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Once upon a time, there lived in the depths of the deep, dark forests a terrible witch named BabaYaga. She was not a kin of Baba Ramdev, but was quite as appalling to look at. For she was eight feet tall, had a crooked nose (which she pressed to the ceiling of her hut when she slept), a bag of bones for her body, and rode a mortar on her nightly missions to eat children raw. Her revolving hut, made of human bones, stood on three chicken legs. In short, BabaYaga was the stuff that nightmares were made on, not just of Russian children but also of a whole generation of Bengalis belonging to the late Seventies and Eighties for whom books from Russia were as familiar as Bengali books, thanks to the close links of their state with the erstwhile Big Brother.
Most of these ‘children’, now in the unfortunate middle years of their lives, would heartily agree with the Russian interior minister, Rashid Nurgaliyev, who recently said that indigenous fairy tales and cartoons should be revived as tools of education in that country. “We don’t need to copy any [foreign] models. We are a unique country... and we have values that no other countries have,” he told a parliamentary hearing. While one may argue over the ‘uniqueness’ of the values the Russian tales upheld, they certainly had the charm of the quaint. In the Tales for Alyonushka (189496) — modernday fairy tales for the author’s daughter, little Alyonushka — Dmitry MaminSibiryak writes about the puny but brave mosquitoes that could drive away an angry bear from the swamp because they fought together. In the same book, the chimney sweep, Iyasha, proudly prepares to eat the piece of black bread he has earned with the sweat of his brow, and instructs his friends, the squabbling birds, about their absolute right over the food for which they have laboured. Will such tales find favour with children growing up with Harry Potter — who is ever the lonely hero in his distinctiveness and whose problems are never such mundane ones as that of earning his daily bread? Perhaps they will, because not all values have changed, and not all characters live and act according to their ‘type’.
The story, “The frog Tsarevna”, is the standard fairy tale involving the three sons of the Tsar, where Ivan, the youngest, begins as the most unfortunate one and ends up being the luckiest. But the tale is not so much about Ivan as about his wife, Vasilisa the Wise and Clever, who actually is so wise and clever that one wonders why she condescended to marry the rather dim Ivan at all. But then, we are told, she had been punished for her cleverness by being turned into a frog by her envious father. She would have remained so if Ivan had not rescued her by marrying the frog.
She gets back her real form temporarily, and during the ball given in their honour, Vasilisa leads Ivan by the hand, literally. But the curse has not yet lifted. In his haste, Ivan foolishly burns her frog skin, and Vasilisa disappears. Ivan must undergo a series of trials before he can deserve his wife. At the end of it all, “Vasilisa the Wise and Clever ran out to him [Ivan] and kissed him on his honeysweet mouth”. Whoever thought that only lovely heroines have honeysweet mouths must have missed out on feminized heroes like Ivan.
The fairy tale of the black geese repeats the pattern of Ivan’s trials, only Ivan is replaced here by little Elena, who must save her brother from the clutches of old BabaYaga. What Ivan learns from his lessons becomes clear when they are seen in conjunction with Elena’s. Elena hurries to find her brother, but on her way, helps a fish, a squirrel and a field mouse, and they all help her in turn. Thus she learns the value of kindness, that spontaneous feeling, which, by making her reach out of her own self, becomes the first step in her preparation for adulthood.
Perhaps the same impulse had led Ivan to marry the squat frog, but he must recognize that emotion in himself for what it is — a task accomplished through the trials — before he can be worthy of the frog princess. Political sympathies differ — which is perhaps why one has to take Nurgaliyev’s comments about his country’s uniqueness with a pinch a salt — but the quality of unstrained human sympathy remains the same across time and place. It still drops as gentle rain from heaven, and sometimes, from forgotten fairy tales.
