If he wants to enter, the passing traveller has to know how. Heroes like Prince Ivan (Ivan Tsarevich) usually blow into the hut and call out: ‘Little hut! O little hut! Stay still, little hut, as you once did, with your front to me and your back to the forest.’ Or: ‘Little hut, o little hut! Turn your eyes to the forest and your door to me. I shan’t stop here long, just a single night. Let the lone traveller in.’
Girls, by contrast, are warned in advance what they must do to humour the dangerous hut: ‘There, my girl, a birch tree will whip your eyes, so tie it down with a ribbon; there the door will creak and thump, so oil the hinges well; the dogs will attack you, so throw them some bread; the cat will scratch your eyes, so give it some ham.’
Vladimir Propp argues that the myths of many tribal cultures contain two worlds: the world of the living and the world of the dead. A wild beast stands on the boundary (wild animals guard the entrance to Hades), or perhaps a hut with zoo morphic traits. In many tribal cultures a hut like Baba Yaga’s is involved in the initiation rites for young males when they enter the adult world. First they have to be devoured (by the hut itself, whose door puts us in mind of jaws) in order to be born again and join the adult world.
Thus the hero stands before Baba Yaga’s hut and says: ‘Little hut, o little hut, turn your front to me and your back to the forest.’ The young man is afraid, many have died on this spot, which is proven by the skulls on the fence, but even so, he pleads to be let inside (‘Let me come in, to eat salted bread!’). Meanwhile Baba Yaga in her hut murmurs, satisfied: ‘All alone you came to me, like a lamb to the slaughter.’
When they gain entry to the hut, the heroes come face to face with a new terrifying sight: ‘On the stove, on the ninth brick, lies Baba Yaga with her bone leg, her nose touching the ceiling, her slobber seeping over the doorstep, her dugs dangling over the lug,[24] sharpening her teeth.’ The descriptions of Baba Yaga vary: stretching from one corner of the hovel to the other, in some accounts, she rests one leg on a shelf and the other on the stove; sometimes she tosses her breasts onto the stove or hangs them ‘over a pole’, or even ‘shuts the oven door with her breasts’, while snot trails out of her nose, and she ‘scoops up soot with her tongue’. Very occasionally the descriptions are unambiguously sexuaclass="underline" Baba Yaga leaps out of the hut with ‘sinewy rump’ and ‘polished cunt’. Baba Yaga has become so much a part of her hut, growing into it, that the hut dances up and down instead of her, or spins on its axis like a child’s top.
How do the heroes cope with their fear? Before their first meeting with Baba Yaga, they appear very impudent: ‘Come on, old girl, what’s all the fuss about? What’s all the racket for? I want food and drink, get the steam-bath ready, then I’ll tell you all the news.’ We recognise a stereotype in the tone and substance of these words: this is how men in patriarchal societies address their women. One does not expect such behaviour from a young man when he meets an old woman for the first time, but curiously enough, the magic formula does the trick. Hearing the tone and substance of his retort, Baba Yaga is tamed in a trice, and she does everything he asks straightaway. The young traveller’s uncouth familiarity is the key that unlocks her door.[25]
The hero comes face to face with vagina dentata, and behold! He lives to tell the tale.
Let me add at once that, while the obscenity of old women is nothing rare in the mythico-ritual world, it is rarely sexual. Obscenity has its ritual nature and its obvious purpose. Baubo is the famous old girl who pulled up her skirts and exposed her genitals to Demeter. By mocking the absurd role of wise consolatrix (which everybody expected her to play), Baubo managed to make Demeter laugh.[26] The Japanese goddess Ame-no-Uzume tempts the sun goddess Amaterasu out of her cave with an obscene dance, to drive away the darkness that had fallen on the earth. In some parts of Serbia and Bulgaria, there was a custom that the old women would lift their skirts and show their vulvas as a way of defending their village from hail, and thereby save the harvest. Old women in southern Serbia would even strip naked and run round the house to drive away the hail, imploring as they went:
or,
The vulva – the ‘dragon’ or ‘monster’ – had a magical strength that could dispel clouds. People believed that the clouds were led by dragons, so the lines ‘Don’t you, dragon, fight my monster’ pitted the vulva against the clouds. Let’s not forget that Baba Yaga rules over the powers of nature: she often appears in the role of mistress of the winds.[27]
Baba Yaga has an initiatory meaning for male and female heroes alike. Female initiation rarely has a sexual character, while the male equivalent is explicitly so: on the psychoanalytic level, the meeting with Baba Yaga is a confrontation with vagina dentata, the mother, the granny, the ugly old crone who is a grotesque inversion of his future bride.[28] Certain native North American tribes have a myth of the Terrible Mother, who has a fish concealed in her vagina that gobbles men up. The hero’s task is to vanquish the Terrible Mother, more exactly to break the teeth of the fish that lives in her vagina.
The hut, vagina dentata, is a male castration fantasy. Your author’s text proposes a remarkable inversion by means of the character of Kukla. Kukla is a victim of her own vagina dentata. The inci dent that occurred at the outset of her sexual life decides her entire later life. Kukla’s problem is two-fold: her sexuality and her creativity are both petrified. She is like the Medusa, who was not made to look in the mirror by others; she did it by herself. She has no children, and only begins to write when her husband dies. And she does so, naturally, hidden behind his name.
Only when Pupa leaves home, her ‘hut’, can she die. Leaving home is the emancipatory deed that leads Pupa where she wants to go – to death.
Returning home, your author returns to the maternal ‘hut’ and repeats the initiation rite for the nth time. She must respect the law of Baba Yaga’s hut, otherwise Baba Yaga will eat her up. The quip about good girls going to heaven while bad girls go everywhere contains the whole female history (as seen by men), where women’s fate has been determined by two opposed poles: home (cleanliness, order, security, family) and the space outside the home (dirt, disorder, danger, chaos, loneliness). The outer space was traditionally reserved to men, and inner space, the home, to women.
Finally, something interesting which can be read as a metaphor realised by contemporary society. The vagina dentata has fled from the field of sexual fantasy into reality. A female condom, the ‘Rapex’, has been invented by a South African woman, who wants to help African women defend themselves against rapists. Just like the Terrible Mother of native North American myths, the female condom has fish teeth in it that can wound the penetrating penis. Apparently the inventor was inspired by meeting a rape victim who said: ‘If only I had teeth down there.’
24
In traditional Russian huts, the lug (in Russian:
25
‘Here are your answers!’ said the beautiful princess. ‘The little wooden box – that’s me, and the little golden key – that’s my husband.’ (From
26
Baubo appears as a figure with a hypertrophied vulva, or more often with a vulva-face. Sometimes she is shown as a
27
‘The old woman came onto the porch, shouted in a voice like thunder, whistled vigorously, and at once strong winds blew up all around her and whirled about, making the hut shake.’ (From
28
In a Serbian fairytale,