In times of national trauma, it is common for governmentsto turn to military heroes as patriotic rallying points. For this purpose Russia’s warrior saints have proved surprisingly durable, even during officially atheistic periods. Throughout the post-communist 1990s, a reinvigorated Russian Orthodox Church won enthusiastic new converts among Russia’s armed forces, humiliated and impoverished by the loss of the Soviet empire.9 In 2004, the Air Force and the Patriarch (with the full approval of President Putin) jointly celebrated the ninetieth anniversary of the world’s first heavy bomber unit (the fighter plane Ilya Muromets of 1914), a ceremony that included a blessing of the troops and, in 2005, the consecration of 160 new bombers in Russia’s Long Range Aviation Forces. The emergence of a faith-based army in this once officially atheistic country will most certainly affect the plots of Russian war literature and its prototypical heroes.
Folk tales (Baba Yaga, Koshchey the Deathless)
The Russian folk tale [skazka] obeys a different logic than does the saint’s life. In his study of the European folk tale, Max Lu?thi notes a cardinal difference between it and more didactic narrative such as legendry. “The saint’s legend wantstoexplain,it wantstocomfort,”Lu?thi notes.“Itdemandsfaithinthetruth of the story and in the correctness of its interpretation. The folktale, however, demands nothing. It does not interpret or explain; it merely observes and portrays . . . It is precisely this relinquishment of explanations that engages our trust.”10 This insight helps us to see why the greatest of Russian psychological novelists, Leo Tolstoy, exhausted by writing War and Peace and temporarily sick of his own hyper-hortative literary voice, turned to folk-tale speech in several
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stories in 1872, especially his brief prose tale, “A Prisoner of the Caucasus.” “If you try to say anything superfluous, bombastic, or morbid, the [common people’s] language won’t permit it,” he wrote his friend Nikolai Strakhov in Marchof that year.11 Tolstoy was certainly not surrendering his right to instruct his readership. But he suspected what Lu?thi noticed above, that neutrality inspires trust whereas narrative exhortation does not – and Tolstoy wished to be trusted.
Among the distinctive features Lu?thi findsin European folk-tale language are one-dimensionality, lack of depth, and an abstract, detached style. Recasting Tolstoy’s auto-critique in Lu?thi’s terms, what is “not permitted” in folk narration is thick description and a conflicted inner life marked by doubt or self-pity. What is it like to live in a depthless world? The hero has one clear, linear task. At the end of it lies his reward, usually a princess. While accomplishing the task, he encounters various helpers, whose gifts or services are all palpably material. Helpers and obstacles appear from nowhere and disappear without a trace; a dark void opens up on either side of the narrow path of the plot. Whatever is on that path, however, is lit up in brilliant primary colors: metallic reds, golds, blues. Throughout his travails the hero expresses no astonishment, curiosity, longing, or fear, and apparently does not experience pain. He never reassesses his goal or his reward.
Many of these pan-European traits are common to the Russian skazka as well. Conventionally it is divided into three types. “Tales about animals” address human behavior but with animal or vegetable actors – all greedy, sneaky, self-serving, duplicitous, for whom the prime value is survival at any cost. More edifying are the “wondertales” that test and transform a hero, usually by dispatching him on a quest and always by relying on supernatural help. Finally there are “tales of everyday life,” focused around the home or hut (center of the peasant cosmos) and featuring a sexual or financial plot – in which a devil might be outwitted, but without any transfiguration of the heroes. As a rule, sexual themes are not treated erotically or chivalrously. Russian folk tales are not incipient love stories, as they frequently were in Western cultures. The Russian fairy-tale princess is often mute, unwilling or passive in the beginning. Once moved to act, however, she is matter-of-fact, inventive, alert to what it takes to survive trial and temptation, and far less sentimental than her Tsarevich Ivan. The skazka is a dual-faith narrative, mixing pagan and Christian motifs. The villain controls major celestial and geophysical forces (frost, wind, thunder, water), but the hero or heroine can always win the services of small animals by acts of kindness. Many Russian folk tales are linked to incantations, spells, and nature worship.
