Witch and witchcraft
material in Russian and Ukrainian culture can be found in
three forms. There are folktales such as the one about
Vasilisa the Beautiful, which is illustrated here. There are
legends, such as the ones I used for my article "Strike Now
and Ask Questions Later: Witchcraft Stories in Ukraine,"
Ethnologies (formerly Canadian Folklore/Folklore
Canadien)special issue on Wicca/witchcraft, Vol. 20, No. 1
(1998), pp. 67-89. Then there are real people who practice
herbal medicine, sometimes act as midwives, and regularly
use incantations to help their patients feel better. The
real women are seldom called witches. The words for them are
baba or babka. Sometimes they are called znakharka or
vorozheia, but the last two are seldom used because they
have acquired a pejorative meaning, especially after the
Soviet era when there was fairly organized persecution of
folk healers. I met a number of these women while I was
working in Ukraine last year. These women can be accused of
witchcraft when something goes wrong. In most cases,
however, they are respected members of the community, often
consulted on all sorts of issues. They have started to
regain their positions in the community with the breakup of
the Soviet Union and the collapse of organized medicine.
Very often they are the only people who can help with minor
illnesses, broken bones, and the like.
In the story about Vasilisa the Beautiful, the heroine lives
happily with her parents. Her mother dies and her father
remarries. The stepmother is an evil woman with two
daughters of her own. She and the daughters resent
Vasilisa's beauty and plot to get rid of her. While the
father is gone, they put out all of the lights in the house
and tell Vasilisa that she has to go into the forest, to the
witch's house, to get a new source of fire. Vasilisa
dutifully leaves. As she travels through the forest, it
turns dark and she is very frightened, but keeps on walking.
All of a sudden, a white horseman rides by and dawn comes.
As she walks further, she meets a red horseman, and it
becomes noon. Finally, she meets a black horseman and it
turns night again. The three horsemen are illustrated here.
Shortly after she meets the black horseman, Vasilisa comes
upon a tiny house on chicken legs, surrounded with human
skulls. This is the house of the witch. The East Slavic
witch, as in illustration one, is often pictured as riding
in a mortar and pushing herself off with a pestal. She comes
home, finds Vasilisa, and sends her to do task after task.
Vasilisa performs all of the tasks assigned to her and the
witch is pleased. She rewards Vasilisa by telling her she
can have anything she wants. Vasilisa asks for fire and
receives a flaming skull. Vasilisa also asks if the witch
will tell her about the horsemen. The witch refuses and
sends Vasilisa home. When Vasilisa arrives with the skull,
it reignites the fires in the house that had been put out by
the stepmother and the stepsisters. Then it spins on its
stick and burns the three evil women with its glowing eyes.
In some versions of the story, Vasilisa uses the skills she
learned from the witch to win the attention of a prince, who
marries her. The marriage scene is the last illustration
here.
The illustrations for the Vasilisa story were drawn by Ivan
Bilibin, a famous painter, designer of theatrical backdrops,
and illustrator of fairytale books.
