Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov (Penguin Classics)

by Unknown

  So there she was again – back in her hut with its chicken’s legs. Staring into the forest. B-o-r-e-d. Waiting for winter.

  Spring always brings with it anxiety. Nature’s busy having a good time. People and animals make love. They give birth to cunning little children. All this is bad news. Then comes summer. In the summer heat the forest seethes with life. And the forest does what it has to do; the wind scatters its seeds. The forest feels pleased with itself. Stupid old fool of a forest. It loves life, the immortality of the earth.

  Then it’s autumn. The first dusting of snow. Yaga cheers up.

  And then – at last – winter.

  The winds begin to blow. The eight grandsons of the God Stribog.2 Fierce and vicious – creatures after her own heart. Very soon blizzards would be covering up paths; whirlwinds would be whirling their crystal dust, snowstorms singing their songs. At last!

  Baba gets into her mortar and pushes off with her pestle. The mortar knocks against hillocks; it bumps, leaps and jumps; it soars up and flies through the whirl of snow. She has strands of ice in her hair; you can see her bony, protruding knee. She is terrible and powerful; she is free as free can be. She flies over the earth like the song of the storm.

  Who has ever seen her? As knights dying on a battlefield glimpse the Valkyries, so those who are freezing to death see Yaga through their closed eyes.

  Yaga leaps out of her mortar. She sings and dances. She seizes a soft young birch. She twists, twirls, bends and snaps it. There’s a loud moan, and powdered snow flies up into the air like silver smoke. Then Baba Yaga throws herself at a scarecrow. He’s stuffed with straw and he’s been wrapped round some rosebushes for the winter. She throws her arms around him and dances with him. Wild and drunken, she shakes him, then hurls him against the ground.

  ‘Let me go,’ begs the scarecrow. ‘Don’t torture me. I don’t want you! I’ve got a rose for a heart.’

  Baba Yaga howls and weeps. On she whirls, crazed and vicious. Roaming the fields and valleys again, looking for someone new to torment.

  A traveller! He’s just got out of his sleigh, he’s looking for the road. Aha! She spins him round, knocks him into a snowdrift, flings snow into his eyes.

  Where was he going? To some Masha or other. Some sweet, jolly, warm little Mashenka. What does he want with her now? He’s all white now, whiter than white. His eyelashes and eyebrows are white. White, icy curls are poking out from under his cap. Wonderful, free and wonderful is the song of the blizzard. It enchants him. Mashenka? What does she matter to him now? No more than a colourful rag on a fence. Can he even remember her? Eyes of green crystal are looking into his soul. He feels both terrified and full of joy, and his soul sings and laughs. For never, never has it known such ecstasy.

  Baba Yaga! Terrible old hag! Accursed man-eater! Oh, how wonderful you are with your song and your crystal eyes! You are a GODDESS. Take me into your death – it is better than life.

  The blizzard falls silent. It’s warm and dark in the little hut on chicken’s legs. The broom stands in the corner, exchanging winks with the pestle. The faithless cat is purring sleepily, stretching his back, pretending …

  Baba Yaga is lying on the stove. Water drips onto the floor from her icy hair. Her bony leg is sticking out from some rags.

  Sad and tedious. Everything is so sad and tedious.

  PART FIVE

  Pavel Petrovich Bazhov

  (1879–1950)

  The year 1936 saw the publication not only of Teffi’s The Witch but also (in Yekaterinburg, from 1924 to 1991 known as Sverdlovsk, in the Urals) of the first of Pavel Bazhov’s cycle of tales about the Mistress of the Copper Mountain, a beautiful and alluring – yet often surprisingly honourable – figure who is seen as presiding over the region’s metal ores and semi-precious stones. Though little known in the English-speaking world, these tales have always been hugely popular in Russia; between 1942 and 2004 at least two new editions were published each year, most of them intended for children.

  Bazhov’s work is not easily categorized. ‘The Mistress of the Copper Mountain’ was originally intended for an anthology of Urals folk literature; it was apparently commissioned from Bazhov as an example of ‘workers’ folklore’. But publication of the anthology was delayed and the story was first published, in a prestigious Moscow literary journal, as a tale written by Bazhov and only later, when the Urals anthology finally appeared, as a tale recorded by Bazhov. It eventually became clear that these tales are original literary creations, though they do indeed incorporate elements drawn from oral folklore.

