The Many Faces of Baba Yaga
“Baba Yaga represents the wild, unknown side of the psyche, and she enjoys a rich textual history”
Instagram/whaleandpetuniasart
Alex Jarvis
Baba Yaga flew into our Russian class when our teacher put on a Soviet-era cartoon featuring the fearsome witch as a filler in between grammar work. She travelled around in a flying mortar, lived in a house with chicken legs, and stole small children to eat. The lesson was drawing to a close; the teacher switched it off, and we had a short conversation about the Baba Yaga as a witch and mere remnant of Slavic folklore in the Russian canon. Done and dusted.
However, this was not my first encounter with Baba Yaga; I had come across her earlier in a book recommended by my mum, and she was of an altogether different, more multifarious disposition. The book was entitled ‘Women who run with the wolves,’ and its author, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, had collected numerous fairytales from multiple cultures and taken something from each of them. She then linked this to the mysterious lost feminine instinct, attempting to find out what has been passed onto each of us, what we can (and should) change about ourselves, and what we can’t (and should never) change. Here, Baba Yaga appeared in a strikingly different context, and one which I struggled to put together with the Soviet cartoon.
She featured in a story entitled, ‘The Doll in her Pocket: Vasilisa the Wise.’ She is a fearsome crone to whom Vasilisa goes to find fire to light the hearth of her wicked stepmother and stepsisters. The young girl is placed in mortal peril when encountering the fearsome Baba Yaga; however, thanks to a small doll given to her by her late mother, she can avoid being eaten. The doll performs all the tasks assigned to Vasilisa by Baba Yaga in order to earn the fire (wash clothes, sweep the yard, separate the good corn from the bad, etc.) Later on, when Vasilisa is given permission to ask questions on what she’s seen, the doll advises her against going too far, thus saving her life, and causing Baba Yaga to remark, “too much knowledge can make a person old too soon.”
However, it is Baba Yaga herself that leads much of the narrative. It’s not that she is outwitted by Vasilisa, so to speak, into not eating her – but, as Estés points out, “one of the most remarkable facets of the Yaga portrayed in this tale is that though she threatens, she is just. She does not hurt Vasilisa as long as Vasilisa affords her respect.” This multi-textuality of the figure indicates her murky upbringing and less than dignified denigration to a merely ‘wicked witch.’ Baba Yaga lurks on the fringes of Pagan and Christian lore; in Estés’ tale, she is fearful of Vasilisa’s doll, which acts as a physical reminder of her mother’s blessing (perhaps a heavily-emphasised Christian detail added later to confirm the Yaga’s evil ways). Far from being this complicated, neither-good-nor-evil figure in the cartoon, she is instead prepared to cook the younger brother of the main character in a classic rendition of an evil witch that we would recognise from any tale of Hansel and Gretel.
Vasilisa the Beautiful- Instagram/unverifiedclaims
The intriguing question for me is, at what point, then, did Baba Yaga become wholly ‘evil’? It can probably be explained by no small amount of historical (and modern) misogyny, and can tell us more about ourselves and women in history than we’d perhaps care to admit. Think of the witch trials across England and America around the 17th century, whose victims were almost entirely (older) women, and societally-mistrusted ones at that. These were killings across the country against a very specific kind of person; female, often elderly – the very kind that Baba Yaga engenders. Far from celebrating the knowledge and wisdom held by these marginal figures, they were mistrusted and denounced when possible. Baba Yaga cannot, clearly, be killed outright. However, she can definitely be reassigned to the shadows, presented purely in the archetypal ‘evil witch’ role by a culture whose interests lie in subjugating her kind.
Her versatility is also shown in a similar cartoon to the one mentioned above. Double meaning is not an entirely foreign concept in Soviet cartoons; threads of subtle political propaganda are woven together without many even realising. In one 1980 cartoon - the year that America boycotted the Olympics to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan - Baba Yaga acts as an all-American antagonist, attempting to stop a sweet bear (aka, Russia) from winning his race against other animals. Oh, and he’s holding an Olympic torch as he goes. This subtle connection between vastly different worlds and characters is merely one example of the complexity of representation in Russian media. This fluidity of meaning as engendered by Baba Yaga, and others in the Slavic canon, whilst interesting, can make it easy for them to be used to suit any kinds of agendas, satirical or otherwise.
Baba Yaga has not gone gently, though; one of the many aspects that Estés draws out from her version of ‘Vasilisa the Wise’ is the need to venture into the unknown and find Baba Yaga. She declares that a woman “must be willing to feel anxious sometimes, otherwise she might as well have stayed in the nest.” Baba Yaga represents the wild, unknown side of the psyche, and she enjoys a rich textual history that cannot be conveyed purely through her poor reduction to an ‘evil witch.’ No doubt she engenders that at times, but she also has the power to help the hero on their way home, often bequeathing some life giving substance to them in the process. She treads the line between spirituality and Christianity, between intuition and fact. In her can be seen both the good and bad that is in everyone; she merely embraces it more than others.