Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

1

‘Put this lady’s massage on my account.’

2

‘Wow, mamma, tits like a hippopotamus!’

3

Ruslan and Ludmila, transl. by Jenni Blackwood (www.sunbirds.com/lacquer/readings/1015)

4

‘He flattered me, seducer fashion! / And I succumbed to reckless passion… Deceiver, profligate! Oh shame! / But tremble, heartless libertine!’

5

‘The golden nightingale!’

6

‘Thank you, pussycat!’

7

Goli Otok and St Grgur are islands off the Croatian coast where real or suspected Soviet sympathisers were imprisoned in the clamp-down following Yugoslavia’s break with Stalin in 1948.

8

‘OK, little one, I see that you’re never going to learn.’

9

‘You are very talented, Jana, very talented…’

10

‘You’re as lovely as a quail’s egg.’

11

‘Marlena, if you leave me, I’ll kill you, honestly, don’t laugh, I’ll kill you, you bitch, just watch me, I’m telling you…’

12

I should warn you at the outset about the difficulties of transliterating Russian and other Slavic languages into English. There is no consensus on the best mode of transliteration, and the scope for confusion is broadest in texts – such as this – which cite from languages that are written in the Cyrillic alphabet (Russian, Bulgarian, etc.), as well as from those written in the Roman or Latin script (Croatian, Czech, Polish, etc.). As this is a private letter, meant ‘for your eyes only’, I have not tried to take a consistent approach. Russian and Belorusian names and words have for the most part been transliterated. The other Slavic languages are easier to pronounce than you suppose, if you follow these simple rules: š = sh (Mokoš = Mokosh); č., ć = ch (domaći = domachi); ž = zh (život = zhivot); j = y (Jaga = Yaga), đ = dj (prođ-e = prodje), etc.

13

‘They approached the hearth where they found two old grannies with two balls of wool: one was winding the wool, the other unwound it. The one who was winding was day, and the other was night.’

14

K. V. Chistov, Zametki po slavjanskoj demonologii, Baba Jaga. Moskva: Zhivaja starina 1997.

15

Maria Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess. London: Thames & Hudson 2001.

16

Tihomir R. Ðorđević, Veštica i vila u našem narodnom predanju i verovanju. Beograd: Srpski etnografski zbornik 1953.

17

In the classic film Cat People (1942), directed by Jacques Tourneur, New York fashion designer Irena Dubrovna is a Serb by extraction. When they are smitten with jealousy or rage, women from the land of her ancestors turn into bloodthirsty wildcats, or in this case panthers, that kill their mates. In the scene that takes place in a New York restaurant, called The Belgrade, an unknown woman recognises Irena Dubrovna and her secret feline self. This woman comes up and says something in Serbian (with a strong American accent, naturally): Ti si moja sestra, meaning ‘You are my sister.’

18

Tihomir R. Ðorđević op. cit.

19

Petar Petrović Njegoš (1813–1851), the Vladika (Prince-Bishop) of Montenegro, was a great poet as well as a ruler and warrior. His verse drama Gorski Vijenac (The Mountain Wreath), about a massacre of ‘renegade’, i.e. pro-Turkish, Montenegrins, is a classic of South Slavic literature.

20

This lack of hair even features in Roald Dahl’s popular children’s story The Witches, where baldness is one of the clues that a woman is a witch. (‘That is why they have claws and bald heads and queer noses and peculiar eyes…’) Which is why witches all wear wigs to hide their real identity.

21

Istria is a triangular peninsula on the northern coast of Croatia.

22

Konavle is a valley at the southern end of Croatia.

23

The following observation may strike you as trite, but isn’t it interesting that commonplaces related to genocide are so rapidly forgotten? If nothing else, this is a reason why we need to keep reiterating that universal male misogyny, down the centuries, has produced cultural and symbolic genocide against women. One of the worst eruptions of this misogyny was the European inquisitorial witch-hunt that lasted practically for four centuries. The Inquisition began around the end of the 12th century and the beginning of the 13th, when Pope Gregory IX sent his inquisitors to the territories contaminated by heresy, and then officially entrusted the conduct of inquisitions to the Dominican order (1235). The congregation of cardinals was established fully in 1542, with legal authority over the inquisition. An estimated 100,000 witches were burned in Europe between 1560 and 1660, though the actual numbers are not known. The first trial of witches took place in Toulouse in 1335. After that, witch-hunting spread across Europe like a prairie fire, and 1486 brought the publication of the remarkable book by Kraemer and Sprenger, the Malleus Maleficarum. The inquisitors now had ideological underpinning: the first textbook which put their labours on ‘a solid scholarly foundation’. There are documents about the victims of inquisitorial torture: incomplete, to be sure, but they do exist. Moreover, many more women suffered outside the inquisitorial system. Their inquisitors were their neighbours, from the same village, motivated not so much by Christian obedience as by local beliefs and superstitions. Village women suspected of being witches were dunked in water. If they sank and drowned, it proved they were not witches. If they kept afloat, they were fished out of the water and beaten to death. Women believed to be witches were even defiled after death. Their bodies were penetrated with wooden poles and pierced with needles, or iron nails were driven into their mouths, and their graves were sown with poppy seeds (the dead woman would have to count each and every seed). The graves of suicides were treated in the same way.

