The taint of the romanovs: from tsarevich Alexis (1718) to tsarevich Alexis (1918) (Illustrated)

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Shopbop Designer Fashion Brands. Withoutabox Submit to Film Festivals. Likewise, attributing the fall of the Romanovs to an ancient curse uttered by a priest executed for siding with the Czarevich Alexis puts the book in the realm of fiction. Does the author believe that world history is controlled by supernatural forces? Why does it take centuries for them to act?

Why this one curse out of the many uttered? Would a countervailing curse have neutralized it? This is the stuff of tacky chick-lit, not serious history books. Catherine Radziwill turns out to be quite a colorful character herself, serving time for a forged check and a promulgator of "The Protocols of Zion," a notorious antisemitic rant well known even then to be a forgery.

This is a very important book for anyone interested in the Romanovs, the emperors and tsars of Russian, or Russian politics in general. It starts with the father and mother of Peter the Great. Conclusions are drawn and validated that are only hinted at in other books I have read.

The author seems to have been a knowledgeable princess, and I believe the book must have been written soon after , perhaps between the two World Wars. I have been reading other biographies and accounts of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, and the facts substantiate all that is stated by the princess, however without drawing any conclusions. Perhaps the princess had inside personal information not available to the other authors.

At any rate, I highly recommend this book. From what I could read I liked this book. The version I downloaded to my Kindle was incoherent. Locations were out of sequence. Sentences were left unfinished. The eastern frontier did not become culturally significant for its pragmatic military alliances, however.

In the mids, the composer Aleksandr Borodin —77 turned this ancient epic song into a Romantic orientalist opera, Prince Igor. A century later, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn exploited another, more sinister aspect of this myth of the permeable Russian frontier. The performance unfolds in a fictional format well known to the Stalinist era, and to these incarcerated men personally: Our third peculiarity concerns the compass. But in fact, the North—South axis has always been equally pronounced and productive of plots.

On the free side we find the monastic frontier communities, homesteaders, pilgrims, adventurers, commercial travelers, heroes of Romantic Wanderlust, and — after the founding of the Russian Academy of Sciences in — scientific expeditions. On the unfree side belong the exiles and prisoners. Two astonishing early autobiographies by pravedniki one religious, the other political anchor the punitive Russian frontier narrative.

His travail through Siberia and then the Far North ended in martyrdom in , when he was burned at the stake. The second autobiography is the memoir of Princess Natalya Dolgorukaya, who was exiled by order of Empress Anna in four days after marrying into a disgraced family. It details their mile deportation to a central Siberian settlement north of Tobolsk on the Ob River. Under such conditions, to sustain oneself and survive without doing harm to others is the maximum that can be asked of the victim by way of a moral goal.

A hero or heroine need take no other initiative. Raskolnikov confesses his murder in Petersburg — but only repents of it in Siberia, in prison, gazing out over the empty steppe. In such narratives, the unfree Siberian exile is Everyman, by birthright a sinner, for whom release into true freedom is release from life itself. Let us consider only one final contrast: Here the relevant distinction is between those who set out with the goal of arriving somewhere, of putting down roots in a new home, and those for whom space itself is their destined and undifferentiated home, their ultimate residence.

Wanderers can be secular or religious. The secular wanderers in Russian literature were largely borrowed from European Romanticism: The religious variant of wanderer, the strannik, was a figure of some spiritual stature. He ends his life as a strannik in the company of a Bible-vendor, which casts a faint but authentic aura of wisdom over his otherwise parodied and indulgent person.

Seekers are drawn to wanderers. Wanderers are not obliged to arrive anywhere, but their natural end is a monastery. In a strange mock epic written in titled The Enchanted Wanderer, Nikolai Leskov tells the story of a vigorous young man, born a serf, who carelessly commits several murders, suffers remorse, and in a vision is Heroes and their plots 47 commanded to wander through Russia, the Tatar lands, and the Caucasus, constantly exposing his life to danger before being deemed worthy to become a monk.

