Two Eggs and No Spoon

Written by Olga Bukhina

It is not often that a Russian theme becomes part of a story for children, especially told by a major American writer. Surprisingly, a latest of book of Gregory Maguire, the author of Wicked, Son of a Witch, and other novels, is set in Russia. The twists of the plat in Egg & Spoon (Candlewick Press, 2014) take the reader to a little village, to the Tsar’s palace in St. Petersburg, to the vicinity of the City of Archangelsk (called in the book Archangel), and farther to the North. It is a lengthy book.

Some of the characters are clearly Russian. Soon after leaving a village devastated by poverty and hunger, we meet Baba Yaga, the Firebird, the last Russian Tsar Nikolas, and even Rasputin (although he does not have a big role in the plot). There are also two girls, one rich and one poor, who by mistake exchange their roles and fates. For the sake of symmetry, there are two eggs, a Faberge egg and a Firebird egg. Alas, there is only one prince Anton, a young nephew of the Tsar.

The plot is too complicated to retell. It starts with the meeting between Elena, an uneducated but smart and adventurous pauper girl whose father is dead and mother is dying, and Catherina, a French and English speaking high society girl who travels with her great-aunt to the capital to take part in the Tsar’s ball and to be introduced to the Tsar’s nephew.

After the adventures at the ball, girls and Anton start a journey to the North with Baba Yaga and her talkative, mischievous cat. The means of transportation, as you might predict, is the little hut on the chicken’s legs. In the end, the narration breaks into a pure fantasy without much relation to Russian folklore. A snow dragon they meet in the North is not native to Russia but rather to Japan. As in his other books, Maguire works out a new frame for old tales.

Surely, Baba Yaga is the most colorful personage in the book. She came from a Russian fairytale, but she acquired a bit of an American accent. She likes using some modern American expressions. The narrator, an old monk locked in the prison tower, admits that he does not always understand what she is talking about. Baba Yaga collects items from the future and from the past, and she knows a lot about the world.

She presumable is able to travel through time and space. She knows, for example, about the real-estate in the Bronx and about Gregor Mendel’s experiments on plant hybridization. She visits Bloomingdale Department Store and keeps in her hut the furniture pieces which have minds of their own and like to change their shape and content. Baba Yaga is a charming character with constant mood swings. At first, she looks like an old witch who is ready to eat a child lost in the woods, and at the end she is more like a tender granny for young characters in the book.

The story moves fast, and it is full of adventures. It is told with a sense of humor and more than enough improbable details (the Russian Tsar, for example, freely quotes Darwin). There are plenty of Matreshkas; there is no lack of typical Russian doom and gloom. If you know Russia (most of the readers will not), you might find it a bit inconsistent. Please be also ready to forgive some inaccuracies in Russian geography. Still, it is a good read.

The book also has an interesting ecological motif. The reason why the expedition to the North was conceived is that the winter was too warm which caused distress to Baba Yaga, floods in St. Petersburg, and a “global” (all-Russian) climate change promising more hunger in the villages.

The Candlewick Press forefronted the book at the Book Expo America in June and put it on the cover of the 2014 catalog. Does it promise a rising interest in Russia themes and some chances for the Russian children’s books to enter the US markets? You wish.

 

Baba Yaga: Her Past, Present, and Future

Written by Olga Bukhina

Baba Yaga, a famous witch, is probably the personage of Russian folklore which is the most familiar to Americans. I recently encountered a fresh college graduate who, when reminiscing about Baga Yaga during the party conversation, said: “Oh, yes, she is the one who lives in the little house with the chicken legs. I know her from the cartoons. She was an enemy of Hellboy.” Definitely, it is a not so traditional take on this familiar Russian fairy-tale character.

There is now a new way to learn more about the real Russian Baba Yaga, and not from old cartoons or Americanized versions of Russian fairy tales. A new book, Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Fairy Tales, edited by Sibelan Forrester, Helena Goscilo, and Martin Skoro (University Press of Mississippi) will give the reader a definitive portrait of this important folklore persona.

Traditionally, Baba Yaga is a wicked witch, who lives in the wild woods and is always ready to eat little children. At the same time, she is often a valuable helper of the main character of the story who requests her advice and directions. (Of course, the hero needs to be nice and polite to the old lady.) This collection of almost thirty traditional Russian tales contains many stories which show both side of Baba Yaga. In Ivanushka, for example, Baba Yaga is an enemy who stole the child, but in Sun and Star, she helps Prince Ivan to find his lost sisters. In others, like in The Stepdaughter and the Stepmother’s Daughter, Baba Yaga rewards the hard-working girl and punishes the lazy one.

Sibelan Forrester, a professor at Swarthmore College, who translated all stories, selected an array of fairy tales from two sources, Afanasiev’s Russian Folk Tales and Khudiakov’s Great Russian Tales. Some of them are the different versions of the same story. Forrester also provided translator’s notes and the introduction which are very helpful in understanding her choices in translating and transliterating the names of the characters. The introduction explains various objects surrounding Baba Yaga, such as her isba, the little hut with the chicken legs, her mortar and pestle, and her stove. Forrester talks about the deeper meaning of Baba Yaga and her role in folklore and in popular culture. She argues that “Baba Yaga appears as an initiatrix, a vestigial goddess, a forest power, and a mistress of birds or animals” (p. XXXIX), and that Baba Yaga is deeply connected to the theme of death and especially children’s and infants’ mortality.

Jack Zipes’ preface puts a story of Baba Yaga into the general context of Russian folklore. He sees Baba Yaga as a powerful image, a “unique Russian folk character” which “has now become an international legendary figure and will probably never die” (p. VIII). Baba Yaga “is the ultimate tester and judge, the desacralized omnipotent goddess, who defends deep-rooted Russian pagan values and wisdom and demands that young women and men demonstrate that they deserve her help” (p. XI).

A very special part of this book is its illustrations. Martin Skoro, an artist, and Helena Goscilo, a professor of the Ohio State University, selected the fantastic gallery of rich and diverse images of Baba Yaga, from the classical Russian illustrations of Bilibin, Benois, and Vasnetsov, to lubok and Palekh boxes, to the various contemporary Russian and non-Russian artists (Hellboy is also not forgotten). The illustrations are as a significant part of the book as the texts themselves. The book also includes a bibliography and a filmography which provides further understanding of Baba Yaga.

It is very clear that the editors and others, who were involved in the making of this book, “love Baba Yaga and want to present her in all richness and complexity” (p. XIII). The wonderful translations of the tales will be a joy to read for these who are interested in Russian culture and folklore. These tales will open a whole world of magic to thoughtful readers who will dare to begin their quests together with the characters of the tales and will start with the magic formula: “Little house, little house! Turn your back to the forest, your front to me.” The readers will soon discover that the wild (and sometimes wicked) Witch of the East is clearly not dead!