ORIGINS AND APPEARANCE OF THE SIBERIAN RUSALKA

In Western Siberia, as in European Russia, rusalkas were often believed to originate from young women who died prematurely before marriage, most often by drowning. As a result, descriptions by informants of a rusalka’s appearance almost always bore the features of the dead: demonic and frightening.

Taken together, descriptions of rusalkas’ appearance reveal the following traits, most often mentioned by informants: unnatural (for a living person) pallor; bluish or greenish skin; long, loose hair (green, fair, red, light brown, golden, or black); a terrifying gaze; glowing eyes; long, sharp nails or animal-like claws; long arms, sometimes able to stretch; and white clothing resembling a shroud. The appearance of a rusalka, like that of a dead person, could be accompanied by a sensation of cold, shivering, and a feeling of “terrible” fear. People feared rusalkas; they were like the dead. They say that drowned women become rusalkas, those who took their own lives—and that is a great sin, so they find no peace in the next world.

— They roam around at night, frightening people; they can even gnaw someone to death (Field materials from the author: Omsk Region, Tarsky District, Grinevichi village, 2005).

— A rusalka was seen. She was dressed all in white, sitting on a rock by the water and combing her hair with a comb. She turned around, and her face was white as flour, with such a terrifying gaze. There seemed to be some kind of green glow all around her. She looked at us and plopped into the water. It was as if a chill had swept through us from inside, and we ran home as fast as we could (Field materials from the author: Altai Territory, Pervomaysky District, Berezovka village, 2009).

— One man here said a rusalka chased him all the way from the lake. He went fishing at night, and she came out of the water, terrifying, completely naked, with a huge mass of long hair and burning eyes. He ran, and she chased him all the way home. He said she wasn’t running, but bounding along as if jumping. He ran through the gate and shut it, but she reached her hands over the fence toward him—so long they stretched out like snakes, crawling after the man. The claws on her hands were as sharp as knives. He managed to get inside the house and read prayers until morning; then they blessed the whole house (Field materials from the author: Novosibirsk Region, Zdvinsky District, Verkh-Uryum village, 2002).

At the same time, field materials from different ethnographic groups reveal distinct and often opposing traits in depictions of rusalkas. They could be either attractive or hideous. This difference was probably connected to the informants’ origins and usually reflected the traditional beliefs of the places from which their ancestors had migrated to Siberia (..).

The descendants of settlers from the Russian North, the Volga region, the Ural foothills, some central regions of Russia, and Belarus imagined rusalkas as ugly and deformed, shaggy, with large sagging breasts, and sometimes as monstrous man-eaters.

— Rusalkas are evil spirits. They go around dirty and shaggy. Their teeth are sharp, clacking away, and their eyes glow like coals—it’s frightening. In the old days, they used to scare children with rusalkas so they wouldn’t go to the river (Field materials from the author: Novosibirsk Region, Bolotninsky District, Barataevka village, 2013).

— A rossomakha sits in the vegetable garden between the rows. She’s the rusalka herself. She’s a terrible, hairy beast, half woman, half animal. Children mustn’t go into the garden alone. She’ll drag them into a deep pool and eat them (Field materials from the author: Novosibirsk Region, Zdvinsky District, Lyanino village, 2002).

By contrast, the descendants of settlers from southern Russia and Ukraine imagined rusalkas as beautiful young women who had died tragically—by drowning—because of unrequited love or a cruel stepmother.

— There once lived a witch in our village who was raising her stepdaughter. She wanted the girl to become very clever too (to learn witchcraft, as the informant explained), so she sent her out on Kupala night to look for the fern flower. But the girl didn’t want to go into the forest at night; she went and drowned herself in the river. They say people often saw her there afterward as a rusalka (Field materials from the author: Novosibirsk Region, Moshkovsky District, Glyaden village, 2000).

Stories were recorded in Siberian Ukrainian villages whose plots resembled N. V. Gogol’s “May Night,” but which recounted events said to have taken place locally and claimed to be true (Field materials from the author: Novosibirsk Region: Karasuksky, Krasnozersky, Zdvinsky, and Moshkovsky districts; Omsk Region: Kalachinsky and Nizhneomsky districts).