  In 1937 or 1938 (the dates are unclear), at the height of the Purges, Bazhov only narrowly avoided arrest. He and his wife Valentina then withdrew from the world, staying out of sight in their own home. For several months, perhaps even a year, neither of them appeared on the street; their only link with the outside world was through Valentina’s sister. During this period of self-confinement, Bazhov wrote his two greatest tales, ‘The Stone Flower’ and ‘The Mountain Master’. Like the artist Boris Sveshnikov, who produced his finest drawings while in a labour camp in the mid 1940s, and like Mikhail Bulgakov, who completed his third draft (the last complete draft) of The Master and Margarita in what could be called ‘inner exile’ in 1937, Bazhov seems to have achieved an extraordinary degree of creative freedom while in the eye of the storm, at the height of the Great Terror.1

  There are many parallels between Bazhov himself and the tales’ young hero, Danilushko. Both disappear, for some time, from the everyday social world – Bazhov into his own house and garden, Danilushko into the realm of the Mistress of the Copper Mountain. Just as Bazhov, during his period of self-confinement, reaches a level of creativity that he was never able to attain before or afterwards, so Danilushko spends time in a magical glade – the heart of the Mistress’s realm – that the Mistress does not allow him ever to remember. And like a returning prisoner, Danilushko is ordered not to speak of where he has been. The parallel between Danilushko in his underground realm and a Gulag inmate working in a mine is remarkably close. Nevertheless, this parallel went unnoticed, or at least unremarked upon, and we cannot even be sure that Bazhov was aware of it himself; it seems to have been ‘hidden in plain view’ – as one can say both in English and in Russian.2 The Malachite Casket was published as a book in 1939, and a second, expanded edition was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1943.

  Bazhov’s own life story was as dramatic as any of his tales; after confinement within the magic kingdom of his own home, he awoke to sudden fame. Mark Lipovetsky has suggested that his tales owe much of their popularity to their resonance with the fantasies and terrors of the time.3 The Soviet Union was, after all, a world where vast numbers of people lived through experiences that the citizens of most countries encounter only in nightmares or fairy tales. There is nothing unusual – from a historical point of view – about mass murder, but only in Stalin’s Russia were hundreds of thousands of people snatched up without warning, swept away to a distant realm of snow and ice and then returned to their homes after the passing of ten, twenty, even thirty years. Early Soviet propaganda claimed that, thanks to the Party, fairy tales had become reality; there may be more truth in this than is immediately apparent. If folktales have remained important in Russian culture, this may not be only because Russia remained a predominantly peasant country for so long. It may also be because the dramatic extremes of folktale, more than most supposedly realist literature, encapsulated people’s real, lived experience.

  As for the Mistress of the Copper Mountain herself, similar though she may be to the seductive mermaids or rusalki of Russian folklore (see Appendix, pp. 424–5), she is still more similar to a poet’s Muse. Born in 1879, Bazhov was a young man during the heyday of Symbolism – the period commonly known as the Silver Age of Russian Literature. His tales are a late bloom from this period; like many of Teffi’s stories, they draw much of their power from the tension between Symbolist aspiration and the reality of the era.

  B
azhov’s tales speak for themselves. His own life story, however, deserves to be told in more detail. Anna Gunin, the translator of the four tales included in this collection, has provided the following account.

  Pavel Bazhov was born in 1879 into a line of Urals ironworkers. His father and grandfather were serfs, spending their working lives in the region’s iron factories. Encouraged by a teacher at a local elementary school, the young Bazhov began memorizing entire volumes of Pushkin. A friend of the family, Nikolay Smorodintsev, persuaded Bazhov’s parents to continue their son’s education. A gymnasium school would have been beyond their means, but with Smorodintsev’s help, Bazhov gained a place at the Yekaterinburg pre-seminary school, normally reserved for the sons of clergy. At fourteen, Bazhov enrolled at the Perm seminary, which he attended for six years. The seminary housed a clandestine library, with books on populist and Marxist politics, economics and science, and for three years Bazhov was in charge of this. At the seminary Bazhov learned Greek, Latin and Old Church Slavonic; he was introduced to poets and thinkers of antiquity, and he expanded his knowledge of Russian literature, discovering the short stories of Chekhov, in particular, who became his favourite author. He excelled in his studies, graduating third in his year, and he yearned to go to university. The seminary, however, would not support further secular study, and Bazhov decided to work as a teacher.