24

In traditional Russian huts, the lug (in Russian: grjadka) was a staf for pole where the peasants hung their washing or babies’ cradles.

25

‘Here are your answers!’ said the beautiful princess. ‘The little wooden box – that’s me, and the little golden key – that’s my husband.’ (From The Enchanted Princess)

26

Baubo appears as a figure with a hypertrophied vulva, or more often with a vulva-face. Sometimes she is shown as a dea impudica, a shameless goddess, riding a hog with her legs spread wide.

27

‘The old woman came onto the porch, shouted in a voice like thunder, whistled vigorously, and at once strong winds blew up all around her and whirled about, making the hut shake.’ (From The Enchanted Princess)

28

In a Serbian fairytale, The Bird Girl (Tica devojka), a baba sits on top of a mountain with a bird in her lap, luring young men and turning them to stone. Only if he approaches from behind and roughly overcomes her can a young man avoid being turned to stone (i.e. symbolically made impotent) and obtain what he yearns for, i.e. ‘the baba’s bird’(!). When he kisses and fondles the bird (!), it turns into a maiden, the young man’s bride-tobe: ‘She yields, giving him the bird from her skirt, and emits a sort of sky-blue wind from her mouth which wreathes around all the petrified people and brings them back to life. The King’s son catches hold of the bird and begins kissing it sweetly, and his kisses turn it into the most beautiful maiden of all.’

29

In India and South Africa today, men infected with Aids sometimes believe that intercourse with a virgin will cure them. There are specialised brothels where girls aged five to ten are bought from their parents and made available for ‘medicinal purposes’. The girls almost always catch Aids themselves.

30

‘Soon a frightful noise is heard from the woods: the trees tremble, the dry leaves rattle; Baba Yaga bursts from the woods, riding in a mortar, waving a pestle, brandishing a broom and rubbing out her traces as she goes.’ (From Vassilissa the Beautiful)

31

In Ukraine, for example, a witch-doctor would bring water from three wells early in the morning, mix the dough, bake bread in the oven, take it out and then pretend to push the sick child into the oven instead. Meanwhile the child’s mother had to go around the room three times, stopping each time in front of the window to shout: ‘Old woman, what are you doing?’ The witch-doctor would call back: ‘I’m kneading the dough!’

32

21 ‘Chuviliha ran to the hut, ate and drank her fill, then she went outside. She rolled on the ground, and said: “I’m rolling around because I ate Teryoshka’s flesh.” High in an oak tree, Teryoshka shouted down: “Roll, witch, it is your own daughter’s flesh that you ate.”’ (From Vassilisa the Beautiful)

33

‘Vassilisa lights the kindling in the skulls along the fence-posts, goes to the stove and takes out the food and sets it before Baba Yaga, and there is enough for ten. She fetches kvass, honey, beer and wine from the cellar. The old woman eats it all up, drinks everything to the last drop, and leaves Vassilisa only a little broth, a breadcrust and a morsel of pork.’ (From Vassilisa the Beautiful)

34

Baba Yaga drives away Vassilisa, who, on completing Baba Yaga’s tasks, helps the mother’s spirit that is embodied in a doll: ‘You know what, blessed daughter, be off with you! I don’t need blessed ones!’ (From Vassilisa the Beautiful)

35

– ‘And you, granny, rest your old head on my strong shoulder, and tell me what to do.’

