Baba Yaga and Vasilisa the Beautiful

Afanasyev printed "Vasilisa the Beautiful" in the fourth fascicle of his Russian Folk Tales in 1858, as tale no. 44 — no. 104 in modern editions. A merchant's wife dies when her daughter is eight and leaves her a doll "together with my parental blessing": feed it, and ask its advice. The stepmother puts out the household fire and sends Vasilisa into the forest to beg a light from Baba Yaga. Three horsemen pass her on the road — white, red and black, the witch's own bright day, red sun and dark night. In Afanasyev's text the hut stands on nothing remarkable; it is the gate that is monstrous, with human legs for gateposts, hands for bolts and a toothed mouth for a lock, under a fence of bones topped with skulls whose eyes light the clearing. The doll, not Vasilisa, does the impossible work of sorting wheat from nigella and poppy seed from earth. Asked how she manages it, Vasilisa answers "my mother's blessing helps me", and that is what gets her thrown out — with a burning skull on a stick, which reduces the stepmother and stepsisters to coal. The tale does not end there: the last third takes her to the city, to a loom, and to the Tsar.

Afanasyev printed "Vasilisa the Beautiful" in the fourth fascicle of his Narodnye russkie skazki (Russian Folk Tales), as tale no. 44 — that is how W. R. S. Ralston cited it in 1873, and it is the number the tale carried before the modern academic editions renumbered it 104. The eight fascicles were issued in Moscow by the publisher Kozma Soldatenkov between 1855 and 1863; the fourth is dated 1858, with a second printing in 1860. Afanasyev was an archivist rather than a field collector: most of his corpus reached him already written down, from the manuscript holdings of the Russian Geographical Society and from the papers of the lexicographer Vladimir Dal. The Russian text runs to roughly 2,500 words, and it repays being read rather than remembered, because the version that circulates is not quite it. A merchant, twelve years married, has one daughter. When the mother dies Vasilisa is eight years old, and from under the bedclothes the dying woman takes out a doll: "together with my parental blessing I leave you this doll; keep it always by you and show it to no one, and when some grief befalls you, give it food and ask its advice." The father remarries, the stepmother moves the household to the edge of a deep forest, the candles are put out one autumn night, and Vasilisa is pushed out of the door to go and beg fire from Baba Yaga. Three horsemen overtake her on the road: one white on a white horse, and it begins to grow light; one red on a red horse, and the sun rises; one black on a black horse who reaches the gate and vanishes, and night falls. What she finds in the clearing is the passage our own entry had lost. "A fence around the hut made of human bones; on the fence stick up human skulls, with eyes in them; instead of gateposts — human legs; instead of bolts — hands; instead of a lock — a mouth with sharp teeth." The hut itself is simply an izba standing on a clearing. In this tale it does not stand on chicken legs and it does not turn. Baba Yaga comes out of the forest riding in a mortar, driving with the pestle and sweeping away her trail with a broom. She sets two tasks: clean a quarter-measure of wheat of its chernushka — nigella, a black seed, glossed as a herbaceous plant in the Wikisource footnote — and then clean a measure of poppy of the earth someone has mixed into it, grain by grain. Vasilisa does neither. She feeds the doll, the doll says "morning is wiser than evening", and in the morning the work is done and the doll is picking the last black grains out of the wheat, leaving her only the cooking. When Baba Yaga inspects it she calls out "my faithful servants, friends of my heart" and three pairs of hands appear, seize the wheat and carry it off to be ground; the next night they come back to press the oil from the poppy. Then the two of them question each other, and this is the hinge of the tale. Vasilisa asks about the three horsemen and is told: "That is my bright day", "that is my red sun", "that is my dark night — all of them my faithful servants." She remembers the three pairs of hands and says nothing, and Baba Yaga approves: "It is well that you ask only about what you saw outside the yard and not inside it. I do not like my dirty linen washed in public, and I eat the too curious." Then it is Baba Yaga's turn. How does she get the work done? "My mother's blessing helps me," Vasilisa answers — and that answer is what expels her: "So that is it! Get away from me, blessed daughter. I have no use for the blessed." She is dragged out of the room and pushed through the gate, and Baba Yaga lifts one skull with burning eyes off the fence, sticks it on a stick and hands it over: "here is fire for your stepmother's daughters; that is what they sent you here for." The skull's eyes burn the stepmother and the two stepsisters to coal by morning, and Vasilisa alone is untouched. The tale does not end there, and roughly the last third of the Russian text is what happens next: she buries the skull in the ground, locks the house, walks to the city and lodges with a childless old woman; she asks for flax, spins thread as fine as a hair, has a loom made, weaves linen so fine it will pass through the eye of a needle; the old woman carries it to the Tsar as a gift, no seamstress can be found to cut it, Vasilisa sews a dozen shirts, the Tsar sends for the woman who made them, sees her and marries her. Her father comes home and stays with her, she takes the old woman into her household, and the doll she carried in her pocket to the end of her life.

There is nothing to visit, and that is not a limitation of this entry but a statement made by the source. Afanasyev's text opens "v nekotorom tsarstve" — "in a certain kingdom" — the standard opening formula of the Russian skazka, whose whole function is to decline to say where. No province, no river, no town and no forest is named anywhere in the 2,500 words. Any point on a map attached to this tale is an editorial guess, including the one this page has carried. What can be visited is the text, and all of it is free. The Russian original of no. 104 is transcribed in full on Russian Wikisource from the modern academic edition, with the footnote identifying chernushka. Ralston's 1873 translation, "Vasilissa the Fair", is in Russian Folk-Tales at pages 150 to 158, scanned at the Internet Archive; read it with the bracketed epitome at the end, which is where the second half of the story went. Post Wheeler's 1912 translation, "Wassilissa the Beautiful", is at pages 27 to 54 of Russian Wonder Tales, also at the Internet Archive, and it is the book from which the illustration on this page is taken. That illustration is by Ivan Bilibin, from the cycle he drew for Vasilisa Prekrasnaya in 1899–1900 and which the Expedition for Preparing State Papers in St Petersburg published as an illustrated booklet, first in 1900 and again in 1902 in chromolithography at 32.5 by 25.5 cm. It shows Vasilisa in the night forest holding the skull on its stick, its eyes throwing beams, with the skull-topped poles around her and the lit window of the hut behind. Wheeler's 1912 volume reproduces twelve of these plates and states on its list of illustrations that they come from the Expedition series and are "used by special permission"; this one faces his page 50. The originals are widely held in Russian public collections and the plates are long out of copyright.