  In 1905 Bazhov was arrested for subversive political activities and spent two weeks in prison. He later described himself as having been an ‘anarcho-populist’ revolutionary. Two years later he began teaching in a girls’ school, and here, among his pupils, he met his future wife, Valentina. They married in 1911. Over a fifteen-year period, Bazhov spent his summers hiking and cycling through the Urals, an area that had long enjoyed a relatively independent existence and still had its own distinct culture. There he gathered folklore and observed the lives of local people, studying the various metal and stone workers at their trade and learning from them the details of their crafts.

  Bazhov’s literary activity began with the 1917 October Revolution, when he started editing army and civilian newspapers and writing sketches and short stories. Later, he wrote, ‘It is likely that I would not have written any literary works if the Revolution had not taken place.’ During the Civil War, Bazhov headed army political units, helped to set up partisan units in Siberia and Altai and oversaw initiatives to eradicate illiteracy. For seven years from 1923 he worked for The Peasants’ Gazette (Krestyanskaya gazeta), travelling to villages and factories to gather material for reports on the lives of the workers.

  Initially Bazhov had been linked to the Socialist Revolutionary Party, or SRs, but in 1918 he joined the Communist Party. During the Civil War he was taken prisoner by the Whites and escaped. In the 1930s, when former SRs were being persecuted, he wrote to the Party administration denying formal membership of the Socialist Revolutionaries. Nevertheless, he was twice expelled from the Communist Party, in 1933 and in 1937. Bazhov had worked as a censor, and both expulsions resulted from denunciations by an author whom he had censored. On the second occasion, a book he had edited was described as ‘counter-revolutionary’ and ‘Trotskyist’; it was based on a collection of the memories of various revolutionaries, some of whom had been declared ‘enemies of the people’ just as the book came off the press. The book was removed from circulation and Bazhov was fired from his job as editor of a publishing house. A year later, when the men responsible for his expulsion had themselves been declared ‘enemies of the people’, his case was reopened and his Party membership restored, although the book remained banned. After this, Bazhov stopped writing non-fiction.

  At the height of the Purges, Bazhov received a summons to the NKVD.4 He packed a small suitcase and arrived at the appointed time, but after waiting for several hours in the corridor he realized that, in the general confusion, they had forgotten about him. Bazhov quietly slipped home and spent a year in hiding, afraid to go out into the streets. With no income of his own, his family was supported by his sister-in-law’s modest teacher’s salary. Bazhov dug in the vegetable patch by day, composing stories, and he devoted his nights to writing them out. Thus emerged the stories that made up the first edition of The Malachite Casket.

  On his sixtieth birthday, in 1939, the first copy of The Malachite Casket came off the press. And in 1943 Bazhov was awarded the Stalin Prize, in response to which he told a friend: ‘Hailed today, jailed tomorrow.’

  The Mistress of the Copper Mountain

  One day, two men from our town went to look at their grass. Their meadows, however, were a fair distance away. Somewhere beyond Severushka.

  It was a holiday, and the heat was sweltering. Both men worked in the mountain, that is to say at Gumeshki. They mined malachite ore, and also lapis lazuli. And when they struck nuggets and nodules of copper and the like, then that too.

  One was a young lad, not yet married, and there was a hint of green in his eyes already. The other was a little older. He was completely burnt out from work. His eyes were all green, and there was a dusting of green over his cheeks. And he was forever coughing.

