Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

The guys in Russian fairytales are mostly called Ivan: Prince Ivan, Ivan the Knight, Ivan the Peasant’s Son, Ivan the Soldier’s Son, Ivan the Robber, Ivan the Bean, Ivan the White Shirt (Ivashka-belaja rubashka) and so on. If the mother or father conceived the child with an animal, then the Ivans have a ‘bestial’ surname: Ivan the Bull’s Calf, Ivan the Cow’s Son (Ivan Korovij’ syn), Ivan the Mare’s Son (Ivan Kobylij’ syn), Ivan the Bear (Ivashko medvedko) and suchlike. Ivan is usually the youngest of three brothers, and he is in a more difficult position than the other two. The parents punish Ivan, throwing him out of the house, or he gets punished for his own misdeeds. This initial affliction is the motor that drives the plot. Ivan has to solve the problem, defeating the foe and surmounting obstacles, if he is to be rewarded at the end with the throne and the beautiful princess’s hand in marriage.

The most popular Ivan of them all is Ivan the Fool (Ivan-Durak, Ivanushka-Durachek), a passive hero, a fool who whiles away the time stretched out on the stove (Ivan Zapechnyj, Zapechnik), catching flies and spitting at the ceiling. Ivan the Fool is nondescript and grubby, because he spends his days digging around in the ashes (Ivan Popjalov), and his nose is always runny. The two older brothers, busy with practical matters, ignore Ivan the Fool, they play jokes and tricks on him, they often beat him, they try to drown him in the river and so on. When their mother sends him to his older brothers with dumplings for their lunch, Ivan the Fool feeds the dumplings to his own shadow, thinking that it’s a living man. When they leave him tending the sheep, Ivan the Fool blinds them all so that they won’t run away. When they send him to town to buy things for the house, he puts the new table on the road to make its own way home, seeing as how it has four legs like a horse. When he sees scorched tree stumps along the roadside, he thinks they will freeze and he puts cauldrons over them to keep them warm. When the horse reaches the river and refuses to drink, Ivan the Fool pours a whole sack of salt into the water. When the horse still refuses to drink, he kills it.

Emelya the Simpleton is cut from the same cloth, except that he has a powerful helper: a pike-fish that has been given its freedom. It is enough simply to say ‘By the pike’s command…’ – and his wishes are granted straightaway. One day he has had enough of being stupid and ugly, and he orders the pike-fish to turn him into a very handsome young man who is gifted with great intelligence. He duly marries the king’s daughter. Ivan the Bear – human above the waist, bear below it – being tasked by his stepfather to guard the barn door, lifts the door off its hinges, carries it into the house and guards it, while thieves steal all the grain. To get rid of him, the stepfather sends him to the lake with the task of making a rope out of sand on the shore. He is hoping that fiends will catch Ivan and drag him down to the bottom of the lake. But Ivan uses his cunning to trick the fiends, and he returns home with a wagon full of gold.

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Ivan the Fool’s most senseless and stupid actions turn out later to have been sensible and clever. For example, he accepts a bag of sand instead of money from a gentleman that he has worked for, but later he meets a beautiful girl who is trapped in a fire, and saves her by pouring his bag of sand over her. The girl is, of course, none other than the emperor’s daughter, and she becomes his wife.

In overcoming his obstacles, Ivan gets help from many quarters: animals (horses, pike-fish, birds, cats and dogs, bears, snakes, frogs, etc.), people, Baba Yaga, magical objects (a ring, a magic flute, etc.). Ivans are ‘chosen ones’ who, thanks to their own wrong choices, magical objects or unusual relatives (sisters that marry powerful bird-emperors), overcome all hardships and finally become heroes: they vanquish their foes, marry the emperor’s daughter, secure great wealth and eventually become emperors themselves.

In their Slavic Mythology, V. V. Ivanov and V. N. Toporov distinguish between two kinds of hero: Ivan the Fool and Ivan the Prince. While Ivan the Fool belongs to the ranks of ‘holy fools’ (yurodivi), who are deeply rooted in the Russian spiritual tradition, Ivan the Prince is a true mythic hero, for he passes the ultimate test, the most difficult of all: the encounter with death. By following the rules, Ivan the Prince finds the way out of the world of the dead and returns to life transformed, which we connect with the ancient mythical motifs of death and resurrection.

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