals to Demeter. By mocking the absurd role of wise consolatrix (which everybody expected her to play), Baubo managed to make Demeter laugh.[26] The Japanese goddess Ame-no-Uzume tempts the sun goddess Amaterasu out of her cave with an obscene dance, to drive away the darkness that had fallen on the earth. In some parts of Serbia and Bulgaria, there was a custom that the old women would lift their skirts and show their vulvas as a way of defending their village from hail, and thereby save the harvest. Old women in southern Serbia would even strip naked and run round the house to drive away the hail, imploring as they went:

or,

The vulva – the ‘dragon’ or ‘monster’ – had a magical strength that could dispel clouds. People believed that the clouds were led by dragons, so the lines ‘Don’t you, dragon, fight my monster’ pitted the vulva against the clouds. Let’s not forget that Baba Yaga rules over the powers of nature: she often appears in the role of mistress of the winds.[27]

Baba Yaga has an initiatory meaning for male and female heroes alike. Female initiation rarely has a sexual character, while the male equivalent is explicitly so: on the psychoanalytic level, the meeting with Baba Yaga is a confrontation with vagina dentata, the mother, the granny, the ugly old crone who is a grotesque inversion of his future bride.[28] Certain native North American tribes have a myth of the Terrible Mother, who has a fish concealed in her vagina that gobbles men up. The hero’s task is to vanquish the Terrible Mother, more exactly to break the teeth of the fish that lives in her vagina.

The hut, vagina dentata, is a male castration fantasy. Your author’s text proposes a remarkable inversion by means of the character of Kukla. Kukla is a victim of her own vagina dentata. The inci dent that occurred at the outset of her sexual life decides her entire later life. Kukla’s problem is two-fold: her sexuality and her creativity are both petrified. She is like the Medusa, who was not made to look in the mirror by others; she did it by herself. She has no children, and only begins to write when her husband dies. And she does so, naturally, hidden behind his name.

Only when Pupa leaves home, her ‘hut’, can she die. Leaving home is the emancipatory deed that leads Pupa where she wants to go – to death.

Returning home, your author returns to the maternal ‘hut’ and repeats the initiation rite for the nth time. She must respect the law of Baba Yaga’s hut, otherwise Baba Yaga will eat her up. The quip about good girls going to heaven while bad girls go everywhere contains the whole female history (as seen by men), where women’s fate has been determined by two opposed poles: home (cleanliness, order, security, family) and the space outside the home (dirt, disorder, danger, chaos, loneliness). The outer space was traditionally reserved to men, and inner space, the home, to women.

Finally, something interesting which can be read as a metaphor realised by contemporary society. The vagina dentata has fled from the field of sexual fantasy into reality. A female condom, the ‘Rapex’, has been invented by a South African woman, who wants to help African women defend themselves against rapists. Just like the Terrible Mother of native North American myths, the female condom has fish teeth in it that can wound the penetrating penis. Apparently the inventor was inspired by meeting a rape victim who said: ‘If only I had teeth down there.’

THE MORTAR

The mortar, a common object in everyday peasant life, plays a strongly symbolic role in European and Asian mythologies. It symbolises the womb, while its partner the pestle is – what else? – the penis. In Belarus, for example, there is a funny explanation, meant for children, of how children come into the world: ‘I fell from the sky, and landed in a mortar, I climbed out of the mortar and look! How big I’ve grown!’

Slavs used to involve a mortar in comical wedding customs. They would fill the mortar with water, and the bride-to-be had to pummel away with the pestle until all the water was gone. There was a wedding ritual of dressing up the mortar as a female and the pestle as a male, and then this symbolic bride and groom were placed on the wedding table.

The Russians and Ukrainians used the mortar in healing rituals. It was believed that sickness could be beaten away in a mortar, sick animals could be beaten back to health with a pestle and mortar and even a fever could be beaten to death in a mortar.[29]

The Indian Vedas, too, celebrate the mortar and soma (the drink of the gods, like nectar, though it is quite possibly really sperm), but here the sexual symbolism is raised to a cosmic level. For the mortar is a cosmic womb in which life itself is renewed, while the pestle is a cosmic phallus.

An iron mortar is mentioned in a Russian spell from the 17th century: ‘There is an iron mortar, on that iron mortar stands an iron stool, on that iron stool sits an iron woman.’ (Stoit stupa zheleznaja, na toj stupe zheleznoj stoit stul zheleznyj, na tom stule zheleznom sidit baba zheleznaja…)

A mortar is Baba Yaga’s means of transport, and in the mythical world she has exclusive permission to fly in it. ‘Ordinary’ witches travel by broomstick, flying up the chimney and out of the house. Baba in The Mountain Wreath, by Petar Petrovíc Njegoš, says: ‘We move around with silver oars, our vessel is an eggshell.’ This verse draws on the folk belief that witches ride in eggshells. That is why people would break eggshells into little bits before they threw them away, so that witches could not use them. And on the Croatian island of Krk they believe that witches and sorceresses can only cross the sea in eggshells.

The mortar, Baba Yaga’s transport of choice,[30] is symbolically closer to an eggshell than a broomstick. Baba Yaga rides in her own symbolic womb (which is so hypertrophied that it can even hold her standing up) and paddles through the air with a pestle-penis. Liberated from human laws that determine what we can and cannot do, the unrelenting laws of the sexes, Baba Yaga makes use of both organs, male and female, and she flies, which is a very strong mythic representation of human sexuality. This sexuality is, it goes without saying, grotesque and carnivalised. As she is an old woman (supposedly a centenarian), Baba Yaga does not only travesty human sexuality: she transvesties it.

Of course, other interpretations are also possible: as a female, Baba Yaga’s ‘wings’ were ‘clipped’ in advance, so she was compelled to ‘fly’ in a mortar, an everyday object, like flying in a stewpot or a kneading-trough. There is also the interpretation that Baba Yaga is actually a hermaphrodite, hence a perfect human being, a Slavic folklore version of Tiresias, who – thanks to the gods – switched gender more than once (and decided in the end that being female is much better!). In Slavic carnival travesties, in Croatia for example, they carry a doll around the village; they call it ‘grandma carries grandpa’ (baba dida nosi), and it is formed of woven parts of male and female bodies.

A popular Russian woodcut (lubok) from the early 18th century depicts an unusual scene: Baba Yaga going into battle with a crocodile. Supposedly the crocodile is Peter the Great (because that was what the Old Believers called Peter the Great: ‘the crocodile’), and Baba Yaga is his wife. Baba Yaga rides on a swine, holding the reins in one hand and a pestle in the other. Her belt is a tangle of a hatchet and a distaff, one ‘male’ object and the other typically ‘female’, although they both have a phallic shape. Hence Baba Yaga, in the imagination of the anonymous woodcut-artist, possesses both symbols of power.

Pupa’s foot warmer is a modern equivalent of Baba Yaga’s mortar. This connection becomes even more obvious when the girl Wawa claims Pupa’s boot and uses it as a mother’s womb in which she falls asleep and dreams her dreams.

Kukla, the vagina dentata, longs for a penis so that she can start up her ‘flying machine’ and become an independent flier. But in order to come by the requisite part, its owner has to die. Perhaps this is why Kukla’s men all die, or are invalids: in other words, Kukla does not need a complete man, she only needs a bit of him – the ‘pestle’. A current, a faint and gentle breeze, can be felt enveloping Kukla, who would in ancient times have been the mistress of the four winds.

CANNIBALISM

Baba Yaga is dogged by evil rumours that she ‘ate people like chickens’. Her hut or hovel, surrounded by heaps of human bones, plainly signals to the passing traveller that he has stumbled upon a cannibal’s lair.

Baba Yaga’s cannibalism, from a folkloristic point of view, is linked to a ritual with a frightful name: ‘baking the child properly’ (perepekanie rebenka). This ritual was performed on children suffering from rickets (the folk name for which, in Russia and Ukraine, was ‘dog’s old age’: sobachya starost’).[31] The actual witchcraft consists of ‘burning’ the sickness. This ritual was accompanied with chanting a spell: ‘Just as we bake the bread, so, dog’s old age, you’ll bake too!’ (Kak hleb pechetsja, tak i sobachja starost pekis!) During the ritual, led by the village witch-doctor, they would pretend to push the sick child into the bread oven. In other words, the bread was symbolically identified with the child, and the oven with the mother’s womb. Returning the child to the oven, meaning the womb, signified rebirth. The ailing, rickety child was not ‘fully baked’ in its mother’s womb, so it has to be ‘baked properly’ in the oven. At the same time, the oven symbolises life after death, the provisional descent into it, and provisional death.

In most fairytales, Baba Yaga appears as an old woman living by herself. Sometimes she turns up as a mother with a single daughter, and sometimes as a mother with forty-one daughters. From a psychoanalytic point of view, of course, the most interesting thing is the motif of devouring her own daughter. Baba Yaga (like the Greek Thyestes, who is tricked by his brother Atreus into eating his own sons) gobbles up her own daughter by mistake, or even accidentally kills all her forty-one daughters.[32]

The South Slavs hold that a witch can only injure her own family and friends. ‘We cannot do any harm to those who are hateful to us, but those who are dear to us, or our own kin, they have no escape,’ says the Baba in The Mountain Wreath. There is even a South Slavic saying: ‘Where else will a witch go but to her own kin?’ In a Serbian folksong, a shepherd describes his dream like this:

The people on some Croatian islands believe that ‘witches like best to pluck out the hearts of their own kin, a bit less to pluck out their friends’ hearts, and if a witch is not satisfied with her husband, she plucks out his heart as soon as she can.’ In Herzegovina and Montenegro, they believe that witches only eat children that are ‘dear and kindred to them, even if they are not their own’(!). The common folk suppose that a woman cannot become a witch until she eats her own child. In Konavle, they think a witch ‘has no strength at all until she kills her own child’. And the Montenegrins think that ‘a woman who wants to be a witch must eat up her own child first, only then can she eat other children too.’ (T. R. Ðorđević)

Slavs think that what witches like best is drinking the blood of children and others with sweet blood. A witch ‘sups the blood with a little spoon and very soon the child withers and dies’. It is believed that witches sometimes kill older people too: ‘they drink a young boy’s or girl’s heart dry, and whosoever they drink up, is no more: they fade away and die in the flower of their youth.’

Blood is very rarely found on Baba Yaga’s menu. There is a rare motif in a Siberian fairytale, of Baba Yaga drinking blood from the breast of Princess Marfita. The principal hero cuts off Baba Yaga’s head, but the head uses Marfita’s legs to run away.

It can happen that human fingers are found floating in Baba Yaga’s soup, but her basic diet is ordinary enough. What is not ordinary is Baba Yaga’s phenomenal appetite.[33]

The scale of Baba Yaga’s cannibalism is modest by comparison with ordinary witches, or with the Maenads, the Bacchae, who in their trance rend the flesh of living creatures with their bare teeth, and once (according to Euripides) led by Agave, mother of Pentheus, tore Pentheus himself to pieces.