– ‘Many’s the young man that has passed this way, but very few that spared a kind word for me. Take my horse, child. It is faster than your own, it will carry you to my middle sister, she will advise you what you should do next.’ (From About the Apples that Restore Youth and the Living Water)

36

‘I know it very well!’ says Baba Yaga. ‘She is with Koshchey the Deathless. It will be difficult to reach her; it is no simple matter to deal with Koshchey the Deathless: his death rests on the point of a needle, that needle lies inside an egg, the egg is inside a duck, the duck is inside a rabbit, the rabbit is inside a trunk, the trunk is at the top of a tall oak tree and Koshchey guards that tree as if it were his own eye.’ (From The Emperor’s Frog Daughter)

– ‘Beyond thirty lands, even the thirtieth kingdom, beyond the fiery river, lives Baba Yaga. She has a mare that can circle the earth every day. She has many other fine mares besides. I was her shepherd for three days together, I did not lose a single mare, and afterwards Baba Yaga gave me a foal for my pains.’ (From Marja Morevna)

37

The most interesting tale from the transsexual point of view comes from Bulgaria: The Old Woman’s Maiden (Babinoto devojče). Several times, the old woman’s maiden puts on a man’s clothes and saves the emperor’s daughter. The emperor offers her his daughter’s hand in marriage, but the false young man thrice refuses to become the emperor’s son-in-law. In truth, the maiden is more interested in the dragon, whose prisoner she was for some time, but the dragon is angry with her because she accidentally burned him with candle wax (castrated him?), and the wound won’t heal. She tries to return to the dragon several times, but the dragon harshly spurns her, sending her to one of the lower kingdoms. These kingdoms are, amazingly, arranged like the floors in a high-rise building: three above, six below. In the end, the maiden is forced to change gender when she is turned, magically and forever, into a young man, who then marries the emperor’s daughter.

38

I. P. Davidov, Banja u Baby Jagi. Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta, Serija 7. Filosofija 2001.

39

‘Vassilisa went to her larder, fetched supper for the doll and set it down before her, saying: “Here you are, dolly, taste it and hear about my misfortunes: they are sending me to Baba Yaga, by torchlight, and she will eat me up!” The little doll ate her supper, and her eyes lit up like two candles: “Fear not, Vassilisa!” she said. “Go where they send you, and take me with you. As long as I am with you, Baba Yaga can do you no harm!”’ (From Vassilissa the Beautiful)

40

The Japanese electronic invention, the so-called ‘digital pet’ called tamagotchi, needs taking care of in just the same way as the wooden dolls in folk beliefs. The toy’s owner has to monitor its ‘happiness level’ every day (tamagotchi has to be fed and bathed, and the owner has to play with it a bit), otherwise the digital pet ‘dies’.

41

The people of the Mansa tribe, in Siberia, say pupig or pupi for guardian spirits or the spirits of their ancestors, dwelling in little totemic wooden dolls.

42

‘“Here are your comb and towel,” the cat said. “Take them and flee; Baba Yaga will set off in pursuit of you, and you keep your ear to the ground, and the moment you hear that she is drawing close, throw down the towel – it will turn into a great, broad river. If Baba Yaga crosses the river and sets after you again, put your ear to the ground once more, and as soon as you hear her drawing near, throw down the comb – a thick, thick forest will spring up, and she won’t be able to make her way through.”’ (From Baba Yaga)

43

‘The little girl came and arrived, came and arrived. The little hut stands still, and Baba Yaga bone leg sits in it, weaving. – “Hello, auntie!” – “Hello, dearie.” – “Mother sent me to borrow a needle and thread to sew up my shirt.” – “Very well, sit yourself down without ado, and weave.”’ (From Baba Yaga)

44

In the fairytale called Palunko the Fisherman and his Wife, by the Croatian writer Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić, the goddess Dawn-Maiden gives ‘embroidered linen and a pin’ to a faithful wife, and these things save her from misfortune. ‘A white sail arose from the linen, and the pin turned into a ship’s wheel. The wind filled the sail until it bulged like a bonny apple, and the wife grasped the wheel with her horny hand. The wreath around the shuttle broke, the shuttle flashed across the vast sea like a star across the blue heavens! Wonder of wonders, the boat flies from the dreadful pursuer, and the fiercer the hunt, the more it helps: the stronger the gale, the faster the boat runs before it, and the faster the sea, the faster the boat across the sea.’

45

‘When I go out tomorrow, take care to sweep the yard and the hut, prepare some food, do the laundry, go to the barn and take four ells of wheat and sort it from the cockles. If you don’t do as I say, I’ll eat you up.’

46

‘I don’t like my rubbish being taken out of my hut, and nosy-parkers get eaten up!’ says Baba Yaga. (From Vassilissa the Beautiful)

47

Ivan Kupala is a traditional holiday in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Celebrated in late June or early July, Ivan Kupala began as a pre-Christian fertility festival to mark the country people’s connection with Dažhbog, the Slavic god of the sun. Rituals involved water (for healing and purification) as well as fire (for light energy).