Maksim Gorky — tapped into the same tradition, when he launched his career as a writer in the s with bestselling stories of itinerant dockworkers and charismatic tramps. The wanderer or displaced person during war constitutes a terrible and vital subset of Russian heroes, one that remained vigorous in literature and film up through the end of the Soviet era. Its human parameters stretched from helpless children to cold-blooded killing machines Bolshevik as well as enemy. A rich Soviet literature of the literally embattled frontier emerged out of the savagery of the Civil War —21 , which was fought simultaneously on dozens of fronts: But all Russian war literature has tended to be read as a parable on Russia herself, a land in which experience could never be made short, painless, or small.

Rogues and villains Our previous three hero types — righteous people, fools, frontiersmen of the ever-expanding and never-pacified edge — have noticeably Russian chronotopes. To an important degree, each is space-and-time-specific to the Russian culture and continent. With the rogues and villains we move into more panEuropean territory. The Russian rogue [plut, pronounced ploot] shares much with the Spanish picaro [rascal], his genetic cousin. But the Russian rogue exhibits some unmistakably national traits, which come into focus at those points where a rogue becomes a villain.

In the Russian context, certain acts came to be considered villainous that would not be so quickly condemned elsewhere. Rogues are not virtuous, of course, but neither are they evil. What gets in the way of evil is their buoyancy, self-confidence, sense of humor, high level 48 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature of responsiveness, and the fact that they live off the land.

If they prosper, it is because their human surroundings are corrupt, greedy, foolish, selfish — or simply amoral. Rogues are survivors; they live by symbiosis and take on the color of the terrain. There is something of Ivan the Fool in them, rooted in the immediate present, although rogues are far more energetic and entrepreneurial.

A villain, in contrast, creates victims. Frol is a poor solicitor. He ends up in bed with Annushka, who, at first shocked, rapidly develops a liking for her seducer and their mutual sport. By means of various minor blackmails the couple manages to elope. The parents are scandalized; the tsar is alerted; Frol confesses his heinous deed to his in-laws with a shrug.

The incensed parents ban their daughter and son-in-law from their house. Both at once, perhaps. These can vary widely. One study of early Russian rogue tales identifies four career trajectories: Two things must be noted about this class of rogue. First, in keeping with the traditional Russian virtues of hospitality, generosity, communality, circulation of wealth — and also their inverse, Russian intolerance for profit-making schemes and hoarding of any sort — the Gogolian rogue is overwhelmingly a mercenary one.

The tests that he puts to others, and the tests that the narrative puts to him, concern proper and improper uses of money. Pavel Chichikov, the conman in Dead Souls who buys up and then tries to mortgage deceased serfs, is shallow and Heroes and their plots 49 unappealing. But his flaws pale in comparison with Plyushkin, the miser in that novel, whose hoarded wealth turns to rot and whose person becomes paranoid and beggarly. Plyushkin is beyond rogue or villain, a black hole that sucks in every material thing and immobilizes it.

He is absolutely unredeemable. Greed of this paralyzing scope is so disrespected that rogues who redistribute wealth by any means, on any pretext, can easily become noble outlaws, or cease to be outlaws at all. This Russian discomfort with material accumulation provokes our second comment. This mediocrity knows neither heights nor depths; he is cautious, acquisitive, narrow-minded.

To bolster his weight in the world, he would always prefer to buy than to spend. In War and Peace, Tolstoy forgives the extravagant, impulsively generous and financially bankrupt Rostov family, even when their fiscal irresponsibility causes a great deal of grief. He marries the profligate survivors, Natasha and her brother Nikolai, to wealthy heirs and heiresses. But Tolstoy does not forgive the elder Rostov daughter Vera and her shallow, calculating husband Berg for decorating their apartment out of the spoils of war.