Allow me to draw your attention to the camouflaged details in your author’s fiction which could be linked with Baba Yaga. In the first part, the author’s mother barely allows her daughter to have access to her space. The mother identifies herself with her house, or more precisely she is the house, and she experiences her daughter’s presence, like the things that she brings into the house, as a territorial violation. Although it is trivial at first glance, the incident with the little cupboard has a symbolic value: the cupboard becomes acceptable to the mother precisely when it has been painted, when it has undergone this transformation, when it is symbolically ‘chewed up’ and ‘devoured’. Although these relationships are only hinted at, Pupa and Beba have traumatic relations with their own children, something which can easily be explained as symbolic cannibalism. In one place, Beba admits that she is her own son’s ‘killer’.

MOTHER, SISTER, WIFE

Baba Yaga’s family status is contradictory. She is a woman without a husband – a spinster. In the Czech version, Ježibaba has a husband, Ježibabel, and his mere name says everything about the power relations between that couple. It is Baba Yaga’s status as mother that causes the most confusion: sometimes a daughter, Marinushka, is mentioned, and occasionally the number of daughters grows to forty-one. Sometimes Baba Yaga appears as a mother of dragons. In one fairytale, tricked into gobbling salt and flour, Baba Yaga drinks seawater to slake her thirst, until she bursts and gives violent birth to frogs, mice, snakes, worms and spiders. Some tales mention Baba Yaga’s sisters (they are identical except in age; they are even called Baba Yaga). ‘Blue-eye’, Sineglazka, a young warrior woman from Russian fairytales, is Baba Yaga’s niece. Even so, the predominant version has Baba Yaga as an old woman who lives alone.

Baba Yaga represents the dark side of motherhood. She appears as the wicked stepmother, the fateful midwife and false mother (in one tale, she even mimics the voice of the hero’s mother in order to lure him closer and gobble him up). Motifs of perversity crop up here and there, though rarely; in one place, she sucks the young heroine’s breasts, in another she asks her to sing her a lullaby and rock her to sleep. Baba Yaga is surrounded by (potential) symbols of female sexuality: her oven is a womb, the hut on hen’s legs is a woman’s belly, Baba Yaga’s mortar also symbolises her womb, though at the same time it could be her mother, Baba Yagishna’s womb. Baba Yaga sometimes chatters away to her mortar and calls it her little mortar-mother (stupushka-matushka).

Baba Yaga’s reactions to women are misogynistic, and she is prone to excessive rivalry with young heroines. Generally she treats the heroines as her servants, finding barely possible tasks for them to perform around the hut.[34] Yet, more often, she appears as a helpmeet and liberator of maidens in misfortune. Even when by mishap she loses her own daughter (or daughters), Baba Yaga seems preoccupied less by despair over her loss than by anger and desire for revenge. She is evil to boys, she’ll eat them up, but she is kind to young men, virtually submissive: she’ll give them food and drink, chat with them, give them magic objects that save them from misfortune and help them in their relationships with beloved maidens. And if the heroes are nice and polite, Baba Yaga and her sisters turn into love-able, generous grannies.[35]

Although she is surrounded by hypertrophied female symbols (big breasts, the mortar, the hut, the oven), Baba Yaga has certain male characteristics as well. She speaks in a basso profundo voice, she has a long nose, a bone or iron leg, long iron teeth and – she can’t cook! She often serves inedible stuff to her guests: iron bread, salty cakes, soup with children’s fingers or spittle swimming around in it. And Baba Yaga often talks ‘like a man’. In the tale Go there – I know not where – and bring me back a thing I lack, Baba Yaga says: ‘He is an ordinary fellow; we could deal with him easily – like taking snuff.’ In other words, Baba Yaga knows about taking snuff.

Baba Yaga’s one and only rival among men is Koshchey the Deathless. While she respects him, Baba Yaga won’t hesitate to give away the secret of his strength to the young hero. Koshchey the Deathless expresses the same kind of respect for and rivalry with Baba Yaga.[36]

By combining such (potentially) female and male symbols, Baba Yaga is, psychoanalytically speaking, what’s called a phallic mother. Some interpreters (such as Geza Roheim) see Baba Yaga’s hut as an image of heterosexual coitus. The image of Baba Yaga – sprawling in her hut with legs spread wide, breasts dangling over a pole, nose poking the ceiling – is really (from a child’s point of view) a matter of the child confronting its parents’ coitus. Other details can be explained in a similar way, for example Baba Yaga’s cannibalism may be a projection of a child’s aggressive hunger. A hungry child wants to eat its mother. Conversely, the mother is a cannibal who wants to eat her own child.

Vladimir Propp explains Baba Yaga’s masculine attributes as a travesty (disguising a man as an old woman) of tribal rituals for the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy. The tribal mother acts the part of a man dressed as a woman, hence a man with a phallus and women’s breasts. There is an interesting detail in Andreas Johns’s book about Baba Yaga. One of the folktales describes how the hero strikes Baba Yaga with a magical wand, and she turns into a woman (!). If Baba Yaga has the ability to turn into different things, to become an intermediary between worlds, the non-human (fantastical, forested, subterranean or unconscious) and the human, then her androgynous nature – or her role of mediating between genders – becomes understandable.[37]

Your author’s heroes are mostly women. The female characters chop and change their roles around, or, more precisely, they assimilate and overlap each other. The daughter in the first part of the diptych takes over the role of the mother: she is not only her nurse but at one moment she becomes her surrogate, her bedel. Kukla has no children. In the web of psychoanalytic meanings, Kukla could be a man, as for that matter all the heroines could be. Beba has a homosexual son, but he is more mature than she, taking over the role of the mother which she herself, allegedly, has not been able to fulfil, and leaving her his adopted daughter. Overall, your author’s diptych could be an interesting field for reading-in and reading-out gender meanings.

THE BATH

In all cosmogonic myths, including the Slavic ones, water means primeval chaos, the original principle and creation of the world. In Slavic beliefs, water flows through the earth’s veins like blood through the human body. Many Slavic beliefs, customs, rituals, demons (vodjanoj, vodjanika, vodnik, vodjanik, vodovik, rusalka) and saints (the pre-Christian goddess Mokosh and her Christian descendant St Paraskeva, also known as St Petka) are linked with water. For water is an ambivalent principle: it brings evil (Gde voda tam beda / Where there’s water, there’s misery), but also cleansing and renewal.

The banya (bath, spa, sauna) has a special place in Slavic folklore, for the Russians above all. The bath is in principle a dirty place, but also a site of purification: you soak in the hot water, letting it chase away illnesses, spells, the thoughts of evil people and so forth. The spirit called Bannik lives there (also known as Bajnik, Bajennik, Bajnushko, Laz’nik). He is either invisible or takes the appearance of a naked, dirty, long-haired old man whose body is caked with mud and leaves. A female spirit lives in the baths as well: Obderiha is a frightful hairy old woman who appears naked or in the shape of a cat, and lives under a little wooden bench. Shishiga is a female demon that takes the shape of a relative or acquaintance, luring people into the baths where they suffocate in the steam.

A proportion of nuptial, birth and funerary rites belong to the bath. Pre-nuptial rituals involving the bride are very similar to those for funerals, for the bride’s departure from the home where she grew up marks her ritual death to her family.

Sensing that a passing traveller is before her, Baba Yaga furiously threatens to eat him up. The hero, as we have already mentioned, tames Baba Yaga with his insolence, and asks her to heat his bath, to begin with, and to prepare him something to eat, and only then will he tell her where he is going and what he seeks.

I. P. Davidov argues that the steam-bath in Baba Yaga’s household is equivalent to the funerary rite that is linked to the site of the bath.[38] The bath is a place of transformation, of ritual ‘deadening’. The principal hero gets ready to travel to the world of the dead, and the ritual steam-bath and the meal are necessary preparations for this journey. The half-blind Baba Yaga recognises the hero by his scent: he smells of ‘living human’ (russkim duhom pahnet, russkoj koskoj), and as a living man he cannot survive in the world of the dead. Baba Yaga herself lives on the frontier between the worlds of the living and the dead. She is the ‘customs officer’, and her hut is the ‘customs house’. It follows that Baba Yaga is ‘bilingual’, fluent in the language of the dead and that of the living. This is why she alone can give the hero his symbolic visa to enter the world of the dead. The ritual steaming is intended to ‘deaden’ the hero (so they won’t recognise him by smell in the world of the dead), to modify or adapt him (so that he can see and talk in the kingdom of the dead). Vladimir Propp argues that ritual food serves the purpose of releasing a dead man’s mouth in the other world. If he is to descend into the kingdom of the dead, the principal hero of the tale must learn a number of other tricks as well: how not to fall asleep there, how not to laugh, how to talk and see like a dead man. Baba Yaga will give the hero a horse for the road to the kingdom of the dead and a ball of thread that will lead him where he wants to go. Baba Yaga herself only rarely leaves her (sentry) post.

The hero’s return to the world of the living is accompanied by new rituals in which water once again plays a key part: dead and alive. Dead water heals wounds and amputated parts of the body, while living water restores the soul to the body.

I think your author’s choice of a spa as the setting for the second part of her fictional diptych is unusually successful. Spas are an important literary topos: a significant portion of Russian literature originated in spas (to mention just one: famous Baden Baden), or take place in or around spas, or even – like Mikhail Zoshchenko’s classic, Scenes from the Bathhouse – take as their theme the comic-absurd communist customs linked to the popular Russian banya. Milan Kundera chose a Czech spa for the settings of his novel The Farewell Party and his story Dr Havel After 20 Years. The topos of the spa succeeds in folkloristic terms, for merely by choosing it as her setting, the author brings together a whole series of ancient legends connected with healing springs, legends about water that heals and apples that restore youth, about living and dead water, and water that gives strength and takes it away (voda sil’naja i bezsil’naja). Baba Yaga’s steam-bath, where the hero ritually steams himself before setting off on his long journey, and the heroines bathe (because Baba Yaga treats them as so many potential tasty morsels), belongs to this series. (‘Go and heat the bath to bathe my niece, and be sure to bathe her well: I want to eat her for breakfast!’)

FEET, LEGS

Demonic beings have feet that give away their demonic nature: they might be hooves, or birds’, ducks’, geese or hen’s legs, or they might have too many toes on their feet (six instead of five), or even have a single solitary foot.

In old China, as also in the Buddhist, Islamic and Christian worlds, it was believed that erosion marks on rocks were the footprints of gods, heroes, prophets and saints. The mother of the founder of the Chou dynasty, for example, became pregnant when she stood in a god’s footprint. The beliefs about footprints in stone – which were left by gods, saints and prophets, but also by beings such as fairies, witches, giants and devils – are scattered all over the place. They have survived down to the present day, with the pavement in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood, where movie stars – our modern gods and goddesses – leave their foot and hand prints.

