Baba Yaga

The earliest printed mention of Baba Yaga dates from 1755, in Mikhail Lomonosov's Russian Grammar, which lists her among the Slavic supernatural figures and then sets her apart, unable to pair her with any Roman deity as it does with the rest. Her name joins baba (old woman, grandmother) to a yaga whose origin is still argued over, akin to Slavic words for dread or disease. What she is not deserves emphasis: she belongs to no pantheon alongside Perun and Veles, and no cult was ever paid to her. She is a figure of peasant storytelling, and she reached print when Alexander Afanasyev gathered the oral tales into his Russian Folk Tales (1855-1863), where she turns up in more than twenty stories, sometimes alone and sometimes tripled into three sisters who all bear the same name.

She lives deep in the forest, in a hut that stands on chicken legs and turns on itself with no door in sight; to get in you must order it aloud to put its back to the forest and its front to the visitor. The fence around the clearing is built of human bones and topped with skulls whose sockets light up at nightfall to show the way. Inside, the mistress fills the whole room, sprawled from corner to corner with her nose jammed against the ceiling, and announces herself by sniffing the air: «Fu, fu, fu! I smell a Russian spirit.» Her oldest epithet, «Baba Yaga the bony leg», sets her halfway between the living and the dead: one leg still flesh, the other already bare bone.

She rides no broomstick like the witches of the West. She travels standing inside a mortar, driving it on with the pestle as a boatman poles his skiff, and sweeps away the trail behind her with a broom; the trees creak and the ground groans as she passes. The house is not empty: a set of bodiless hands appears to carry out each order, and three horsemen cross the palisade at fixed hours. In the tale of Vasilisa the Beautiful the girl watches them go by one after another (the white one at dawn, the red one at midday, the black one as night closes in) and the old woman claims them for her own: my bright day, my red sun, my dark night. Within that clearing, time itself works to her command.

Baba Yaga is not exactly wicked: she works as a test. Whoever arrives with good manners, performs the impossible chores she sets and knows better than to ask too much is handed the fire, the horse or the counsel he came for; the greedy, the lying and the insolent she eats, adding their skulls to the fence. Vasilisa the Beautiful leaves that house with a burning skull in her hand that reduces her stepmother and stepsisters to ashes; other heroes ride away on a horse that can reach the world's end. Vladimir Propp read the hut as the initiation lodge of ancient rites: a border the protagonist must cross into the land of the dead and return from changed. That is why the old woman always asks the same thing before deciding, whether the visitor comes of his own free will or is driven by need.