No capital value can accrue to a thing, only to a life. Such satirists routinely ignored or discredited as sham whatever civil liberties or political freedoms they saw, emphasizing only the triviality, conformity, and tedium of a comfortably provisioned life. One good example is The Islanders, a novel of British life written in by Evgeny Zamyatin — , by profession an engineer who supervised the construction of Russian icebreakers in England during World War I and later authored the anti-utopia We.

Material security — a morally neutral background texture for many literary plots in post-industrial countries — has aroused far greater irritation and suspicion in Russian culture. One category of roguishness was not well developed in the Russian context: This important type entered Russian high literary culture only during the Romantic period, and even then long retained the flavor of a European import.

But characteristically, Pushkin awards his Don Juan lofty poetic dimensions that undercut the covetous physical aspect of his pursuit and add aesthetic luster to it. If Pushkin cleanses and poeticizes the purely sensuous, then Tolstoy darkens and coarsens it. This should not surprise us. If these hoarders hurt strangers or obstruct tax-collectors sent by an impersonal state bureaucracy, their sin is not so heinous.

They can become attractive rogues and sometimes even positive heroes. But if their hoarding destroys their family, it is unforgivable. Money, like love, only has value if it circulates. Pin it to yourself and you will lose everything. The nadir of such greed and money-driven villainy is reached with the darkest nineteenth-century novel, The Golovlyovs s , by the civil servant and satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin — The tone is set by its grasping matriarch Arina, successful businesswoman. The second generation slips into prostitution, Siberian exile, suicide. Thus the practitioners deserve no mercy and can be rubbed out.

Popular support for their extermination was easy to incite. The Evil Spirit to his ways is winning.

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Consider the most famous portrait, Nikolai Stavrogin from Demons. But Stavrogin becomes progressively weaker as a result of his amoral profligacy, not stronger. The authentic Gothic villain does not weaken. But in a Russian cosmos, evil rewards him with impotence. Our final category is the political villain, the villain backed by governmental power. This Terrible tsar [lit. His rehabilitation as an exotic, patriotic, divinely decreed precedent for Stalin, in a campaign that began in and recruited the best talent in literature, film, and music, formed the aesthetic backdrop for those fabricated charges of treason that claimed the lives of so many artists during the Great Terror.

The greatest poets fought back literally with their lives.

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The tyrant in Russia has always been threatened by acts of straightforward outrage and feats of more private loyalty. But tyranny has also been successfully undone by more double-voiced means — through parable, satire, the fantastic, the absurd, and perhaps with greater effectiveness. Its fulcrum is the doorman Nikita, an impenetrable bully with the power to lock in or lock out as commanded by his superiors. It is Nikita who redefines a slothful, recalcitrant doctor first into a patient and then into an inmate.

This story was one of a handful of tales that turned Lenin into an implacable enemy of the tsarist state. Laughter can be equally terrible, especially with its demonic undercurrent. But that room turns out to be reality. Many 54 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature of these alienated heroes were simply transplanted. During the Realist period, they evolved into distinctly Russian nihilists, utopians, and other idea-driven reformers or eccentrics.

From the outset a cutting-edge of parodic reassessment characterized Russian borrowings from Europe. The idea caught on among Russian critics and was retrofitted to heroes of the Romantic era. To be superfluous meant to be defeated along three parameters: Its perspective is largely that of society, not of the individual.

If the European Romantic-era misfit was an egoist, outcast, rebel, and proud of his rebellion — proud even to fail in that rebellion, if need be, for the attempt and the quest were all — then Russian variations on the Byronic hero were more contemplative, passive, and resigned. They were less deluded which is why Onegin and Pechorin thrill us even today with their intelligence , but they were frail. By default, this frailty brought them back into the fold. Traditional Russian culture valued communality and wholeness. As we have seen, however, this culture was also highly tolerant, even protective, of eccentricity: The Westernized eccentric or outsider on Russian soil was not so fortunate.

