The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

princess. She adores gold and is persuaded to come on board to view the wares of this “merchant.” Only after the ship has sailed away does she discover that the merchant is a king; swayed by the gold, the royal lineage, or perhaps even the prince himself, she consents to be his wife.

While still at sea, Faithful John overhears three ravens predict that the young king will not consummate his marriage. He will mount a horse that will fly off, his bridal costume will burn him to death, and his bride will faint away during the nuptial ball. Interventions and antidotes are possible against these disasters, but anyone who warns the king in advance of them will be turned to stone. John intervenes in the first two temptations and the mystified king tolerates it. But when Faithful John revives the insensate queen by sucking three drops of blood from her right breast, the king loses his temper and condemns his servant to the gallows. Then John tells all and turns to stone. He is only brought back to life several years later when (such are John’s terms) the king agrees to behead his own twin sons with his own sword. The sons are beheaded, the stone statue revives, John replaces the children’s heads, and all five dwell together in happiness.

As this well-known folk tale migrated throughout Eastern Europe, it absorbed local motifs and amplified different virtues. One commonly anthologized Russian variant appears in conjunction with a “Koshchey the Deathless” tale. A number of crucial details are altered. Romantic love is far less in evidence. There is no positive mercantile theme (no courtship that exploits the princess’s appetite for gold), no ships at sea (Tsarevich Ivan sets out in search of his bride on foot). A great deal more casual violence is encountered on the way – and the tests administered to hero and heroine alike come from the world of untamed nature, not from the realm of domesticated animals or manufactured goods. The tsarevich comes upon his “Faithful John” – here, Bulat the

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Brave – while the latter is being flogged in a public square for non-payment of a debt to a rapacious merchant. The tsarevich is informed that the man who redeems Bulatwilllose hiswifetoKoshchey.Allthe same,Ivanpaysthe debt, and from then on Bulat manages everything. He courts the destined bride Vasilisa the Beautiful with the wing of a chicken, a duck, and a goose (she is frightened, silent, and Bulat must negotiate for her by supplying both their voices). He abducts her from her tower. Twice Bulat slays the pursuers sent by Vasilisa’s father. But even Bulat cannot straightaway slay Koshchey, who steals Vasilisa while Ivan (like most tsareviches, kindhearted but singularly inept) is asleep. The two men eventually locate Vasilisa in Koshchey’s hut – and remarkably, separated from her father and childhood home, the silent bride has become the wise and crafty female force, the “donor,” or helping aspect of Baba Yaga. Through three deceits, Vasilisa seduces her bony, braggart captor into revealing the location of his death. Ivan and Bulat set out in search of it. Along the way, various animals are almost killed for food (a dog, an eagle, a lobster) but then at the last minute spared; they become the indispensable helpers. The death is found in the egg, Koshchey is reunited with it, and at this point the contour of the Grimm tale resumes.

Twelve doves, relatives of Koshchey, inform Bulat that his master will be killed by his favorite dog, or horse, or cow. He who enables the tsarevich to avoid these threats will be turned to stone. The threesome returns home, the marriage is consummated, and the tests begin: Bulat slices the threatening dog in half, then decapitates the horse and cow. Incensed, Prince Ivan orders Bulat to be hanged, and the faithful helper, confessing, slowly turns to stone. In this version too, only the blood of the two slaughtered royal children (a son and a daughter), smeared on the stone, will bring Bulat back to life. But one detail of this final episode is worth noting. In the German version, the king carries out the sacrifice of his two sons on his own and then tests his wife after the fact, to see if she would have consented to it. No such test of the female is necessary in the Russian tale. There, the prince consults with his wife before committing the double sacrifice. Once she becomes a wife, the Russian heroine (nourished on the roasted wings of birds and tested against Koshchey the Deathless) is wiser, stronger, and more autonomous than the gold-coveting trophy wife and consort queen we see in Grimm.

There are other East–West divides. European Cinderellas run themselves ragged for their evil stepmothers (one senses a work ethic here), even though they never lose their beauty while doing so. Russian Cinderellas tend to be more realistic as regards the effect of unremitting physical labor on human bodies. Idleness and laziness is never a virtue, of course, but many Russian heroines happen to have magic dolls from their mothers who miraculously do

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everything, permitting their own hands to remain attractively soft and white. Onthe male sideofthe genre,Western Prince Charmingstend to beenterprising young men, whereas the Russian Ivan-Tsarevich is a bumbler not unlike Ivan the Fool, relying on helpers or miracles. The cosmopolitan Pushkin, barely out of his teens, burst into fame in 1820 with his first long narrative poem Ruslan and Lyudmila, a mock fairy-tale epic of unprecedented bawdiness. He provided four princely suitors for the abducted princess in hopes of getting one who could complete the job, even though (a wise sorcerer informs us early on) Lyudmila is in no serious danger: the evil dwarf Chernomor is impotent. In Chapter 8, we will see how the resilient, predetermined plot of the folk tale – both simple-minded and sly – was adjusted to the Stalinist stage.

Hybrids: folk epic and Faust tale

To complete this rudimentary literacy in Russian traditional narratives, it remains to consider two hybrids. The first is the bylina or “Russian folk epic.”13 A bylina was chanted rhythmically to a simple melody (often with spoken inserts) and featured the exploits of a bogatyr [warrior-hero]. Highly formulaic, these songs were governed not by plot suspense but by descriptive detail and texture. Like the folklore hero, epic heroes were external agents only, devoid of psychological motivation; for this reason, a bylina cycle was often organized around a historic city rather than a personality. Kiev played this anchoring role during the first wave of Mongol attacks in the thirteenth century. Later, the northern medieval city of Novgorod became home to an epic cycle built around the wealthy merchant Sadko and his dealings with the Sea Tsar.

Some of the earliest mythological byliny reflect a struggle between the bogatyr, the male hero-warrior mounted on a swift steed, and the immobile, invincible depths of Mother Earth. In one widespread variant, Earth gives birth to a hero, “Svyatogor” [Sacred Mountain], so huge that she cannot bear the weight of her son. Svyatogor is a swaggerer, a braggart, who tosses his mace to the sky and never fails to catch it on the way down. Among his claims is the curiously Archimedean boast, provocative considering the person of his Mother, that he could lift the entire earth if only he could find a point of support. One day, riding through the steppe, he finds a small skomorokh’s [minstrel’s] bag in the open field. It is too heavy to pick up from the saddle. Svyatogor dismounts, but still he cannot lift the bag; instead, he sinks up to his knees in the earth. In some variants his horse hauls him out, but at other times the giant bogatyr interprets this failure to attach a pouch (a womb) to his own belt as the beginning of his death.

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With the collapse of the Kievan state by the middle of the thirteenth century, these early heroic songs migrated to central and northern Russia. To their familiar repertory of enemies (nomads or heathens from the eastern steppe) the Kievan epic heroes then added villains of the darkened forest and swamp. One such foe was the highway bandit Solovey [“the Nightingale”], who lived in a huge tree and whose very whistle could deafen or kill a passerby. North or south, the defense of Russia remained the bogatyr’s primary task. The most famous saga of all is the dual-faith tale of Ilya Muromets, Ilya of Murom on the Oka River, halfway between Moscow and the Urals city of Kazan.

Ilya was a poor peasant’s son, born a cripple. Or in other versions, Ilya, like the folk hero Ivan- durak, faked his disability, preferring to warm himself on the stove rather than work. For thirty (in some versions, thirty-three) years Ilya lies on the stove. One day, while the rest of his family is in the fields, several