Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

I must admit how surprised I was to get your letter. I do not know how you came to choose me out of all the excellent scholars in Folklore Studies. I only joined this university recently and haven’t yet gained the sort of reputation here or in international academic circles for my name to mean anything to you. Of course I am pleased that you turned to me, but I must warn you before we go any further that, although I do indeed specialise in Slavic folklore, myths and ritual traditions, this does not make me an expert on your topic by any means. Secondly, I am under a good deal of pressure trying to finish a book about ‘Bulgarian popular beliefs related to childbirth’, and unfortunately I won’t be able to give as much time as I would like to answering your questions. Be this as it may, flattered by your trust in my ability, as also by a wish to maintain this contact (which, who knows, may be more than coincidence!), I have read the manuscript you sent me with pleasure. I confess that the brevity of the text contributed not a little to my enjoyment.

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As far as I gather from your accompanying letter, your author undertook to provide a text based on the myth of Baba Yaga. By the way, I was touched by your admission that you ‘don’t have a clue’ about Baba Yaga yourself. Nevertheless, you only have to surf the Net a bit to see that, while Baba Yaga may not be Oprah Winfrey or Princess Diana, she isn’t a completely obscure mythical nonentity either. A shamanist group in northern Holland is named after her; likewise a table-lamp shop somewhere in Poland, a Polish–American magazine (Baba Yaga’s Corner), a home for the elderly and infirm, a family hotel and a language school in Germany. Restaurants, patisseries and health-food shops seem to be drawn to the name Baba Yaga, a circumstance which, bearing in mind Baba Yaga’s own culinary preferences, is not without its amusing side. A number of fitness centres also bear her name, maybe because their owners think Baba Yaga must have some connection with – yoga?! There is a German dressmaking business called ‘Baba Yaga’, a Dutch ‘spiritual website’ (where interested parties can purchase crystal balls and teapots) and a women’s choral society, likewise Dutch. The character of Baba Yaga has also served as an artistic stimulus to theatre companies and pop groups, art projects, film directors, comic strips and animators, the authors of graphic and non-graphic books, horror and porno websites, blogs and adverts. For example, there is a Serbian advertising slogan for the Porsche Carrera GT: ‘the Baba Roga of the roads’ – Baba Roga being the Serbian equivalent of the Russian Baba Yaga.

Along with these broad uses and abuses of her name, I suppose the average non-Slavic reader does not know much about Baba Yaga. Even for most Slavic readers, she is just a hideous old hag who steals little children. Which brings me precisely to the problem that we share. You modestly admit that you don’t have a clue, and are asking me to explicate the correspondences between your author’s text and the myth of Baba Yaga. In these circumstances you will surely agree that the task you set me is by no means an easy one.

To make my reply as clear and simple as possible, I have compiled a ‘Baba Yaga For Beginners’ – a short glossary of themes, motifs and mythemes linked to Slavic mythology, and therefore also to ‘babayagology’. At this point I should remind you of the notorious fact that Slavic mythology is only conditionally ‘Slavic’. Myths, legends and oral traditions are like viruses. Similar ‘stories’ exist everywhere – in Slavic forests, on African deserts, the foothills of the Himalayas, in Eskimo igloos – and they seep through to our own time and our own mass culture, to TV soaps, sci-fi series, Internet forums and videogames, to Lara Croft, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Harry Potter.