He was featured but neither pitied nor respected, and usually he did not survive. We limit our discussion here to three Russian variants: Napoleonic, nihilist, and utopian. The Russian Napoleon myth evolved in several stages, each with its own literary signature. By the s, national trauma had faded and the cult of Napoleon had begun: Petersburg, a self-made man and merit-based career was an exhilarating, illicit dream. Heroes and their plots 55 Pushkin had been only thirteen when Moscow was occupied and burned, too young by two years for military service or exploits against the foe; in his various poems on Napoleon, the poet already saw the Frenchman more as a liberator and democrat than as a scourge.

As the myth matured in the s, however, it again darkened. In Dead Souls, Gogol evoked the Napoleon image as farce: During the mids, while Crime and Punishment was being serialized, Tolstoy was recreating in his War and Peace the saga of the invasion replete with its cardboard Napoleon — and already Tolstoy was nervous that the wheel might be turning again, that the French Emperor was regaining his aura and would have to be debunked.

In several decades, this proved true. The Symbolist generation admired Napoleon anew. The Napoleonic hero had a cyclical trajectory in Russia, one tied to the mystique of the West and to the nightmare and the nostalgia of foreign invasion and heroic self-defense. In contrast, and somewhat paradoxically, the nihilist hero — who doubts and negates everything — was nourished by rumors of positive internal reform.

Only by applying a utilitarian standard could a rational human being escape the disillusionment of the Byronic hero and the delusions of Napoleonism. The first attack on the life of the Liberator Tsar Alexander II, by a domestic terrorist organization, occurred in , and it promoted the nihilist from metaphysical portrait to political threat. Political assassinations rose steadily in Russia until the outbreak of the Great War. There was also no use for cynical, nay-saying nihilists in the spirit of the Underground Man.

Literary utopia has a lengthy European pedigree, beginning with Sir Thomas More in the early sixteenth century. But utopian thinking remained robust longer in Russia than in the West. The novel is a dream, free of the anxieties of a workable political blueprint, and no wonder Lenin was so fond of it. Anti-utopias, it turns out, are as double-voiced as utopias. It is both impossible to remain as we are, and impossible to survive in a society where our current vices have been eliminated.

Vladimir Mayakovsky — was a Bolshevik poet, committed in word and deed to the futuristic slogans of the new regime. But in the final scene of his dystopian comic drama The Bedbug , when the pre-Revolutionary hero is unfrozen and displayed in the zoo as a relic of ancient times, he cries out to the audience with genuine pathos: Why am I alone in this cage?

The protagonist and diary writer of We is liberated by his rediscovery of the first-person singular — and simultaneously appalled by it. It is no surprise that this underground hero has no discernible face. The heroes we might yet see, and what lies ahead This gallery of favored Russian heroes has not been strong in certain categories widespread in Western fiction. Virtuous merchants and productive bureaucrats are few, beautiful sinners are rare. Has the twenty-first century already irreversibly changed this repertory?

Russian literary space openly welcomed persons and themes that had always been on the brink of taboo: And also, to be sure, explicit pornography, violence, and misogyny. Instead we begin to see a partial return to the bawdy mixed prose of the eighteenth century, to wide-open not Aesopian satire, and to the amoral ethics of the folk tale. These and other narratives of the pre-Pushkin era are the subject of our next two chapters.

The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Chapter 3 Traditional narratives Viking chieftain Ryurik invited to rule Novgorod Ryurikovich dynasty lasts until Martyrdom of Boris and Gleb Alexander Nevsky defeats Teutonic knights on frozen Lake Chud First printing press in Moscow authorized by Ivan the Terrible s: Boris Godunov sends eighteen young men abroad to study; none return, nor do their assigned spies Election of Boris Godunov as tsar Patriarch orders musical instruments burned State-sponsored church reforms leading to Schism [Raskol] and breaking-away of Old Believers First stage play performed at Moscow court — Reign of Peter the First, the Great Russian medieval culture was rich, but not in the printed word.

