Word: yaga
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Baba-Yaga was a bloodthirsty witch who flitted through the skazki (fairy tales) of old Russia. She had a false leg fashioned from the polished thighbone of a young boy. She lived in a house that hopped on chicken-footed stilts, around which was an iron fence ornamented with skulls. After dark, the eye sockets of the skulls glowed with fire to light her way. Her chariot was a mortar, which she pushed with a pestle, using her besom to erase her singular track. Innocent children were her favorite fare, but once a girl child, who might have been...
...Russia there is little room for such ideologically unorthodox characters as Baba-Yaga. Since Lenin, writers of the new Soviet skazki have been instructed to fashion their fairy tales as "pictures of the Socialist way of life."* But Soviet writers cannot always follow Soviet Socialism. In Moscow last week Baba-Yaga might have chuckled a hearty witch's chuckle. Two of her Socialist successors-Bread Crumb and Gunpowder Crumb-were being boiled...
...from the hunter's brush and was heroically destroyed when Gunpowder exploded. Bread Crumb, meanwhile, came to his appointed happy end. The hunter ate him. Platonov's moral: "Bread gave the hunter strength. Gunpowder wanted to singe the whole world but only burned a sparrow." In Baba-Yaga's Russia such a feeble, artless fable would have had a hard time finding a publisher. But in Soviet Russia its publication evoked a thunderstorm. Pravda blasted: "Reeks of cheap pacifism*. . . both false and harmful. 'Peace on earth, good will to men,' our planet...
...other tongues. Ali Baba, Aladdin, Big Klaus and Little Klaus and many others are here in naturalized form. But the background of these Russian stories is the vast steppes, the dark conifer forests, the softly falling snow. They are dominated by strange creations of the Slav mind-Baba Yaga (the witch who lives in a little hut that stands on hen's legs), the Sea King (who rises from the depths to enslave human beings), Zhar-ptitsa (the Firebird), Koshchey the Deathless, who is really "little father death." These stories throb with a violence that makes the atrocities...
...Russian fairy tale, Vasilisa the All-Wise walks up to the little hut that stands on hen's legs and says : "Little hut, little hut, turn with your face to me and your back to the sea." And the voice of Baba Yaga, the witch, answers from within the hut: "Fee fo fum, I smell Russian blood. For today the Russian spirit is marching through the world, and it throws itself on your breast and it slaps you in the face...