Some psychoanalysts prefer the interpretation that men see the female foot as a ‘missing penis’, whence, allegedly, stems the male fetish for women’s feet and shoes. And this, we could say, is where the traditional Chinese practice of binding women’s feet (to keep them smaller and ‘more beautiful’) belongs, along with the belief that witches and other female demons have big feet or birds’ feet.

Baba Yaga is perceived as one-legged, even though she isn’t: ‘Ah, you, Baba Yaga, peg-leg!’ (Ah, ty, Babushka Jaga, odna ty noga!). In the fairytale Ivan the Fool, Baba Yaga appears before three brothers and hops around them on one leg.

Baba Yaga’s most frequently mentioned feature is her skeleton leg (Baba Yaga, bony leg!). This leg most often turns up in the singular, and in different guises: made of wood, gold and (most often) bone. Although it is easiest to suppose that the reason for this lack of precision lies in errors that crept into the retelling of the story, some commentators have latched onto this detail, seeking a deeper reason.

In one tale, Baba Yaga turns into a snake before she dies, leading some commentators (such as K. D. Laušin) to find evolutionary characteristics in the figure of Baba Yaga. In other words, first she was a snake (embodying death), then she evolved into the one-legged goddess of death and then she migrated from myth into fairytale, becoming a character: Baba Yaga, bony leg. Her mortar also has its evolutionary aspect: originally, Baba Yaga jumps into the mortar – ‘the mortar runs along the road, and Baba Yaga sitting inside’ (bezhit stupapo doroge, a v nej sidit Baba-Jaga) – but later she flies in it, too. One of the supporting arguments for this ‘evolutionary’ interpretation lies in Baba Yaga’s name: Yaga supposedly derives from the Sanskrit word ahi, meaning ‘dragon’.

(In Serbia, by the way, Baba Yaga appears as an old woman with a hen’s leg – Baba Jaga, kokošja noga!)

Vladimir Propp explains this by reference to certain archaic forms of the Russian tale, where a billy-goat, bear or magpie lies in the hut instead of Baba Yaga. The frontier between animal and human is a person with an animal leg. In the case of Baba Yaga, who according to Propp guards the entrance to the world of the dead, this leg is replaced with the skeleton leg. The Empusa, who guards the anteroom of Hades, has one leg of iron and the other of donkey excrement.

The wheelchair that Pupa uses or the walker, a metal walking-frame that the author’s mother uses, are modern technical equivalents of Baba Yaga’s bony (golden, wooden or hen’s) leg. The description of the dead Pupa’s leg, which has the ghastly colour of rotten meat, might be an allusion to Empusa. And Kukla’s big feet too associate her discreetly with all those female mythical creatures with animal legs.

CLAWS

Baba Yaga’s hut stands on either one or two hen’s legs. These legs have prominent claws. The three-digit hands that can be seen on European vases of the early Neolithic are really birds’ feet. The mythic importance of birds’ claws dates from the Palaeolithic, when prints of birds’ feet were put on cave walls in northern Spain. Later the same three-toed prints appeared on vases, urns and figurines with female shapes. According to Maria Gimbutas, the bird-claw prints testify to the exist ence of the Great Goddess, half-woman and half-bird. Let’s remind ourselves once again that, in some Slavic versions, Baba Yaga herself, not only her hut, is described as an old woman with a hen’s leg.

Women’s fingernails are seemingly the only strong connection with the great goddesses from the era of matriarchy that has lasted down to our own time. Women’s nails take various forms: there are fashions for trimming them, false nails with different shapes and lengths that can be glued onto the real ones underneath, then there are different coloured varnishes for nails and – most recently – a fashion for decorating fingernails with miniature designs. Men still feel that long, pampered nails have an erotic appeal. Only femmes with long, painted nails can be fatales. Long (usually scarlet) nails and shoes with ostentatiously high, tapering heels (which are nothing more than exaggerated substitutes for those dangerous toenails) belong to the stubbornly imperishable attributes of seductive women.

Mevludin experiences Pupa’s outstretched hand as a claw (and her raised hand as a hen’s wing). It is interesting that even in the swimming pool Pupa insists on covering her legs, so they dress her in knee-socks!

NOSE

A long pointed nose is one of Baba Yaga’s most striking features. Her nose was once a bird’s beak which did not manage to turn itself into a regular nose. In other words, all the evidence suggests that Baba Yaga used to be a bird (the Great Goddess) before she turned herself into a humanoid of the female gender and a caricature of her former divinity.

Besides, the nose is a symbol of intelligence. Many tribes, in their ritual invocations of spirits, ancestors and other invisible forces, make use of dust mixed with ground-up, dried animal snouts. The peoples of Siberia – Yakuts, Tungus and others – preserve the snouts of foxes and reindeer, believing as they do that an animal’s spirit dwells in its snout, while the Chukchi utilise the snouts of wild animals as household spirits, guardians of their homes. The Lapps use the snout of the polar bear so that its perfect sense of smell will pass into them.

Psychoanalytically minded researchers will say that Baba Yaga’s nose is a phallic symbol, which fits with the thesis that she herself is a phallic mother.

By assenting to plastic surgery on their noses – and rhinoplasty was the first massively popular cosmetic procedure – women consciously disown their (own) symbolic power and submit to a male concept of beauty. The folk saying ‘My nose – my pride’ expresses the judgement that someone’s nose is an inalienable part of their human identity, one that may not be changed, no matter what it is like. In other words, by disowning their noses, women disown their pride and power. If we adopt this point of view, the whole of women’s history can be read as the history of female self-castration, the deliberate disowning of power. This process of self-castration accelerated with the development of plastic surgery, of its ‘populist’ element, meaning the encouraging of women to kowtow to a particular (male) stereotype of beauty. In women’s history, which proceeds from ugly Baba Yaga towards the beautiful Virgin Mary (or ‘from Beast to Blonde’, as Marina Warner would put it), the Virgin has achieved total victory. Thanks to this victory, many women today look like the cheap plastic Virgins in village churches, or in other words like Paris Hilton!

GUYS

The guys in Russian fairytales are mostly called Ivan: Prince Ivan, Ivan the Knight, Ivan the Peasant’s Son, Ivan the Soldier’s Son, Ivan the Robber, Ivan the Bean, Ivan the White Shirt (Ivashka-belaja rubashka) and so on. If the mother or father conceived the child with an animal, then the Ivans have a ‘bestial’ surname: Ivan the Bull’s Calf, Ivan the Cow’s Son (Ivan Korovij’ syn), Ivan the Mare’s Son (Ivan Kobylij’ syn), Ivan the Bear (Ivashko medvedko) and suchlike. Ivan is usually the youngest of three brothers, and he is in a more difficult position than the other two. The parents punish Ivan, throwing him out of the house, or he gets punished for his own misdeeds. This initial affliction is the motor that drives the plot. Ivan has to solve the problem, defeating the foe and surmounting obstacles, if he is to be rewarded at the end with the throne and the beautiful princess’s hand in marriage.

The most popular Ivan of them all is Ivan the Fool (Ivan-Durak, Ivanushka-Durachek), a passive hero, a fool who whiles away the time stretched out on the stove (Ivan Zapechnyj, Zapechnik), catching flies and spitting at the ceiling. Ivan the Fool is nondescript and grubby, because he spends his days digging around in the ashes (Ivan Popjalov), and his nose is always runny. The two older brothers, busy with practical matters, ignore Ivan the Fool, they play jokes and tricks on him, they often beat him, they try to drown him in the river and so on. When their mother sends him to his older brothers with dumplings for their lunch, Ivan the Fool feeds the dumplings to his own shadow, thinking that it’s a living man. When they leave him tending the sheep, Ivan the Fool blinds them all so that they won’t run away. When they send him to town to buy things for the house, he puts the new table on the road to make its own way home, seeing as how it has four legs like a horse. When he sees scorched tree stumps along the roadside, he thinks they will freeze and he puts cauldrons over them to keep them warm. When the horse reaches the river and refuses to drink, Ivan the Fool pours a whole sack of salt into the water. When the horse still refuses to drink, he kills it.

Emelya the Simpleton is cut from the same cloth, except that he has a powerful helper: a pike-fish that has been given its freedom. It is enough simply to say ‘By the pike’s command…’ – and his wishes are granted straightaway. One day he has had enough of being stupid and ugly, and he orders the pike-fish to turn him into a very handsome young man who is gifted with great intelligence. He duly marries the king’s daughter. Ivan the Bear – human above the waist, bear below it – being tasked by his stepfather to guard the barn door, lifts the door off its hinges, carries it into the house and guards it, while thieves steal all the grain. To get rid of him, the stepfather sends him to the lake with the task of making a rope out of sand on the shore. He is hoping that fiends will catch Ivan and drag him down to the bottom of the lake. But Ivan uses his cunning to trick the fiends, and he returns home with a wagon full of gold.

Ivan the Fool’s most senseless and stupid actions turn out later to have been sensible and clever. For example, he accepts a bag of sand instead of money from a gentleman that he has worked for, but later he meets a beautiful girl who is trapped in a fire, and saves her by pouring his bag of sand over her. The girl is, of course, none other than the emperor’s daughter, and she becomes his wife.

In overcoming his obstacles, Ivan gets help from many quarters: animals (horses, pike-fish, birds, cats and dogs, bears, snakes, frogs, etc.), people, Baba Yaga, magical objects (a ring, a magic flute, etc.). Ivans are ‘chosen ones’ who, thanks to their own wrong choices, magical objects or unusual relatives (sisters that marry powerful bird-emperors), overcome all hardships and finally become heroes: they vanquish their foes, marry the emperor’s daughter, secure great wealth and eventually become emperors themselves.

In their Slavic Mythology, V. V. Ivanov and V. N. Toporov distinguish between two kinds of hero: Ivan the Fool and Ivan the Prince. While Ivan the Fool belongs to the ranks of ‘holy fools’ (yurodivi), who are deeply rooted in the Russian spiritual tradition, Ivan the Prince is a true mythic hero, for he passes the ultimate test, the most difficult of all: the encounter with death. By following the rules, Ivan the Prince finds the way out of the world of the dead and returns to life transformed, which we connect with the ancient mythical motifs of death and resurrection.

The character of Mevludin is undoubtedly analogous to the character of Ivan the Fool. (I’m a fool, love. And once a fool, always a fool – says Mevludin). Pupa, Kukla and Beba – like the three Baba Yagas in the fairytales – indirectly help to make Mevludin’s dream come true, and it is precisely here that the correspond ence between your author’s literary exercise and the myth of Baba Yaga is strongest. The character of Mr Shaker can be identified with the character of the capricious emperor in Russian fairytales, whose rival is Ivan (the Fool or the Prince) and who will try to destroy Ivan before giving him his daughter’s hand. The sexual dimension is more explicit in your author’s text, because Mr Shaker is the king of protein-enriched beverages, with added hormones that turn out to cause impotence. Mr Shaker will end up dead, just like emperors in the Russian tales. One of the ‘Baba Yagas’, namely Kukla, will bring about his death. Dr Topolanek and David, Pupa’s grandson, are minor characters and do not show any particular connection with the Russian fairytale, yet they too are ‘fabulous’ in their own way: David as a deus ex machina (or, as Kukla says, a nepos ex machina), and Dr Topolanek as some kind of contemporary wizard or trickster. Arnoš Kozeny has, of course, the potential to become like Koshchey the Deathless, Baba Yaga’s one and only true rival (and the relationship between Beba and Arnoš Kozeny could be revealing in this context), but even so, this motif remains undeveloped in your author’s text.