Folk and religious art was visual and aural: In , Tsar Ivan the Terrible allowed a printing press to be set up in Moscow. The first book published in Russian on Russian soil, an elaborate edition of readings from the Apostles for use in the liturgy, appeared in In , the press was destroyed by a mob incited by clerical authorities. Although printing made steady gains, until the late seventeenth century, the small number of literate Russians preferred scrolls to printed books.

Traditional texts were performed in connection with specific communal rituals. In his final years, Leo Tolstoy — provocatively declared a wedding song and a welltimed anecdote or joke preferable to a symphony or a novel. At the time of his death, the visionary Symbolist composer Aleksandr Scriabin — was planning a vast choral work of divine revelation, Mysterium, which would synthesize all the arts in a single performance, usher in the apocalypse, and herald the birth of a new world.

Tolstoy as a peasant primitivist and Scriabin as a religious ecstatic might be seen as two possible twentieth-century end points for traditional pre-modern, pre-print Russian narrative. One is the down-to-earth, profane wisdom of folklore and the folk tale [skazka], rooted in a partially Christianized paganism. Its master plot is survival.

Its master plot is intercession and salvation. In between are various hybrids: All of these narratives — ecclesiastic and folk — could accommodate miracles and the supernatural. Russian medieval genres did not know the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, only between entertainment profane stories and edification sacred stories. All events, consciousnesses, and narratives were linked in a single, integrated continuity, told or experienced.

Just as no person could stand alone, fully outside a clan or community for every person at least has parents , so no literary work stood alone. But integration did not mean homogenization or a dissolving of the one into the many. Just as every individual is born of two discrete parents but does not duplicate either of them, so was every medieval text perceived as indispensable to the integrity of the whole. No body was excluded from a community merely because it happened to be orphaned or deceased. Churches were understood also to be bodies — or more precisely, human faces with eyes, ears, and heads Traditional narratives 61 onion domes rose up roundly on necks; oko [eye] gives rise to okno [window].

From this animated and integrated cosmos, we will discuss only a small number of text types: Russian saintly prototypes originated in Byzantine Christianity but mutated while moving north. Her official conversion to Christianity was abrupt. It affected cities and towns but hardly registered in the countryside. As Christian stories and motifs spread slowly over the Russian plain, they blended with, rather than replaced, pagan worldviews.

The distinction between mischief and sin is important. In the Russian hagiographic tradition the Christian side of dual faith , saints are radiant and singular; devils are small, devious, and many. Devils are always drawn to the challenge of bringing down a saint.

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Gods of sun, moon, stars, and wind did exist, but prayers were directed down to the life-giving black soil rather than up to celestial deities. The body was understood to be a seed; thus failure to bury a dead body was a grievous sin. The pagan Greek pantheon was not well known in Kievan or Muscovite Russia, and many of the central Greek gods had no equivalent in the Russian religious imagination.

There was no aggressive god of war, for example, and no goddess of female beauty only of grass, flowers, birch trees, ponds, lakes, rivers, and swamps. Mother Earth Herself had no discernible face. Kindness, fidelity, and the capacity to nurture were valued over freedom or valor. The center of human life, the peasant house, was embedded in four elements, the same four known to the medieval West. Both pairs were obligatory, but their energies did not mix.

Nor did they fundamentally change. Since time was not progressive but cyclical, whatever change we see can only be superficial — the work of wizards, masks, or shape-shifters. But the pagan cosmos was pragmatic and overall tolerant. It made room for the officially new and then re-coalesced around the well, the barn, the hearth. But in the nineteenth century, the authorities gave up trying.

Precisely that century witnessed the phenomenal flowering of a Russian literature that freely integrated motifs of paganism, Christian monotheism, and modernization. In imitation of Christ, this innocent sacrifices its life — but for the sake of national unity or domestic peace, not for the salvation of all humanity. The concept of original sin is not central to Russian Orthodoxy; its punitive aspects are not obsessively dwelt upon.