48

37 It suffices at this point to remind you of the couplet, quoted above: ‘We move around with silver oars, our vessel is an eggshell’ – meaning Baba Yaga’s mortar or womb, which is the daughter’s and the mother’s at the same time (stupushka–matushka)!

49

38 ‘The white bird flew over the white field; it carried white milk in its beak, which it let drip as it flew. The white milk fell onto white stone. This left a trail which bewitched our… [the name of the person who is under a spell should be inserted here]’; ‘Be gone, spell, to the yellow sands, where there are big birds with yellow beaks and grey wings. With their beaks they will tear off, with their wings they will sweep away, and will help… [the name of the person]’; ‘On the white birch-tree, the Nagajbird is sewing up the wounded chest with its beak’; ‘Three brazen-birds, don’t bore holes in the oak, bore out the spells instead.’

50

I assume that your author’s title, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, derives from this archetypal image. However, a parallel reading of the title is possible, one that would see the egg as, to put it bluntly, a symbol of (female) creativity. If we pursue the reading in this key, then the picture of female creativity looks rather grim. Female artists are Baba Yagas, isolated, stigmatised, separated from their social surroundings (they live in the woods or on its edge), wholly reliant on their own powers. Their role, just like the role of Baba Yaga in the fairytales, is marginal and constricted. On the other hand, the same title can be read as a cheerful apology for women’s creativity.

Linguistic analysis could lead to a comically grotesque inversion of the phenomenon of female creativity. For every child in Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia knows the nursery rhyme:

Mokosh, as we know, is the pagan Slavic goddess of fertility (Mokoš, Makoš, Mat syraja zemlja). Over time, Mokosh became the guardian of pregnant women and women in childbirth, and under Christianity she gained the name of St Paraskeva or St Petka (meaning ‘Friday’).

In American showbiz jargon, the expression to lay an egg means to fail in a performance – more bluntly, to ‘corpse’ or ‘die’. Presumably your author did not mean to invoke that remote connotation; even so, given that our theme is Baba Yaga in all her ambivalence, it invokes itself.

51

I have adapted and abbreviated this tale for you. The portions in italics belong to the original.

Once upon a time, a young soldier guarded a demon which, taking pity on it, he released. The demon put the soldier on its wings and carried him off to its castle, where the soldier’s only task was to guard the three beautiful daughters. It was not a difficult service, the young man could have carried on forever, but he noticed that the maidens disappeared somewhere every night. One night he crept into their room and saw the girls stamp their feet on the floor, turn into doves and fly out of the window. The soldier followed suit, turned into a robin redbreast and flew after them, until the doves flew down and alighted in a grove of green trees.

The doves in that place were beyond number; they covered the whole grove. There was a golden throne in the middle of the grove. Time passed, and then heaven and earth flashed, a golden carriage flew through the air pulled by six dragons in harness, with Queen Elena the Wise, whose beauty was beyond imagining, let alone describing.

The youth fell in love with Elena the Wise, mistress of the doves, and he decided to follow her by stealth to her castle. By hiding in a tree, he could keep her chamber in view as he warbled so sweetly and sadly that the queen did not sleep a wink all night. In the morning the queen caught the robin and set him in a golden cage, which she carried into her room. As soon as the queen fell asleep, the robin turned into a fly, flew out of the cage, landed on the floor and turned back into the fine young man. He approached the bed and could not help himself kissing the queen on her honey lips. Then he turned straight back into a fly, went back into the cage and became the robin again. Elena the Wise awoke, looked around, saw no one. She was awoken several times again that night, and in the morning she used her magic book to see everything as plainly as if it was written on her hand.

‘Ah, so it was you, impudent fellow!’ shrieked Elena the Wise. ‘Out of that cage with you! You shall pay for your impudence with your head.’ What else could the little robin redbreast do but fly out of the golden cage, land on the floor and turn back into the good-natured young man? He knelt before the queen and begged her forgiveness. ‘Not for you, knave,’ screamed Elena the Wise, then called for the executioner to cut off the soldier’s head.

At this, the soldier wept and wailed so mournfully that the queen took pity on him: ‘I shall give you ten hours to hide yourself so well that if I cannot find you, you shall have my hand in marriage, but if you don’t succeed, I shall have your head!’