Children cursed by their parents could become rusalkas, as could children “promised” or “given” to evil spirits.

— Rusalkas lived in our river, the Inya. My mother used to tell me that there once was a man in our village whose wife was pregnant. One day he went fishing. He was sitting in his boat, angling for fish, when evil spirits started rocking and overturning the boat. He said, “Let me go!” And they said, “Give us something you don’t know you have at home.” The man thought he knew everything he had at home, and agreed. He came home, and his wife had given birth to a girl. The devils kept pestering him to give her to them, since he had promised. The man didn’t give up his daughter. He stopped fishing and forbade her to go near the river. When the girl turned ten, she went to the river and drowned herself. Everyone said that since her father had given her to the evil spirits, she wouldn’t have lived anyway (Field materials from the author: Novosibirsk Region, Moshkovsky District, Glyaden village, 2000).

Siberian old-timers (descendants of Russian settlers from the late 17th and 18th centuries) lost a significant part of their traditional beliefs associated with rusalkas. “The conviction among many old-timers that rusalkas cannot live in Siberia is based on arguments about the freezing winters, when the rivers are covered with ice.”

In areas where rusalkas are recorded, they were imagined as shaggy and unkempt because they needed to keep warm in harsh climates where it was impossible to live naked. This links them with North Russian traditions” [Fursova, 2007, p. 128]. According to our field materials, questions about rusalkas, on the one hand, brought to mind images familiar from literature, art, or the media. On the other hand, among Siberian old-timers the rusalka was given the characteristics of a shapeshifting witch. In a number of districts in Western Siberia, memorates were recorded about encounters with rusalkas that turned into animals (a horse, foal, calf, dog, or pig), birds (a chicken, duck, cuckoo, or crow), or plant-based objects (a haystack).

One possible sign that the image of the rusalka has undergone secondary sacralization—“returning” from fiction to plots in oral folklore—is the character’s fish tail. It should be emphasized that informants of the older generation, who belonged to the ethnographic groups of Russian “new settlers” (descendants of migrants from the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries), Siberian Ukrainians, and Belarusians, did not mention a tail in their descriptions of rusalkas.

Among Siberian Ukrainians, a pseudo-biblical legend about the origin of the mermaid-pharaohs was recorded in an original interpretation.

— Grandmother used to tell us. It was long, long ago. In some country, Christians were being tortured. They were forced to knead clay with their bare feet. And they would put glass in the clay. So they kneaded it barefoot, with their blood. God took pity on them. “All right,” he says, and sent someone from himself. “Tell these people they have to be taken across the sea.” “But how, Lord, am I going to take them across? Look how vast the sea is!” And he (the Lord, that is) says, “Go and get a long stick, strike the sea with it, and the waters will part. Then you can walk along the sea floor. Just tell these people not to look back. Anyone who does will remain there.” All right, they walked and walked; they had already gone halfway. Some wanted to look back. “How can this be? We’re walking along a road, but where is the water?” And so half the people had already crossed, while the other half looked back and stayed there in the sea. That is how they became the rusalkas who remained there. Women and men alike—all who looked back (Field materials: Novosibirsk Region, Zdvinsky District, Khapovo village, 2002). It is noteworthy that Darya Ivanovna Streltsova (born 1913, née Kononenko), who told this legend, denied that rusalkas had tails.

At the same time, beliefs about the mermaid-pharaohs were known among residents of the Russian North and Northwest. Besides apocryphal tales, “pharaohs” (half-human, half-fish beings) could be found in folk visual art: their images adorned the window frames of houses, and they were called pharaohs or bereginyas [Pomerantseva, 1975, pp. 16–21; Vlasova, 1998, pp. 508–511]. Mythological beliefs about sirens, distinguished from rusalkas by their fish tails, are known in Russia’s western regions [Cherepanova, 1983, p. 35]. Thus, the presence of a tail in descriptions of the rusalka may have been connected both with the influence of literature and art, which prompted the secondary sacralization of this character’s image, and with North Russian traditions. However, in Siberia the tradition of depicting bereginya-pharaohs did not take root, and the legend of the “drowned pharaoh’s army” did not become widespread. I therefore consider my hypothesis more convincing, though not definitive: the presence of a fish tail in Siberian old-timers’ descriptions of rusalkas may serve as a distinctive marker of the secondary sacralization of their images.