The Fall is less a story of sexual guilt than of prideful autonomy. Both brothers had armed retainers and thus the power to defend themselves; they chose not to do so, which is essential to the potency and pathos of their story. This non-violent, self-negating response to evil has nothing of the masochistic or epic-heroic about it. The boys did not wish to die. To seek suffering or to glorify it would have been a prideful sin. No matter how immature their royal persons or how flawed their reigns, a violent, passively received death ennobled them.

The Boris-and-Gleb model of sacrifice resonates behind the most atheistic of patriotic Soviet fictions. In her classic study of the Stalinist novel, Katerina Clark notes that martyrs remained the privileged means by which History moved toward its preordained end.

Michael occupied a cell in the monastery for forty years, living on bread and water, sleeping on the bare earth, and facilitating a series of miracles during local famines and droughts. Two details are worth noting about his holy-foolish career. Michael advised his city to sue for peace. Sometimes, as 64 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature did Michael, they saw reality more sensibly than the politicians.

Upon seeing this strange monk, the abbot inquired: Why did you come to us? Where are you from? This mirror or echo-dialogue is an instructive example of holy-foolish discourse, which, dressed up in more literary garb, will become the verbal dynamic of carnival, of certain types of dissident speech, of avant-garde poetry and the Russian Absurd.

The interrogator asks a question confidently because he unlike, he presumes, his interlocutor is in his right place, a stable and recognized identity. The interrogated party responds by casting back the question unchanged, thus turning a hierarchical inquiry into a horizontal pan-human one, the litso [face] of the interrogator into a potential lichina [mask]. We provide here only one post-medieval example. In Chapter 5 of his quasiautobiographical Childhood Leo Tolstoy describes, from the perspective of a ten-year-old boy, the visit of the yurodivy Grishka to a Westernized aristocratic estate.

Entering the house, Grishka strikes the floor with his staff, breaks into a grotesque laugh, and begins to mutter incoherently. She expected this skepticism and parries it. Our remaining two saintly types are more survival-oriented and pragmatic. Saint Theodosius, who founded the Caves or Crypt Monastery in Kiev in and then became its abbot, represents the monk-administrator.

The task of its administrators was not to jolt or confound society — the Traditional narratives 65 duty of the confrontational fool — but the opposite: With his own monks, Theodosius proved himself a gentle and patient advisor. His Life, written by the chronicler Nestor Z, pp.

To his enemies, however, Theodosius could be uncompromisingly severe. In his youth, those enemies included his own possessive mother, who fought tenaciously to keep him within the biological family fold, beating him without mercy when she discovered he had girded his loins with iron chains.

He escapes her, of course, for his vocation is preordained. When his mother tracks him down, she discovers that she will have access to him only if she enters a convent. This model of a working male community under threat at the edge of the civilized world, led by a spiritual ideologue who must overcome among much else the protective and procreative instincts of the family, will combine with the traditional Russian epic hero bogatyr to inspire the Soviet construction novel.

Alexander —63 , later called Nevsky because of his victory over the Swedes on the Neva River, became Prince of Novgorod in Two years later, Mongols were at his doorstep, but a miracle of spring flooding made the swamps impassable and kept the fierce horsemen at bay. Alexander reigned for sixteen years, fending off the attacks of Swedes, Lithuanians, and Teutonic knights from the west while buying off the Mongol overlords with tribute to the south and east. His Life, composed around , is the first hagiography of a secular prince and military leader. Wherein lies the courage? Against the well-armed, highly aggressive Catholic nations to the west, Alexander fought lightning-swift, strategically brilliant battles.