Allow me to mention here that a stupid girl, one who spends the whole day picking her nose and lazing on the stove, and eventually becomes a princess or a queen, is completely unthinkable in fairytales! The imagination of folktale-tellers created an equiva lent of male heroism in the characters of Slavic Amazons (the Russian Sineglazka, or the ‘Giant Girls’, Div-devojke, in Serbian folksongs), but grubby, idle, stupid girls are usually punished with death. Wealth, a throne and love are only conceivable as rewards for grubby, idle, stupid guys!

DOLLS

There is an interesting motif in the fairytale Vassilisa the Beautiful. As the mother lies dying, she calls for her daughter and gives her a doll that will help her in life. The doll can only be asked for advice after it has been given food and drink.[39] Vassilisa keeps the doll in her pocket as long as she lives. A doll as the abode of ancestral spirits (the mother’s, in this case) is something that features among the most ancient tribal beliefs of many peoples around the world.

The doll symbolically replaces the dead member of the family, it is the tomb of that person’s soul. Some African tribes have a custom that a widower who remarries makes a little statuette of his dead wife and keeps it in his hut in a place of honour. Respect is shown to the statue, to prevent the deceased from being jealous of the new wife. In New Guinea, after a death, members of the family make a little doll that protects the soul of the deceased. The dead person who is incarnated in the doll only offers to help if the rest of the household looks after it, feeds it, tucks it up in bed and so forth.[40]

Among the tribes of northern Siberia, dolls’ heads are made from birds’ beaks. The doll is a pledge of fertility, so newlyweds take it into the bedroom on their wedding night. The evil spirit Kikimora can also pass into the doll. Then it has to be burned. In Kursk, for example, the doll’s face is left blank, without eyes, mouth or nose, for fear that an evil spirit will pass into the doll and harm the child that plays with it. Dolls which possess protective power are hereditary: mothers bequeath them to their daughters.

The Hantis, Mansis, Nenets and other peoples of northeastern Siberia made a special doll, called the itarm. They dressed it up and put it in a deceased person’s bed. At mealtimes, they would bring it morsels of food and make a show of deferring to it, for the doll served as the dead person’s double. This ritual passed into Russian fairytales. In the tale Teryoshechka, an old childless couple dress a little log in babies’ clouts and put it in a cradle. The log turns into a boy – a motif that endured long enough to reach Carlo Collodi and his famous Pinocchio. The well-known Russian wooden dolls, the matryoshka, emerged from the same typology of mythico-ritual thought.

Hunters in the forests of north-eastern Siberia build little wooden cabins that they call labaz or chamja. A labaz is erected on top of high wooden stilts (like the hen’s legs under Baba Yaga’s hut!) and it serves as a hunters’ storehouse, to keep dried food and other supplies safe. The back of the labaz is turned towards the woods, and the front towards the passing traveller. On ritual sites called urah, similar cult cabins were built, without windows or doors. Itarm dolls were placed in these cabins, dressed in furs. The itarm dolls occupied the whole interior – whence the description of Baba Yaga’s body filling her hut. For that matter, yaga or yagushka is the name of the furry ‘dressing gown’, a garment worn by women in north-eastern Siberia. Arkadij Zelenin insists on this interpretation, and very convincingly; he develops a theory that the Golden Baba or Sorni-nai was a shamanistic divinity of the northern Siberian peoples, who were resisting conversion to Christianity. Later, the legend of the Golden Baba spread – thanks to soldiers, travellers and missionaries – and was revived in fairytales as Baba Yaga.

Although Beba, Pupa and Kukla are female nicknames, it is difficult to believe that the choice of these particular monikers is just coincidence. Beba is a common female nickname in urban Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia, while Pupa is found in northern Croatia, where it derived from the German, and in Dalmatia, where it derived from the Italian. Beba (a doll, but also a newborn baby!), Pupa (Latin: pupa; German: die Puppe; Italian: pupa; French: poupée; English: puppet; Dutch: pop),[41] Kukla (Russian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Turkish, etc.) and finally Wawa (Chinese): they are all polyglot synonyms for ‘doll’.

There are several possible explanations of why your author uses nicknames. The first is connected with the author’s principle, which is to say the simple idea that the heroines are just dolls that come to life in the author’s hands. Perhaps the nicknames serve a ritual–protective function, insofar as your author has respected the taboo against mentioning any witches’ names. One of the reasons could be linked to Baba Yaga, who has sisters, also called Baba Yaga (like the Irish girl Brigid, whose two sisters are both called Brigid). The reason could also lie in the culture of male domination, where women’s names do not matter much anyhow (for a name is a symbol of individuation and identity), in other words where one woman is all women.

In the language of our contemporary culture, a discriminatory gender linkage between women and dolls is stubbornly persistent. People often coo over little girls: ‘My little doll!’ or ‘You’re as sweet as a doll!’ Young girls are ‘as pretty as a doll’; they are ‘Barbies’, ‘babes’ or even ‘dolly birds’. People don’t see anything odd when grown-ups carry their childish nicknames around.

As for Pupa, Beba and Kukla, that trio has its roots in old Indo-European mythology, where goddesses appear in threesomes: as three different goddesses (like the Greek Moirai, the Roman Parcae and the Nordic Norns), then as a single goddess with three functions, or a triad that represents the life cycle: maiden–mother–crone.

Slavic mythology, too, is familiar with the Fates, the goddesses that ordain human fate. In Bulgaria, for example, they are called orisnici (or narachnici), or sudički in the Czech language, or rođenice, suđenice or suđeje in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia. Rodenice are invisible; they turn up when a child is born; they can only be seen by the mother of a newborn child or by a beggar if one happens to come along. What rođenice assign to people is called good luck or destiny, and it cannot be changed. In one short fragment, the author’s mother remembers the story that her own mother told her about her own birth, about seeing three women, two arrayed in white and the third in black.

I would draw your attention to one further detail. The author’s mother, in the little flat that is ‘tidy as a box’, with a wig on her head and a lipsticked mouth, is reminiscent of a doll in a labaz.

In one place, the author compares her mother, not without a certain cruelty, to ‘a traffic warden’. The labaz were also used to mark out the forest. The mother, too, stubbornly keeps a souvenir doll in Bulgarian national costume in a prominent place, completely unaware of its deeper meaning. ‘It’s to remind me of Bulgaria,’ she says simply.

COMB AND TOWEL

A comb and a towel are magical objects that often appear in fairytales. A comb can be turned into a dense forest, a towel can be turned into a river or a sea and either can thus defend the hero or heroine from their pursuer. This pursuer is most often Baba Yaga herself.[42]

The comb is an important object in all mythologies. It occurs in Slavic mythologies as a deadly object, a female symbol, a means of healing and a magical means of liberation. Precisely because of the magical properties that have been given to it, the comb is associated with rules and taboos. For example, a comb must not be exposed to the gaze of the household, left out on the table or other such places, otherwise ‘the angel won’t come’ (angel ne sjadet). Combs have medicinal and protective effects: if somebody was losing his hair, people would comb his scalp with a comb for carding yarn. The comb (and bobbin) were kept in cradles so that the infants would sleep soundly. The South Slavs had a habit of wedging one comb into another, which – in an era without antibiotics! – served as a defence against sickness.

In ceremonies linked with childbirth, a comb served as a symbol of women’s destiny. A newborn boy’s umbilical cord was cut with an axe, but with girls, it was cut with a comb. At christenings, the midwife would hand a male infant to its godfather across the threshold, and a girl across a comb.

Combs were used for prophesying. Girls would place a comb under their pillow when they went to bed with the words ‘Destined one, come here and comb my hair!’ (Suzhenyi, ryazhenyi, prihodi golovu chesat!). If the maiden then dreamed of a young man, it was believed that he would be her chosen one. This is why young girls were given the gift of a comb at weddings.

A comb that was used to comb the hair of a deceased person was held to be ‘unclean’; it would be thrown away in a river, so that death disappeared from the house as soon as possible (chtoby, poskorej uplyla smert), or it would be put in the coffin with the deceased, along with whatever remained of his or her hair.

The towel, linen, kerchief, napkin, shirt, embroidery – all these things are of the highest importance. Vassilisa the Wise, for example, has three crucial possessions which make her strong: a napkin, a comb and a brush.

Sometimes we come across Baba Yaga in fairytales with a bobbin in her hand, and she often gives the heroine of the tale a weaver’s task to do.[43] What is more, if Baba Yaga is well disposed, she will give the heroines gifts beyond price: a golden ring, bobbin and embroidery frame.[44] The bobbins, the hanks of yarn and the yarn itself connect Baba Yaga with ancient Ananka, who rules the world and every single destiny in it. The yarn also connects Baba Yaga with the Moirai, who spin human destiny: black thread for black destinies and white or gold thread for the lucky ones. Baba Yaga’s balls of thread, which help the heroes to reach their goal, are like the ball that Ariadne gave to Theseus so that he could find his way out of the labyrinth when he had killed the Minotaur. Those weaver’s threads connect Baba Yaga with all those powerful old women who oversee the weaving work that women do.

The weaving, spinning, embroidering and sewing that women do have a ritual-magical significance in many cultures. A specially woven piece of linen has protective powers. During plague or cholera epidemics, old women and widows wove linen and sewed towels from the linen. The towels would be placed in the church, hung up on icons or laid in a ring around the house. The aim of these rituals was to protect the place from sickness.

In Serbia and Romania, old women – usually nine of them – would gather at midnight and weave linen in total silence. They would stitch the linen into a shirt, which the young men would take turns to wear before they went off to war. Donning the shirt was meant to protect them from death. There is a magic shirt in Russian fairytales that makes the hero invulnerable.

Weaving and embroidering are the most important skills in the heroine’s repertoire of accomplishments. Linen, embroidery and embroidered kerchiefs serve as a young girl’s fingerprint, her identity card. Vassilisa the Beautiful weaves linen so fine that it can pass through the eye of a needle. She turns it into shirts for the emperor, who is so delighted by her skill that he has the unknown seamstress brought to him. Then he falls in love with her and marries her.

Weaving is a metaphor for the human lifespan: each of us has as much thread and yarn as has been given to us. In the Russian fairytale called The Witch and the Sun’s Sister, Prince Ivan encounters two old seamstresses on his path, with two wooden chests, and they say: ‘Prince Ivan, we don’t have much time left in this world. When we break all the needles in this chest and use up all the yarn in that chest, death will come for us.’