Where and when rusalkas appear: regional differences

Researchers of Slavic folk beliefs have repeatedly sought to determine whether rusalkas belong to the earthly or aquatic realm, a question with no clear-cut answer [...].

In the Russian North, “the image of the rusalka split into a number of distinct characters, most often according to where rusalkas lived—in water or on land. Forest maidens, fair maidens , on the one hand, and the water woman, the water maiden, on the other, are variations of a single character” [Cherepanova, 1983, p. 35].

In central and southern Russia, rusalkas could be considered both water and forest or field beings. The South Russian rusalka was associated with the cult of plants, fertility, moisture, and the spirit of bodies of water; V. Ya. Propp compared her to a personified force of nature [2000, pp. 92–93]. In Western Siberia, beliefs that rusalkas could influence nature and fertility survived in rudimentary form in spring and summer rituals (for more details, see: [Lyubimova, 2004, pp. 186–190; Fursova, 2003, pp. 5–17, 33–56; and others]). In non-fairy-tale oral narratives, the rusalka is most often associated with bodies of water. The most widespread motif in such stories is a rusalka sitting on a rock by the water, combing her hair. According to stories told by Siberian Ukrainians and Belarusians, one could also encounter a rusalka in the forest, in a field, in a vegetable garden, or in a bathhouse, but only during the period when she was especially active—the rusalka week.

— I looked into the bathhouse on Thursday, and there sat a rusalka, all shaggy. She stared at me with her huge eyes bulging, so I shut the door and ran without looking back (Field materials: Novosibirsk Region, Krasnozersky District, Svetloye village, 2004).

The period when rusalkas were active—the rusalka (rusalia) week—usually fell in the week before Trinity Sunday, though in some places it was considered to begin after Pentecost.

Rusalkas are also active on the night before Ivan Kupala (July 7) or the preceding evening (on Agrafena the Bathing Lady). At this time, young people gathered for festivities in clearings and meadows, usually near bodies of water: they danced in circles and jumped over bonfires. Women gathered herbs and morning dew for use in folk magic and medicine. Kupala festivities are held today as folk festivals and staged reenactments (fig. 2). Girls made offerings to the rusalkas, leaving ribbons, beads, and lengths of cloth on birch trees (“a shirt for the rusalka”); they set wreaths afloat on the water (figs. 3, 4), and also used them to divine their fate.

Some local features of beliefs about rusalkas may have been connected to the area: natural and geographical factors and landscape features indirectly influenced where rusalkas were believed to be present and how their image developed. For example, in an area surrounded by marshes, people believed that rusalkas lured people into impassable bogs, a belief that corresponds to traditional Belarusian notions of “marsh fiends.”

— Rusalkas sit in the marshes; you mustn’t go there in the evening. We always go mushrooming or picking cranberries early in the morning, so we can get back before dark. As soon as it gets dark, the rusalkas crawl out of the marsh; they can grab you and drag you into the quagmire (Field materials from informants: Omsk Region, Tarsky District, village of Vasiss, 2005).

The proximity of a river or lake with deep pools and a strong current could prompt stories about water spirits dwelling in it, especially if someone had drowned there.

— A tractor driver drowned in that river. People said they’d seen a rusalka there. Nobody swims there now, though before that nothing happened and everything was peaceful (Field materials from informants: Novosibirsk Region, Iskitimsky District, village of Nizhny Koen, 2001).

— A girl drowned herself in the lake and turned into a rusalka. Now she lives in that lake, comes ashore at night, and sits by the water. Many people have seen her (Field materials from informants: Novosibirsk Region, Karasuksky District, village of Kukarka, 2004).

In other words, stories about rusalkas may have arisen in response to particular circumstances.

Based on materials by O. V. Golubkova

“The Rusalka in the Folk Beliefs of the Eastern Slavs of Western Siberia (Prospects for Mapping Local Aspects of the Image)” — read the full article in the attached file.