In such maneuvers, pursuit of glory was possible and appropriate. The steppe frontier was endless and could not be defended. Thus the Church blessed Prince Alexander in his journeys of taxpaying tribute to the Mongol capital on the Volga River. Two centuries later, when internal rivalries fractured the Horde, Muscovite tsars pitted one khanate against another and reunited the Russian lands. In the Stalinist period, Saint Alexander Nevsky was rehabilitated. When Stalin and Hitler concluded their non-aggression pact in August , Alexander Nevsky was immediately withdrawn from the movie houses, to be just as rapidly reinstated in June after the Nazi surprise attack.

In times of national trauma, it is common for governments to turn to military heroes as patriotic rallying points. The emergence of a faith-based army in this once officially atheistic country will most certainly affect the plots of Russian war literature and its prototypical heroes.

The folktale, however, demands nothing. It does not interpret or explain; it merely observes and portrays. It is precisely this relinquishment of explanations that engages our trust. What is it like to live in a depthless world?

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The hero has one clear, linear task. At the end of it lies his reward, usually a princess. While accomplishing the task, he encounters various helpers, whose gifts or services are all palpably material. Helpers and obstacles appear from nowhere and disappear without a trace; a dark void opens up on either side of the narrow path of the plot. Whatever is on that path, however, is lit up in brilliant primary colors: Throughout his travails the hero expresses no astonishment, curiosity, longing, or fear, and apparently does not experience pain.

He never reassesses his goal or his reward. Many of these pan-European traits are common to the Russian skazka as well. Conventionally it is divided into three types. As a rule, sexual themes are not treated erotically or chivalrously. Russian folk tales are not incipient love stories, as they frequently were in Western cultures. The Russian fairy-tale princess is often mute, unwilling or passive in the beginning. Once moved to act, however, she is matter-of-fact, inventive, alert to what it takes to survive trial and temptation, and far less sentimental than her Tsarevich Ivan.

The skazka is a dual-faith narrative, mixing pagan and Christian motifs. The villain controls major celestial and geophysical forces frost, wind, thunder, water , but the hero or heroine can always win the services of small animals by acts of kindness. Many Russian folk tales are linked to incantations, spells, and nature worship. The only way to foil this immortal creature is to reunite him with his own death.

Although stubborn, vain, and dangerous — his foul breath can turn a person to stone — Koshchey is not very intelligent and easily outwitted. His tactics suffer from his innate inability to sympathize with others. Unusually for folk tales but conventionally for opera which requires, in addition to the romantic soprano, a mezzo or contralto as secondary love interest , the villain has a beautiful daughter, Koshcheyevna, who by various charms almost seduces Ivan-Tsarevich, thereby interrupting his quest to regain the captive princess.

The princess, being human, can empathize with her rival. Out of compassion she kisses Koshcheyevna on the forehead. The Koshchey element can revert to plants or trees but cannot be fully humanized. This quasi-animate dwelling is surrounded by a fence made of stakes readied for human heads. Outside her hut, she travels in a mortar and pestle. But Baba Yaga extends her help to a hero only after he has been tested for manliness. First she announces that she will eat her visitor his bones will be ground up in that mortar — and waits to see how the guest responds.

If he ignores her hideousness and demands proper hospitality, she will feed him and provide him with talismans and secrets for his journey. If he trembles and goes limp with fear, she will destroy him. We will now consider two variants of the same exemplary tale. Placed side Traditional narratives 69 by side, they suggest how a specific folk-tale plot might change in emphasis and value system as it migrates east. The most prominent difference between the two variant tales is the presence of Koshchey and Baba Yaga.

All are fueled by mercantile interests and test the hero in the manner of a knight from the Age of Chivalry. The old king dies, leaving his adolescent son in the care of Faithful John. The new young king is allowed access to everything in the palace but the room with the portrait of the Princess of the Golden Dwelling. Of course the king glimpses the portrait and falls instantly in love. To court her, he orders that five tons of family gold be crafted into various artifacts. He packs these into a ship, and he and Faithful John sail across the sea to the princess.

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