  It was good to be in the forest. The birds were singing gaily, there was a haze rising from the earth and the air was gently scented. The lads felt warm and drowsy. They reached the Krasnogorsk mine. In those days they mined iron ore there. Well, our lads lay down on the grass under a mountain ash and went straight to sleep. But the young lad suddenly awoke – as if someone had jabbed him in the side. He looked: in front of him, sitting on a heap of ore near a large stone, was a woman. She had her back to the lad, but he could see from her plait that she was a maiden. The plait was blue-black and, rather than hanging loose as our lasses’ plaits do, it seemed stuck to her back. It was tied with ribbons that shimmered now red, now green. Light shone through them and they were tinkling very softly like copper leaf. The lad marvelled at the plait, and carried on looking at her. The girl had a pleasing figure and was not too tall, and she was such a bundle of energy that she could not keep still for a moment. She would lean forward as though searching for something underfoot, then spring back again; she would bend to one side, then the other. She would jump to her feet and wave her arms about, then lean forward again. In a word, the girl was quicksilver. He could hear her babbling something, but in what language and to whom he couldn’t make out. Only she said everything with a laugh. She seemed full of mirth.

  The lad had been about to say something to her, when all of a sudden it hit him:

  ‘Oh my, it must be the Mistress herself! Just look at her clothes. How could I not have noticed? It was her plait had me spellbound.’

  Her clothes were indeed of a kind you could never find in all the world. Her dress was of silken malachite. There really is such a thing. Stone, but like silk to the eye. And it even feels like silk.

  ‘What terrible luck!’ thought the lad. ‘How can I get away before she notices me?’ You see, he’d heard about this Mistress – this malachite girl – from the old men. They’d said that she loves to play tricks on people.

  He had barely thought this when she turned around. She looked cheerfully at the lad, grinned and said teasingly, ‘Stepan Petrovich, what are you doing staring at a maiden’s beauty for free? People pay money for looking, you know. Come closer. Let’s have a little chat.’

  The lad was terrified, of course, but he didn’t show it. He steeled himself. She might be a mysterious power, but all the same she was a girl. Well, and he was a lad – and that meant he was ashamed to appear scared in front of her.

  ‘I don’t have time for chatting,’ he said. ‘We’ve overslept as it is, and we’re on our way to check the grass.’

  She laughed, then said, ‘That’s enough of your play-acting. Come here, I have a proposition for you.’

  Well, the lad saw there was no way out. He began to walk towards her, and she gestured with her hand, as if to tell him to walk round the other side of the ore heap. He walked round and there he saw vast numbers of lizards. And they were
all different. Some were green, some were sky-blue merging into indigo, and there were others that looked like clay or sand speckled with gold. Some glistened like glass or mica; others were like faded grass, but they too were adorned with patterns.

  The girl laughed.

  ‘Don’t tread on them,’ she said, ‘Stepan Petrovich, my soldier. See how big and heavy you are, compared to my little ones.’ And she clapped her hands together, and the lizards scattered, freeing a path.

  The lad walked closer, then stopped. Then she clapped her hands once more and said, laughing away, ‘Now there’s nowhere for you to step. If you flatten one of my servants, you’ll find yourself in trouble.’

  He looked down – now he couldn’t see the ground at all. The lizards had all flocked to one spot, and the ground had become like a patterned floor. Stepan looked: Good grief – so it was copper ore! Every kind, and all burnished. There was mica, and blende, and all sorts of glittering stones, with some that looked like malachite.

  ‘Well, have you recognized me yet, Stepanushka?’ the malachite girl asked, and she let out a peal of laughter.

  Then, after a pause, she said, ‘Don’t be frightened. I won’t do anything bad to you.’

  This riled the lad. The girl was mocking him. He grew mighty angry, and he even shouted, ‘I work in the mountain – who do you think I’m going to be afraid of?’

  ‘Good,’ answered the malachite girl. ‘That’s just what I need, a man who’s not afraid of anyone. As you go down into the mountain tomorrow, you’ll see your factory steward. Now here’s what you must say to him – and mind you don’t forget the words: “The Mistress of the Copper Mountain has ordered you, you rank old goat, to clear out of the Krasnogorsk mine. If you go on breaking up this iron cap of hers, she will drive all the copper in Gumeshki so deep that you won’t be able to reach it at all.” ’