There is an interesting detail about combs and combing in the first part of your author’s diptych, where the daughter is worried about the mother’s wig and ‘ritually’ washes it while her mother is in hospital. I don’t suppose this detail has much to do with ritualistic thinking, but let me mention in passing that care over hair has great ritual importance among primitive tribes. The Eskimo goddess Nerrivik is an old hag who lives under the sea and guards the spirits of the dead. She refuses to defend the walrus hunters until the shaman has ritually combed her hair!

As for the towel, there is an affecting moment in your author’s text: the image of the mother’s father, going into the house with a towel folded under his arm. Who knows, maybe the mother’s subconscious added this image – which had stirred feelings of guilt in her for years – this little salutary detail: the towel that will, as in a fairytale, protect her aged father from adversity.

And one more detail: the author’s mother keeps old embroidery, made by her relatives, in a cupboard. Although her memory is playing up, she knows exactly whose hand made which bit of embroidery. The character of the mother merges on a symbolic level into unarticulated, ‘female’, pre-feminist and pre-literate history. The mother, in short, can ‘read’ embroidery like Braille.

BROOM AND RUBBISH

The broom was witchery’s helpmate: witches fly on broomsticks, they steal milk with their brooms and lay waste crops by dragging their brooms across a field. Baba Yaga covers her tracks with a broom.

Many beliefs and superstitions in the Slavic world are connected to the broom. For example, a house may not be swept when one of the household dies, in order not to chase wealth out of the house, or to offend the soul of the deceased. When they move house, Russians take an old broom with them, for the domovye (brownies) live under the broom. Because it was believed that brooms provoke quarrels, sickness and misfortune, a broom would be tossed down next to the house (or over the roof) of people that you wanted to harm. Envious people hid a broom in the newlyweds’ wagon in order to bring them hurt. Stepping over a broom brought bad luck.

House-cleaning is a sort of test that a maiden must pass when she finds herself in Baba Yaga’s power.[45] Baba Yaga has magical servants in the form of three pairs of hands that perform all her tasks, so she does not need any real help, but she enjoys testing the maidens’ maturity, diligence and character. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, in her book Women Who Run with Wolves, falls back on psychoanalysis to explain this detail as cleansing the soul, purging it, bringing it to order, an educational process of separating the essential from the inessential. Baba Yaga uses the word rubbish figuratively, too, and she thanks the maiden for not showing any undue curiosity.[46]

In Mexico, they have broom festivals to honour the earth goddess Teteo-Innan, with the aim of clearing away all illnesses and troubles. In Christian iconography, a broom is associated with St Martha and St Petronila, who protect all housewives and everyone employed in the household. There is an interesting tale involving a familiar figure from Italian folklore, La Befana, the best and tidiest housewife in the city, who was so absorbed in her domestic duties that she not only failed to recognise the Three Kings among her guests, she even missed joining in their search for Jesus. La Befana appears with a broom, enters the house down the chimney and leaves presents for the children. Even today she survives as a sort of female Father Christmas (she appears at the Epiphany, twelve days after Christmas), yet she also incorporates some elements of the ancient tradition of burning the old year so that the new year can come forward and take its place.

Many beliefs in the Slavic world are linked to ‘rubbish’ and ‘cleansing’. Particular attention was paid to rubbish in the funeral rites. In Moravia, the room where the deceased had lain would be swept clean and the sweepings thrown in the fire. In Serbia and Russia it was forbidden to sweep the house as long as the deceased was there, so as to be sure not to sweep away the living at the same time.

Rubbish was even used for prophesying. In Bohemia and Moravia, the girls would take the rubbish to the crossroads or the midden, and predict who would be their beloved. They would say: ‘Out with the rubbish, young men, widows, whoever wants can come, from east, from west, ahead, behind, through the orchard and into the barn.’ In Siberia, before Christmas, girls used to put the rubbish in the corner of the house, to ‘spend the night’ there, and in the morning they would take it to the crossroads and ask the name of the first man they met. They believed that their future husband would have the same name.

The house could not be swept during certain holidays (Christmas, weddings, Ivan Kupala and so forth),[47] because the souls of ancestors would appear on those days. In Belarus, the householder brandished a little broom around the house after a holiday, saying: ‘Shoo, shoo, little spirits! The older, bigger ones – out through the door, and the smaller ones – use the window.’ (Kish, kish, dushechki! Ktora starsha, i bol’sha, ta dver’mi, a ktora mensha oknami.) The holiday rubbish was burned along with the straw in the courtyard or the orchard, and this custom was called ‘warming the dead’ (gret pokojnikov, or diduha paliti). The ashes were thrown in the river; it was believed this would protect the fields from weeds and wolves. On occasion, they simply ‘swept’ the Christmas holidays. The Bulgarians forbade children to go near the midden, and housewives were not allowed to throw away rubbish when they were facing east. (It was believed that this would make the cattle barren.) The Belarusians and Slovaks used rubbish as a specific against bewitchment. They would secretly collect rubbish from three adjoining houses, burn it and fumigate the suspected victim with the smoke.

It is hard to say if the author’s mother’s manic obsession with cleaning has anything to do with the heritage of Slavic folklore. Yet, it won’t do any harm if I bring this aspect to your attention. The description of the author’s mother asleep in her armchair, with a duster in her hand, could be connected to the Italian legend of La Befana, that devoted housewife, whose sense of domestic duty leads her to neglect what matters so much more in a ‘historic’ perspective: the quest for Jesus. Cleaning is, it would seem, the mother’s strategy for forgetting. She cleans the house of ‘the ancestors’ souls’, and the whole text is a sort of anamnesis of amnesia.

The most inspiring interpretation of the clean–dirty antithesis is Mary Douglas’s classic study Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. The coordinate system of ‘clean– dirty’ structures practically every primitive social community, where thinking about the world, behaviour and customs has been organised via an elaborate system of taboos. Purity, however, which is not a symbol but rather a part of our emotional make-up, can be a way to petrification. Purity is the pledge of our security, it is the enemy of change, ambiguity and compromise.

Interestingly, then, our de-tabooed age, an age of ‘leaving home’ for a space of chaos, is obsessed with cleanliness. Most television adverts, for example, advertise cleaning materials (for our homes, bodies or clothes) and are forever warning us with the formula ‘clean: positive, dirty: negative’. Even the ‘dirty’ has become the ‘cleansed’. Thanks to the media (the Internet and television), in fact, we can indirectly take part in ‘dirty’ things (pornography, sex, war, misery, natural disasters, murders, collective misery, poverty and so forth) while staying clean!

EGG

According to the Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Slavic Mythology, the egg is the beginning of all beginnings, the symbol of fertility, vitality, the renewal of life and resurrection. In the cosmogonic myths of the South Slavs, the egg is a protoimage of the cosmos. In South Slavic children’s riddles, ‘God’s egg’ is the sun and ‘a sieve full of eggs’ is a starry sky. Slavs believed that the whole world was a gigantic egg: the heavens were the shell, the water was the white, the clouds were the membrane and the earth was the yolk. There is a riddle: ‘The living gives birth to the dead, and the dead gives birth to the living’, which contains the old scholastic inquiry: ‘Which came first, the chicken or the egg?’ – and the answer that Silesius gave: ‘The egg is in the chicken, and the chicken is in the egg.’[48]

Symbolising as it did the renewal of life and resurrection, the egg played an important part in funeral rites. An egg would be placed in the dead person’s hands, or in the coffin, or it would be dropped into the grave and buried with the coffin, so that the deceased could come back to life one day. Earthenware eggs have been discovered in Russian and Swedish crypts; statues of Dionysus with eggs in his hand have been found in Beotian graves. The same semantics of the renewal of life define Slavic and other rituals at Easter: painting eggs, decorating trees with eggs, hunting for Easter eggs and so forth. Slavs would place an egg in the first furrow ploughed in a field, and scatter bits of eggshell around the field to make the harvest a good one. Because of their multiple symbolic value, eggs could be used in many situations. People believed that eggs could stop a fire from spreading. If a fire broke out at home, the members of the household would surround the house with eggs in their hands. According to some folklore beliefs, if a man carries a rooster’s egg in his armpit for forty days, a guardian spirit will emerge from the egg and bring the man great wealth.

The egg is a universal symbol. The mythopoetic image of the world emerging from a cosmic egg is common to many peoples: the Celts, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Tibetans, the Indians, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Finns, and others besides. The world was born from an egg, and in some traditions the first human being likewise (Prajapati, Pan Gu). Heroes, too, came out of eggs (if the mother ate the egg). Castor and Pollux, the sons of Leda and Zeus, were born from eggs.

The notion of the world being born from an egg, and of splitting the egg in half, has many variants. The Egyptians imagined that the egg appeared on top of a hill that emerged from the waters of the primordial ocean, Nuna. The god Khnum came out of the egg and created the variety of beings. According to the traditions of Canaan, in the beginning was the ether from which Ulomos (Boundlessness) was born. Ulomos gives birth to the cosmic egg and to Shansora, the creator. The creator breaks the cosmic egg in two and makes heaven out of one half and earth out of the other. According to Indian cosmogonic beliefs, Being springs out of non-Being, and Being gives rise to the egg that cracked in two: a silver half and a golden half. The silver shell became the earth and the gold, the heavens. The outer membrane gave rise to the mountains, and the inner, to the clouds. The tiny veins in the egg became rivers, and the bubble of water in the egg became the ocean. In Peruvian myths, the Creator begs the Sun to make people and populate the world with them. The Sun throws three eggs down to the earth: the higher estates are born from the golden egg, their wives come out of the silver one and the ordinary folk emerge from the copper egg. For some African tribes, the egg is absolute perfection, for the yolk represents the ovum and the white, the sperm. Everyone should aim for perfection – in other words, to become an egg.

Simply lying on eggs has a symbolic significance. Certain Buddhist sects revere hens, for a hen sitting on a clutch of eggs symbolises spiritual centredness and fertilisation of the spirit.

The egg symbolism in your author’s text is plain to see. Apart from the title, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, and the spectacular egg-coffin, let me remind you of the obscure episode where the author spits out a tiny breathing body, all wet from tears and saliva, into the palm of her hand, which is already damp with tears and snot. In this ooze (or egg), she makes out a deformed miniature likeness of her mother, just as Beba dreams of an egg in which she can see her own son, in miniature, curled in the foetal position. An egg is simultaneously tomb and womb. In the Russian tale, the emperor’s daughter’s love is hidden in an egg, the very same that Mevludin offers Rosie as his ‘heart on a silver platter’.

