Baba Yaga is known to everyone for Russian folk tales, as well as numerous fiction and animation films. However, only a few connoisseurs and lovers of folklore know that this is one of the most ancient mythological characters, whose image carries a deep ritual meaning.
Mythological functions of Baba Yaga
The pagan Slavs revered Baba Yaga as a guide to the kingdom of the dead. Her house - a hut on chicken legs - served as an entrance to the afterlife. Recognizing the hero by his smell (in fact, Baba Yaga is blind), she always heated a bathhouse for him, which meant ritual ablution. Then she set the table for a ritual meal. Fortunately, the death of the fairytale character was only conditional, "temporary", and allowed him to rescue the kidnapped beauty from the dead kingdom.
Appearance and prototypes
As a rule, Baba Yaga was portrayed in the guise of a terrible hunchbacked old woman with long gray hair and a hooked nose. She rode around the white light in an iron mortar, which she forced to run faster, urging her with an iron club or pestle. To hide her tracks, Yaga covered them with a broom and a broom.
At the same time, Baba Yaga is not necessarily a villain. Like any deity, she is either evil or good, but she has always been the bearer of wisdom. She was served by frogs, black cats, first of all - the Cat Bayun, crows and snakes - in other words, all creatures in which wisdom got along with a threat.
A possible prototype of Baba Yaga was healers, who were popularly considered witches. As a rule, they lived in the depths of the forest, collecting medicinal herbs and roots there. The villagers, although they were afraid of them, often asked for help. This is the kind of healer that Alexander Ivanovich Kuprin showed in the image of Manuilikha in his story "Olesya"
A direct association with Baba Yaga arises when one gets acquainted with the image of a witch from Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol's story "The Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala". No wonder she leaves the hut "on chicken legs" first in the form of a black dog, then turns into a cat, and only then into an "bent into an arc" old woman "with a face wrinkled like a baked apple."
The colorful image of Baba Yaga in Alexander Row's fairy-tale films was created by the talented character actor Georgy Millyar. The appearance of Baba Yaga, performed by Millyar, became truly textbook, and although the old sorceress was not distinguished by femininity, the actor endowed her with great charm.
Baba Yaga performed by Tatyana Peltzer in the fairy tale film "There, on unknown paths …" appeared before the audience as a completely unusual, neat and good-natured old woman. Another unusual Baba Yaga - angry and insidious, but at the same time young and very attractive, was played by Valentina Kosobutskaya in the musical film "New Year's Adventures of Masha and Viti".
Baba Yaga, to this day, is one of the most popular fairy-tale characters and, although she is still considered a villain, her image is increasingly interpreted with good humor, inevitably causing reader and audience sympathy.