The soldier ran out of the castle and into a thick forest, sat under a bush and despaired. At that moment, the demon appeared before him, stamped on the ground and turned into a grey eagle. The soldier climbed onto the eagle’s back and was borne up to the highest heaven. But Elena the Wise saw all this in her magic book: ‘You fly in vain, eagle, for I see you, and you know full well that you cannot hide from me. Come back to earth!’ What could the eagle do but return to earth? So that is what he does, then he rounds on the young man, strikes him on the face and turns him into a needle, and then himself into a mouse. He picks up the needle in his teeth, slips into the queen’s castle, finds the magic book and thrusts the needle into the book. Elena the Wise searched for the soldier in her book, and she saw him, yes she saw him indeed, but she could not find him. When ten hours had passed, the queen threw the book into the fire in a rage. The needle flew out of the book, hit the floor and turned into the good young man. And that is how they got married.

52

‘And this is what Ilja says: / “Eh, you, Dobrynja Mitkevich / there’s no honour or fame / if two heroes fight the old woman / you should beat the woman in the proper manner / on her tits and arse.” / And he remembered the old ways, / he starts to beat her on the tits and arse, / and he kills the whore Baba Yaga.’ (As cited by Andreas Johns)

53

Lapot was an ancient custom, supposedly practised in Serbia and Macedonia, whereby old women who were no longer able to earn their bread were killed with an axe or stoned to death. In Montenegro, this custom was called pustenovanje, from the world pust, ‘felt’. They would cover the old people’s heads with a piece of felt, then press a heavy stone on their heads. Supposedly the Montenegrins also stoned unfaithful wives.

54

The Russian Baba Yaga is currently being revived in cyberspace, where nameless Russian authors launch their stories into orbit. These stories are comic, often brutal and pornographic, in keeping with these new times, but Baba Yaga’s treatment is in no way worse than the treatment meted out to other popular heroes of Russian folktales: Ivan the Fool, Vassilisa the Beautiful, Elena the Wise, Koshchey the Deathless. The lively decanonisation of the heroes of Russian folktales carries on apace in Internet forums – along with their recanonisation.

55

Lusatia is part of Saxony, near the German–Polish border; the Sorbs are a Slavic group.

56

It won’t do any harm to list the most notorious female scourges of the ancient world. The Empusa is a female demon with one leg of iron and the other made of donkey excrement, vampirical and voluptuous, who can turn herself into a beautiful girl, seducing young men and drinking their blood. Lamia eats little children, is punished with perennial insomnia, but finds comfort in the gift of being able to take out her own eyes at will. Hecate is a three-headed goddess, a beast, a witch, a seducer of young men. Eos (Aurora) and her sister Selena (Luna) are voluptuaries, Erida is envious and jealous and Ino is an evil schemer. Medusa, one of the Gorgons, is a female monster with snakes instead of hair and a petrifying gaze. The Graeae were born old; they share one tooth and one eye between them. The Keres bring death, decay, fever, blindness, impotence and old age. They have staring eyes, lolling tongues, black wings, bird’s claws and clothes reeking of blood (for they drink from the veins of dying warriors). The Erinyes (or Eumenides) are old hags with vipers twisting in their hair, they avenge crimes of parricide, matricide and perjury. The Harpies are birds with women’s heads, which steal little children, pollute food and bring sickness and hunger. The Stymphalides, birds (or even women with birds’ heads), eat human flesh and pollute the fields with their excrement. The Mormo is a deadly seductress. The Sphinx has the head of a woman, the body of a lion, bird’s wings and she likes to dine on dimwits. The Roman Larvae are ugly, skinny as sabres and embody dead souls. The Strige, like the Harpies, are voracious birds with croaking voices, large heads, a fixed stare and a crooked beak; they steal little children, and also take human form, as witches. The Manias punish whoever offends the gods by driving them mad (when Orestes saw the Manias, he symbolically castrated himself by biting his own thumb!). Echidna is a monster that gives birth to more monsters: she is the mother of Cerberus, Hydra, Chimera and Orthrus. The dangerous Moirai – Clotho (the Spinner), Lachesis (Destiny) and Atropos (the Merciless) – sit on their thrones, all garbed in white, turning their mother’s (Ananke, Necessitas) bobbin and ruling all the spheres of the world. Their Roman sisters, the Parcae, are harsh, gloomy and inquisitive old hags, three sisters, spinners who spin out human destiny so that one picks out the thread, the second spins it and the third cuts it. Let us add here that the Norns are their nordic sisters (Urt is responsible for the past, Verthandi for the present and Skuld for the future).