THE HEN’S GOD

In Russian folk traditions, the hen’s god is a ritual object, or amulet, that watches over hens. A stone with a hole in the middle, a clay pot, a dish with no bottom, old worn-out slippers: anything like this can serve as the hen’s god. Usually it would be hung up in the henhouse or the yard in front of the henhouse. The hen’s god guaranteed that the hens could lay eggs continually and it drove away spirits, mostly nasty brownies (domovye, doma i) and Kikimora. An old cracked pot stuck on top of a pole or tree could catch the eye of a passer-by and so avert his bewitching gaze from the household. A hole in the pot, a dish without a bottom, a cracked jug: these were all symbols of mature female sexuality and fertility. A pebble with a hole in the middle had an additional purpose: to protect its owner from toothache.

I would draw your attention to one detail: Beba, representing mature female sexuality, carries an unusual amulet or charm around her neck – a flat stone with a hole in the middle.

BIRDS

Birds appear in all mythopoetic systems and traditions as demiurges, deities and demons; a means of transport for the gods, demigods and heroes; celestial messengers, wizards, immortals, prophets and totemic symbols. Although the symbolism associated with birds is rich and multilayered, birds are above all symbolic postmen, intermediaries between heaven and earth.

The bird plays a key part in all cosmogonic myths, including Slavic myths. The creator sends a bird (a grebe, a dove or suchlike) to bring clay, sand or sea-foam from the bed of the primordial ocean. The creator makes the earth out of this sand or sea-foam, and in the centre of this earth he plants the tree of the world. It has its roots in the earth, its crown in the heavens and its trunk connects heaven and hearth. The crown, or upper world, is an abode for birds (two birds for every side of the treetop, symbols of the sun and moon, day and night).

There is a hierarchy of birds. The eagle usually has the highest, most powerful position. In Bulgarian folklore, the eagle has access to the end of the world, where heaven and earth meet. Fairies, dragons and other mythical beings live at the end of the world. A magpie drops in. The fairies call the magpie every year to harvest the immortelle, which is why they let her bathe in the fairy lake. There she changes her feathers and returns to earth. This is why the magpie is believed to possess healing powers. When a Bulgarian child loses a milk tooth, it throws the tooth onto the roof of the house and says: ‘A bony tooth for you, magpie, so you can bring me an iron one instead!’ The Czechs and Slovaks have an identical custom, except that the children appeal to Baba Yaga instead of a magpie (Ježibaba, stara baba, ty maš zub kosteny, daj mi zub železny!).

In Bulgarian folklore, God came down to earth before the great Flood. Seeing a poor widow-woman with many children and a single hen with chicks, he decided to save her. He told the woman to gather up her children, hen and chicks, and flee from the house, but – he warned her – she should not look back. The inquisitive woman, even so, turned around and she and her children were turned to stone. God succeeded in saving the hen and chicks, and turned them into a con stellation that people call Kvochka (the brooding hen) – meaning the Pleiades.

Bulgarian – and other – cosmogonic beliefs include the notion that the earth is a flat board supported on a cockerel. Earthquakes happen if the cockerel moves or flaps its wings.

Avian typology in myths encompasses not only actual birds, but also feathered mythical creatures such as Anzuda (Mesopotamia), Garuda (India), Simurg, Varagani (Persia), Tanifi (Maori), Ruha (Arab), Straha-Raha, the Stratim Bird, the Nogot Bird, Voron Voronvich, Siren and the Firebird (Russia). There are also hybrid beings with birds’ wings that are able to fly (sphinxes, chimeras, gryphons, sirens, gorgons, etc.). Many gods and divinities turn into birds (e.g. Zeus into a swan), they have bird-like features or birds are included in their attributes (Apollo with a swan and crow, Aphrodite with swans and sparrows, Athena with an owl, Juno with a goose, Brahma with a goose, Saraswati with a swan or peacock, Krishna with a peacock’s feather headgear and so on).

A bird is a symbol of the spirit and the soul. Birds recur most often as the souls of the departed, but according to the beliefs of some Siberian tribes a bird can also be the symbol of someone’s other ‘sleepy soul’, the one that only appears in dreams. The ‘dream-bird’ takes the form of a female grouse, and its likeness can be seen carved on Siberian cradles as a talisman.

The Australian tribe of the Kurnai cherishes gender totemism linked to birds, hence one kind of bird embodies the male sex organ and another, the female. A bird is a metaphor for the sex organ among many peoples. Here are two examples from Croatian folk poetry:

The quail in this instance is a substitute for the vagina, while in the next example the rooster is a substitute for the penis:

In the folklore mythology of many peoples, birds are messengers. They presage death (cuckoos, owls, crows), misfortune, unhappiness, as well as big disasters such as epidemics and wars, but they also herald the birth of a child or a future wedding. As well as portending weather conditions, the life of a bird also serves as a natural calendar (announcing spring and winter).

In popular creeds, birds possess healing powers. Hens are used as a ‘medicine’ against fever, epilepsy, night-blindness and insomnia: ‘Let the hens take away insomnia and bring back sleep’ (Pust kury zaberut besonnicu i dadut son). It is believed that birds can beat illness away with their wings, dig sickness out of the body with their beaks and sew up wounds. Birds can break spells, as many folklore enchantments and oaths testify.[49]

The link between woman and bird brings us to the Palaeo lithic era. Unusual combinations of female and avian traits appear in Palaeolithic cave drawings (Lascaux, Pech Merle, El Pindal): a beak instead of a mouth, a wing instead of a hand, a bird’s expression on a human face. In the well-known ‘narrative’ drawing of the dying man and a wounded bison, and the bird with a woman’s face watching it all, some see the bird as a symbol of the soul leaving the man. The statuettes of the woman-bird, a woman with a bird’s head, date from the same era. The notion of a half-woman, half-bird (Siren) and a bird-soul belong to humankind’s primal imagery, more ancient than the cosmogonic mythologeme of binary birds and bird-demiurges. In the Neolithic era, according to renowned archaeologist Maria Gimbutas, a figurine of a woman-bird with breasts and bulging rump turns up among different representations of the Great Goddess (statuettes of a naked woman, pregnant or giving birth, symbolising fertility).

Birds – ravens, black hens, crows, magpies, swans, geese, etc. – are linked to witches, female demons and ancient goddesses, Baba Yaga among them. Mythical female creatures often have birds’ features (claws, legs, wings or head), the ability to turn into birds or to fly like them. According to one legend, Ivan the Terrible gathers all Russia’s witches together in Moscow so he can burn them, but they turn into magpies and escape. According to another, Metropolitan Aleksey was so convinced that magpies were witches that he banned them from flying over Moscow (!). Peasants often hang dead magpies from the roof to frighten off witches.

In Bulgarian folklore, an ordinary woman can become a witch if she carries a black hen’s egg in her armpit until a black chick hatches. If she slits its little throat and smears the blood on her joints, that ordinary woman will gain a witch’s power – including the ability to turn herself into a black hen.

Peasant farmers in southern Bulgaria believe that freakish creatures called mamnici can steal their crops. Mamnici have no feathers, but they have two heads, and as they hatch from witches’ eggs, they are witches’ offspring. The souls of un christened children turn into small, chicken-like, evil, demonic beings that are called navi. Croats and Serbs believe the souls of unchristened children have birds’ bodies and human heads. In Ukraine and Poland, such a creature is called potrečuk or latawiec.

In Bulgarian folklore, chickens are ‘unclean’, ‘dark’ animals, related to demons. A chicken is a bird that cannot fly. It pecks the ground with its beak, hence it connects people with chthonic powers. Thus the chicken encompasses contradictions: as a kind of livestock, it belongs to people, but equally it belongs to the heavens (being a bird), and at the same time to the underworld (being unable to fly). Notions of Baba (Yaga) sitting on eggs in a nest made in a treetop, of her hut on hen’s legs, of her ability to give birth to forty-one daughters (a quantity that could only have hatched from eggs!):[50] these all build up a picture of a black-feathered demon that is linked with all three spheres of the world.

Birds have always fascinated the human imagination, because they are connected with people’s deepest dreams of flight. Mere mortals are chained to the earth, whereas wings were the endowment of demons, angels, fairies and other mythical creatures. Birds are the gods’ transport of choice (Garuda carried the Indian god Vishnu, and Brahma flew on a goose).

In one of the most beautiful Russian fairytales, The Feather of Finist the Grey Falcon, a maiden begs her father to buy her a feather from Finist, a falcon. After three attempts, her father finally gets a feather and gives it to his daughter in a box. When she opens the box, the feather flies out, lands on the ground and turns into a handsome prince before the girl’s very eyes. The maiden and the prince love each other every night, until the maiden’s sisters find out about the unusual sweetheart from the box and wound him badly. The falcon flies away, and the girl, if she is to find him again, must pass through thirty lands in thirty realms, wearing out three pairs of iron shoes and wearing down three iron staffs. On the way, three good Baba Yagas give her useful gifts: a silver distaff and golden spindle, a silver dish with a golden egg and a golden embroidery frame and needle. In the end, the maiden finds her sweetheart, her feather, and marries him.

The most feathery and aerodynamic Russian fairytale is the tale of Elena the Wise.[51] Everyone flies in this tale: the ‘dark forces’, the ordinary soldier (turned into a robin redbreast), the three sisters (turned into doves) and Elena the Wise herself.

The age-old human fantasy of flight has persisted down to our own aero-age, into mass culture and its genres (sci-fi, cartoon strips, films), and has bred two of the mythical mega-icons of our time: Superman and Batman. Interestingly, among the mass media myth-icons of our time, there aren’t any strong female counterparts. Wonder Woman stays in the margins. Even in the lowlier zones of human imagination, the pilots’ seats are reserved for men.

Only in ancient mythical zones is women’s power of flight unlimited. There they fly on equal terms with men. In the oldest times of all, aerial traffic was unusually dense: the heroes flew on huge birds and magic carpets; along with anthropomorphised winds, flashes of lightning and thunderbolts, dragons and witches, flying daggers, brooms, mortars, dark forces, demons and demonic creatures, gods, deities and brave heroes went in search of their sweethearts – pea-hens, doves, swans and graceful ducks – falcons, eagles and hawks. In these zones, Baba Yaga herself could fly freely. She flew in her mortar, in her mortar-womb, to be sure, but the thing is, she flew.

Your author’s narrative has a striking ornithological framework: the story in the first part, for example, is set in a three-year temporal framework which limits the invasion of the starlings to one of Zagreb’s neighbourhoods, and their departure likewise. In the second part, right on the first day we learn from the newspaper that Arnoš Kozeny is reading that the H5 strain of bird ’flu has been discovered, while on the last day, we learn – again from Arnoš Kozeny’s newspaper – that thousands of hens were slaughtered on Czech farms because of suspicions that they were infected with the H5N1 virus. All in all, there are feathery motifs to spare. I shan’t offer a more detailed analysis here, rather I shall leave you to brood a while on the symbolical eggs in your author’s text.