The most famous Russian folklore villains are Koshchey the Deathless and Baba Yaga.Koshchey, the simpler of the two, is an archaic figure,a sorcerer, often
68 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature
portrayed as a skeleton (his name is related either to the word for bone, kost, or to koshch'noe, the Slavic kingdom of the dead). Koshchey’s task is to thwart the hero in his pursuit of the reward (the princess). The only way to foil this immortal creature is to reunite him with his own death. The hero must find this death (usually hiding in a duck’s egg in an oak stump floating in the sea) and smash it against Koshchey’s forehead. Although stubborn, vain, and dangerous -his foul breath can turn a person to stone - Koshchey is not very intelligent and easily outwitted. His tactics suffer from his innate inability to sympathize with others. Consider Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s folk opera Koshchey the Deathless (1902). Unusually for folk tales but conventionally for opera (which requires, in addition to the romantic soprano, a mezzo or contralto as secondary love interest), the villain has a beautiful daughter, Koshcheyevna, who by various charms almost seduces Ivan-Tsarevich, thereby interrupting his quest to regain the captive princess. The princess, being human, can empathize with her rival. Out of compassion she kisses Koshcheyevna on the forehead. For the first time in her life, Koshchey’s daughter begins to weep - turning her into a willow tree. The Koshchey element can revert to plants or trees but cannot be fully humanized.
Baba Yaga, “Old Woman Yaga,” is a far more ambiguous and powerful figure.12 Witch, cannibal, earth goddess, Mistress of the Forest, she lives in a hut on chicken legs that rotates in expectation of the unwary visitor. This quasi-animate dwelling is surrounded by a fence made of stakes readied for human heads. Inside her hut, Yaga’s sprawling grotesque body cannot move; one leg is always of bone (or iron), the other often of excrement, her nose is hooked to the ceiling, her breasts hang over a rod, her genitals foam. Outside her hut, she travels in a mortar and pestle. (The famous ninth episode - or “picture” - in Musorgsky’s 1874 Pictures from an Exhibition, “The Hut on Hen’s Legs [Baba Yaga],” depicts her ferocious ride in this strange kitchen vessel.) Baba Yaga can be Koshchey’s consort or his sister, but she can also do battle with him. And significantly, she can be the “donor” or enabler of the hero, the one who insures his success against Koshchey in quest of his lost princess. But Baba Yaga extends her help to a hero only after he has been tested for manliness. First she announces that she will eat her visitor (his bones will be ground up in that mortar) - and waits to see how the guest responds. If he ignores her hideousness and demands proper hospitality, she will feed him and provide him with talismans and secrets for his journey. If he trembles and goes limp with fear, she will destroy him.
We will now consider two variants of the same exemplary tale. The first, “Faithful John,” was collected by the Brothers Grimm; the second, “Koshchey the Deathless,” by their Russian counterpart Aleksandr Afanasiev. Placed side
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by side, they suggest how a specific folk-tale plot might change in emphasis and value system as it migrates east. The most prominent difference between the two variant tales is the presence of Koshchey and Baba Yaga.
From a Russian folk perspective, “Faithful John” is a very Western plot. The many European versions of this tale – including the French “Old Fench” from Lower Brittany and the Swedish “Prince Faithful” – all open as an incipient love story. All are fueled by mercantile interests and test the hero in the manner of a knight from the Age of Chivalry. The old king dies, leaving his adolescent son in the care of Faithful John. The new young king is allowed access to everything in the palace but the room with the portrait of the Princess of the Golden Dwelling. Of course the king glimpses the portrait and falls instantly in love. To court her, he orders that five tons of family gold be crafted into various artifacts. He packs these into a ship, and he and Faithful John sail across the sea to the