OLD AGE

In one of the old Bulgarian legends, the Archangel Michael meets a woman and asks where she comes from and who she is. ‘I’m a witch, and I slither into the house like a snake,’ the woman replies. The archangel ties her up and starts to hit her with an iron rod. ‘I shall beat you until you tell me all your names,’ he says. The witch reels off her names, until she reaches the nineteenth. The legend is hard to translate because the multiple oral traditions have produced a ‘Chinese whispers’ effect, creating a delightful alloy of Hebrew, classical Greek, Bulgarian and who knows what else, so that many words can hardly be deciphered with any certainty. This is how it happens that – in the text that has come down to us – the witch did not reveal all her names or all her faces.

Likewise with Baba Yaga. The story about her circulated for hundreds of years by word of mouth, from ear to ear. Although the storytellers (and later the interpreters) set about her with their interpretive rods, they still could not bring all her ‘names’ to the surface. Only partly misogynistic herself, Baba Yaga was (and remains) the object of frightful misogyny: they beat her, dunked her, threw her in the fire, shoed her like a horse, banged nails into her, cut off her head, pierced her with swords, forged her tongue on an anvil, roasted her in the oven, monstrously insulted her in fairytales, children’s jokes and epic poems.[52]

Let us say it once again: Baba Yaga is a witch, but she does not belong to the coven of witches; she can be both good and evil; she is a mother, but she is her own daughter’s killer; she is a woman, but she has no man, nor ever had one; she is a helper, but she also plots and schemes; she has been excommunicated from the human community, but she does communicate with humans; she is a warrior, but a housewife too; she is ‘dead’, but also a living being; she roasts a little child in the oven, but the outcome has her being roasted herself; she flies, but at the same time she is riveted to the ground; she only has a ‘supporting role’, but she is the hero’s mainstay as he (or she) makes his (or her) way to fame and fortune.

Baba Yaga’s character emerged from oral traditions, innumer able nameless storytellers, male and female, who built it up and added to it over many decades. She is a collective work, and a collective mirror. Her biography begins in better times, when she was the Golden Baba, the Great Goddess, Earth Mother, Mokosh. With the transition to patriarchy, she lost her power and became an outlawed horror who still manages to prevail through sheer cunning. Today Baba Yaga ekes a life in her hut like a foetus in the womb or a corpse in a tomb.

In modern terms, Baba Yaga is a ‘dissident’, beyond the pale, isolated, a spinster, an old fright, a loser. She never married, and apparently has no friends. If she had any lovers, their names are not known. She does not care for children, she is no devoted mother, nor – despite her advanced years – has she become a granny surrounded by beloved grandchildren. She is not even a good cook. Her function is at once crucial and marginal: ‘courteous’ or ‘rude’ heroes stop when they reach her hut, they eat, they drink, they steam in her bath, take her advice, accept magical gifts that help them to reach their goals and then disappear. They never come back with a bunch of flowers and a box of chocolates.

The chief reason for Baba Yaga’s heresy is her great age. Her dissidence only takes place within the system of life-values that we ourselves have made; in other words, we forced her into heresy. Baba Yaga does not live her life; she undergoes it. She is an old maid or virgin, who serves as a screen for the projection of (castrating) male and (self-punishing) female fantasies. We have stripped away the mere possibility of accomplishment on any level and left her nothing but a few tricks to scare little children with. We have pushed her to the very edge, in the forest, deep in our own subconscious; we have made a symbolical doll and assigned her a symbolical lapot.[53] Baba Yaga is a surrogate-woman, she is here to get old instead of us, to be old instead of us, to be punished instead of us. Hers is the drama of old age, hers the story of excommunication, forced expulsion, invisibility, brutal marginalisation. On this point, our own fear acts like acid, which dissolves actual human drama into grotesque clownishness. Clownishness, it is true, does not necessarily have a negative overtone: on the contrary, in principle it affirms human vitality and the momentary victory over death![54]

It is interesting that your author chose to foreground old age as the most relevant theme, although in truth she gave clear warning of this in her introduction (‘At first you don’t see them…’). Precisely because the author promotes this theme above the others, she achieves an interesting re-semantisation of all the elements linked to the character of Baba Yaga. I shan’t analyse this more deeply, because that’s not my job, but I will mention one example. The title of the first part, ‘Go there – I know not where – and bring me back a thing I lack’, is the slightly changed title of a Russian fairytale (Go there, I know not where, bring back I know not what / Pojdi tuda – ne znaju kuda – prinesi to – ne znaju chto) and one of Baba Yaga’s most popular riddles. And the title of the second part – ‘Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies’ – belongs to one of Baba Yaga’s sayings in a folktale Vassilisa the Beautiful, although it differs a bit in its meaning from the original (Sprashivaj; tol’ko ne vsjakij vopros k dobru vedet /, Ask, but not every question leads to something good). For some reason your author left out the next bit of Baba Yaga’s reply, which goes: ‘If you know too much, you grow old too soon!’(Mnogo budesh znat’, skoro sostareesh’sja!) All in all, the riddle is meant to prove Baba Yaga’s wisdom and manipulative powers. In your author’s text, Baba Yaga’s riddle suggests the opposite: deeply moving senility. There are other such details. Rereading your author’s text through the prism of Baba Yaga, and vice versa, once again reading Baba Yaga through the thematic prism of old age that your author provides, is a refreshing experience. Don’t let’s forget that epochs of history, cultures and whole civilisations are the result of a struggle for meaning. Once, long ago, Baba Yaga was the Great Goddess, the Golden Baba. Living through the long and burdensome history of her own degradation, Baba Yaga has come down to our own day as, unfortunately, her own caricature.

BABA YAGAS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

Baba Yaga is a ‘dissident’, excommunicated, reclusive, an eyesore, a failure, but she is neither alone nor lonely. In many mythic and ritual folklore traditions besides the Slavic ones, she has innumerable sisters.

The Slovak Ježibaba (also Jenžibaba, or in Czech, Jahababa or Jahodababa) has a nose like a pot and a wide, fat mouth. She uses different stratagems to get her way: she turns princesses into frogs, and can turn herself into a frog or snake. Ježibaba is polycephalic: she can have seven, nine or twelve heads. Polycephaly, cannibalism, metamorphosis and great wickedness are the chief traits of this dangerous Czecho-Slovak Ježibaba. She possesses magical objects: shoes for walking on water, a skull that can bring rain, a golden apple, a golden purse, a stick that turns anything living into stone. Ježibaba often comes into contact with hunters who are hunting the forest animals in her vicinity.

There is an ancient female terror in the folklore of the Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Slovenes, Macedonians and Montenegrins. She is called Baba Roga, Baba Jega, Gvozdenzuba (Irontooth). These peoples are much more afraid of their local witches and sprites than of Baba Yaga. Baba Roga is a bugbear that very few people take seriously, and in that sense it is hard to compare her with the Russian Baba Yaga. Serbian folklore, to be fair, has the Forest Mother (Šumska majka), who combines the characteristics of witch, water-nymph, mountain fairy and Baba Yaga. The Forest Mother is described as a young woman, full-breasted, with long, black, wanton hair and long nails (though she can also be old, ugly and toothless). She shows herself to people naked or dressed in white. The Forest Mother has the power to turn herself into a haystack, a turkey, a cow, a pig, a dog or a horse. She most often appears at midnight. She is skittish, she attacks the newborn babes and infants, but she defends them too. She knows how to cure barren women with preparations of forest herbs. The Forest Mother supposedly has a beautiful voice and is unusually sensual: she often waylays men, leading them deep into the woods, where she has sexual intercourse with them.

Instead of Baba Yaga, the Bulgarians have the Mountain Mother (Gorska maika), who causes insomnia among little children, as well as ‘the witch Mag’osnica’, the Samodiva (a sort of Bulgarian Rusalka) and the Lamia, a female monster, who is a Slavic derivation from the ancient Greek creature of the same name.

The Romanian Mamapadurei lives in the woods in a hut with hen’s legs. The hut is surrounded by a palisade fence with human skulls stuck on the posts. She steals little children and turns them into trees. Baba Cloanta (Jaws) is a tall, ugly old hag with teeth like rakes. She guards a barrel of human souls. Baba Coaja is a child-killer with a long glass nose, one leg made of iron, and nails of brass. Baba Harca lives in the oven and steals stars out of the sky. The Romanian equivalent of Serbian St. Petka (Friday) or St. Paraskeva is Sfinta Vineri, who oversees women’s weaving work. She looks human, but her hen’s foot gives her away.

Vasorru baba is an old woman with an iron nose almost reaching her knees, who lives in Hungarian folktales. Vasorru baba tests young heroes and heroines, and if they aren’t kind to her, she turns them into animals or stones.

The Ragana is a mythical Lithuanian evil-doer (regeti is Lithuanian for to know, to see, to predict; ragas means horn or crescent moon). The Ragana has a mortar that she sleeps in or flies in, propelling herself with a broom and pestle. In winter, the Raganas swim in the open air, amid the ice, and sit high in the birch-trees combing their long hair. Their evil nature is more obvious in summer, when they destroy the crops, curdle the milk, kill newborn babes and make trouble at weddings, where they have been known to turn the groom into a wolf. The Ragana is connected with death and resurrection, or rather regeneration.

The Polish Jendžibaba, or Jedsi baba, is a woman who trots along on hen’s feet (pani na kurzej stopce), and she shares all the general characteristics of the Russian Baba Yaga.

The Lusatian Sorbs[55] believe in the wurlawy (or worawy), women of the forest who emerge from the trees at precisely ten o’clock in the evening. They set about ploughing the fields, and as they plough, they make a great hubbub. Wjera or Wjerobaba is the Lusatian Sorb version of Baba Yaga.

An old woman with an iron nose (Zhaliznonosa baba) ambles through Ukrainian fairytales, legends and creeds. She is followed by thirty babas with iron tongues and an iron baba (Zhalizna baba) whose house stands on duck’s feet.

The Norwegian variant of Baba Yaga could have been assembled from three women who appear in Norwegian fairytales. One is an old woman, the ‘old mother’ (gamlemor), whose long nose gets wedged into a tree stump and stays wedged there for a hundred years or so. The hero Espen Askeladd (a Norwegian version of the Russian Ivan the Fool or Ivan Popjalov) helps the old woman to free her nose, and in return he is given a magic flute. The second is the trollkjerring or haugkjerring, an old witch, while the third is the kjerringa mot strommen (roughly, ‘the woman who goes against the stream’), a stubborn woman, a contrary character, even a shrew.

Finno-Karelian folklore has the Syoyatar. Sparrows fly out of her eyes, crows fly out of her toes, vipers slither from under her fingernails, ravens flap out of her mouth and magpies out of her hair. The Syoyatar embodies evil and never helps anybody, but it is a comfort to know that she is no cannibal. Akka, another Finno-Karelian evil-doer, is much closer to Baba Yaga. She lives in the woods or near the seashore, she threatens to eat passing travellers, she has breasts the size of buckets and she can wrap her legs three times around the hut. Like Baba Yaga, Akka wants the hero or heroine to accomplish different tasks (heating the bath, feeding the animals, caring for the horses), and she rewards good service with useful advice.

Baba Yaga has numerous relatives in Western Europe. Let’s just mention that in France – the land of foie gras – there are legendary females with goose feet. Arie, or Aunt Arie (Tante Arie, Tantarie) has iron teeth and goose feet. Tantarie punishes lazy weavers and rewards hard-working ones. During the Christmas holiday, she appears on a donkey and hands out presents. Tantarie lives in the cave where she guards her chest with its jewels, and she only takes off her golden crown, studded with diamonds, when she bathes. In Germany, Perchta is an old woman with big goose feet, who carries her broom around with her, as well as a needle and scissors. She cuts open the stomachs of lazy girls and sloppy housewives with her scissors and fills them up with rubbish. The famous Frau Holle – a tall, grey-haired woman with long teeth, who frightens little children and tests the kindness and patience of young maidens – has features in common with Baba Yaga.

Turks, Tartars, Bashkirs, Uzbeks, Chuvash, Turkmen, Kirghiz, Azerbaijanis, Kumyks, Nogais and many other peoples believe in the Alabasti. The Alabasti is demonically evil, a hideous woman with dangling breasts, chaotic hair and a talent for metamorphosis. She has bird’s legs (or so they believe in Azerbaijan), or even hooves (according to the Kazakhs). The Tartars of Kazan believe that Alabasti has a single eye in the middle of her forehead, and a stone nose. She has no flesh or skin on her back, so her internal organs are exposed for all to see, and she has sharp talons instead of fingers and toes. In Kirghizia, they believe in two Alabastis: the very evil black one (kara) and the less dangerous blonde one (sari). Alabasti is never without her magic book, comb and money. In the picturesque legends of the Chuvash, Alabasti is a voluptuary who keeps company with hunters, brings them luck, gives them her own milk to drink and feeds them with her own flesh that she slices from her ribs. Alabasti can be tamed by stealing a hair from her head or her precious possessions: the comb, book and money. The Turks believed that Alabasti becomes good and docile if you pass a needle through her clothes. Alabasti brings illness and nightmares, she drinks her victims’ blood and she is especially dangerous to women in childbed and to newborn babes. Alabasti loves horses, and she rides them by night. Her origins are by no means clear. Some suppose that she is Turkish, and others, Iranian. Al may be the name of an ancient deity, close to ilu (among Semitic tribes), while the Indo-European basti means spirit or deity. Alabasti’s k66ith and kin are scattered among many peoples, and their names are al pab, ali, ol, ala zhen, hal, alk, ali, almazi, almas, kara-kura, shurale, su anasi, vutash. Baba Yaga is her Slavic sister.

All in all, it is not hard to conclude from this quick survey that Baba Yaga straddles the globe: the ‘baba genus’ is international, and Baba Yaga’s kinsfolk can be found in Asia, South America and Africa; ‘Baba Yaga’s International’ is making trouble here, there and everywhere, as it has always done.[56]

This impressive, grandiose mythic transmission has been going on for centuries. The ‘old crones’ International’ – all those monstrosities, malefactors, frights, freaks and demons, those ‘scum of the earth’, those ‘prisoners of want’ – is united by the fact of female gender. Ancient (and other) myths diffused around the world, getting contaminated by Christianity and Christian myths, as well as local pre-Christian, folkloric and mythico-ritual creeds. And all that long-lived, labyrinthine, fertile, profoundly misogynistic but also cathartic work of the imagination gave birth to Baba Yaga.

AND HERE, MY FRIEND, COMES THE STORY’S END

It seems, dear editor, that the moment has come for us to part. I hope the sudden change of tone won’t confuse you: we have sped through several thousand signs together; we have pecked at grains of language side by side; they say that reading should be interactive, just like making love, so the assumption is that we have not remained total strangers to each other. Human rituals require that we stay together for a little longer and share a prohibited postcoital cigarette.

I’m sure you won’t mind admitting that there was too much of everything. In fact, you were afraid at one point that I would never stop. In some places you sighed with boredom, in others you yawned, in others again your forehead creased in a frown. You had fiendish folklore coming out of your ears. You were given an overdose, I know. At first you felt as if somebody had shut you in a box. It was cosy enough – mummy’s tummy, an improvised cottage, a bit of unthreatening darkness: they all stir the childish imagination. And then you felt cramped, and more cramped, until you almost couldn’t breathe. In a well-made text, the reader should feel like a mouse in cheese. And that’s not how you felt at all, is it?

I realise that this attack of textual claustrophobia was brought on by repetitious rituals from the world of folklore. Don’t touch this, do touch that; don’t cross the threshold – step over it. Throw that tooth over the roof, no no, good grief, over the fence. Spit over your right shoulder, wait, stop! Over the left! You only have to go home to the next village and the signal code changes. In the fucking village of Small Baba, the locals spit over their left shoulder, against spells, while in fucking Big Baba, they do it over their right shoulder. And how lucky you are, you’re thinking, to live in a de-ritualised and de-mythologised world where a person can relax, kick off his shoes, put his feet on the table and twiddle his thumbs without fear of baleful consequences. But perhaps there’s something else on your mind? Fear of the existence of parallel worlds, for example?

In the Serbian fairytale called The Speechless Language, a shepherd goes into a wood, on his way to his sheep. All at once the woods catch fire, and a snake is trapped by the blaze. The shepherd takes pity on the snake and saves it. The snake winds itself around the shepherd’s neck and orders him to take him to his father, the snake-emperor. He warns him that the snake-emperor will offer him immense riches, but he says no, all he’d want from the snake-emperor is to know the animal language. So that is what he asks for. At first the snake-emperor refuses, but the shepherd is stubborn and eventually the snake-emperor gives in.

‘Stop! Come closer, if that is what you want. Open your mouth!’

The shepherd opens his mouth, and the snake-emperor spits in his mouth and says: ‘Now you spit in my mouth!’ The shepherd spits in his mouth.

They spit in each other’s mouths three times, and then the snake-emperor says: ‘Now you possess the animal language. Go, and tell no one what you know, for if you tell a living soul, you will die that same moment.’

And this shepherd with the newly acquired skill – of understanding speechless language, the language of animals and plants – became a wise man.

Language serves the process of mutual understanding. We enter effortfully, we gesticulate, we wring our hands, we explain, we translate our thoughts, we interpret, we break into a sweat, we furrow our brows, we act as if we have understood, we are convinced that we have understood, we are convinced that we know what we are talking about, we are convinced that they understand us, we translate other languages into our own. And all our endeavours boil down to this: we miss the meaning. For if we were truly to understand one another, speaker and listener, writer and reader, you and I, we would have had to spit into each other’s mouths, entwining our tongues and mixing our spittle. You and I, editor, we speak different languages: yours is only human, whereas mine is both human and serpentine.

Are you frowning now? Thanks a lot, you’re thinking, it’s too much already. Don’t forget that what you have found out, struggling through to reach the end of my text, is only a smattering, a trivial fraction of the whole ‘babayagology’. And what were you thinking of? That the entire history of Baba Yagas (sic!) can fit into a few dozen pages? And that you have solved the problem with a bit of help from Aba Bagay, an obscure Slavic scholar from eastern Europe who is only too pleased to shed a bit of light on these matters?

I opened the door just a crack, and let you scratch the tip of this enormous iceberg. And the iceberg is formed of the millions and millions of women who have always kept the world going and still keep it going. (I’m speaking your language now, that’s enough of the picturesque stuff.) I am sure that in reading my ‘Baba Yaga For Beginners’ you did not notice one particular detail: in many tales, Baba Yaga sleeps with a sword beneath her head. We have found all manner of things in your author’s fictional dyptich, but not a single mention of a sword!

Let me make myself quite clear: I am not like your author. I know about that sword under Baba Yaga’s head, and I believe in its deep significance. I’m convinced that accounts are kept somewhere, that everything is entered on the record somewhere, a painfully huge book of complaints exists somewhere, and the bill will have to be paid. Sooner or later, the time will come. So let us imagine women (that hardly negligible half of humankind, after all), those Baba Yagas, plucking the swords from beneath their heads and sallying forth to settle the accounts?! For every smack in the face, every rape, every affront, every hurt, every drop of spittle on their faces. Can we imagine all those Indian brides and widows rising from the ashes where they were burned alive and going forth into the world with drawn swords in their hands?! Let’s try to imagine all those invisible women peering out between their woven bars, from their dark bunker-burkas, and the ones who keep their mouths hidden behind the burka’s miniature curtains even when they are speaking, eating and kissing. Let’s imagine a million-strong army of ‘madwomen’, homeless women, beggar women; women with faces scorched by acid, because self-styled righteous men took offence at the expression on a bare female face; women whose lives are completely in the power of their husbands, fathers and brothers; women who were stoned and survived, and others who perished at the hands of male mobs. Let’s now imagine all those women lifting their robes and drawing their swords. Let’s imagine millions of prostitutes around the world reaching for their swords; white, black and yellow slaves who were trafficked, sold and resold at meat markets; slaves who were raped, beaten, stripped of their rights, and whose masters cannot be stopped by anybody. The hundreds of thousands of girls destroyed by Aids, victims of insane men, paedophiles, but also of their lawful husbands and fathers. The African women who are shackled with metal rings; the circumcised women with their vaginas sewn up; the women with silicone breasts and lips, botoxed faces and cloned smiles; the millions of famished women who give birth to famished children. The millions of women who pray to male gods and their representatives on earth, those shameless old men with purple, white, gold and black caps on their heads, tiaras, berets, keffiyehs, fezzes and turbans, those symbolic substitutes for penises – all those ‘antennae’ that help them to commune with their gods. That all these millions of women, instead of going to the church, the mosque, the temple or the shrine, which anyway were never really theirs, go in quest of a temple of their own, the temple of the Golden Baba, if they really have to have temples at all. That they would finally stop bowing down to men with bloodshot eyes, men who are guilty of killing millions of people, and who still have not had enough. For they are the ones who leave a trail of human skulls behind them, yet people’s torpid imaginations stick those skulls on the fence of a solitary old woman who lives on the edge of the forest.

I, Aba Bagay, belong to the ‘proletarians’, to the hags’ International, for I am she over there! Don’t tell me you’re surprised. You might have expected it; you know yourself that women are ‘masters’ of transformation, a talent that has been dinned into them by many centuries of living underground, where they ‘mastered’ all the skills of survival. After all, weren’t they told right at the start that they were born of Adam’s rib and only had a place in this world so they could give birth to Adam’s children.

Farewell, dear editor! Soon I shall change my human language for a bird’s. Only a few more human moments remain to me, then my mouth will stretch into a beak, my fingers will morph into claws, my skin will sprout a covering of glossy black feathers. As a sign of goodwill, I am leaving you a single feather. Take care of it. Not to remind you of me, but of that sword under Baba Yaga’s sleeping head.