Spirits of the Home and Forest

“As a child, it seemed perfectly reasonable to me not to believe in God, but believing in the leshy [forest spirit] was just common sense,” said Valentin, a Russian friend born in 1940 and raised in the Altai region.

Russian legends and memorats (personal narratives) from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries feature many place spirits, including the domovoy “house spirit,” dvorovoy “courtyard/barn spirit,” ovinnik “drying barn spirit,” bannik “bath house spirit,” leshy “forest spirit,” polevoy “field spirit,” vodyanoy “water spirit” and the rusalka “mermaid.” Each place (home, barn, bath house, field, forest, body of water) had a single spirit, who may have lived there with his wife and children.

The source of the spirits is a matter of debate. Some folklorists argue that they are connected to an ancestor cult, because the house spirit is said to look like the male head of the household. Others say that this explanation may work for the domovoy, but not for the other spirits, who do not share this physical trait. They contend that the spirits are the remnants of pre-Christian agrarian religious beliefs. Still others believe that the spirits are the result of a more respectful relationship to the essence of place and to the natural world among the Russians. Regardless of how we explain their origin, the spirits are at the heart of some of most engaging, amusing, and terrifying stories in the Russian folk tradition.

Contemporary legends tell mainly of the domovoy, bannik, leshy and the rusalka. Twentieth and twenty-first century legends about them abound in both rural and urban areas of Russia. In 2010, I was teaching a Russian folklore class at the University of Kentucky in the Chemistry-Physics building. During class one day, a loud clanging noise started coming from the ceiling. My students joked that it was the Chemistry domovoy fighting with the Physics domovoy. They had just a read a story about how a family was moving to a new house. Both the father and mother of the family invited the domovoy to go with them, as is the Russian folk custom. Usually only the mother would take this step, but the father believed she had forgotten. As a result, two domovoys came along and took up residence in their new home. They had terrible fights at night, so that the tormented, sleepless family consulted with a village znakharka (literally a “knower”, a folk healer) about how to get rid of one of their two domovoys. They follow her instructions and are finally able to sleep peacefully.

When I arrived back at the office and told my staff assistant from Krasnodar about the noise, she immediately replied, “It was the domovoy.” While many references to the spirits may be tongue in cheek, some do take the spirits much more seriously and relate their both amusing and dangerous experiences with them. As a result, there are dozens of collections of these stories in circulation and in archives in Russia today.

The domovoy is described as a small, hairy man who resembles the father of the family. The domovoy is the protector of the home, family, and household animals. He dislikes disorder and untidiness and is particular in his demands about the way the household is run. If the family treats the domovoy well, he will help care for the animals and people in their charge. The domovoys are said to live behind the large stoves in traditional Russian peasant houses (or behind the oven in the kitchens of city apartments). Their lives are reversed from the family whose home they share. They not only come out at night, but prefer simple food, such as black bread rather than the more refined white loaves, and unsweetened tea to tea with sugar or jam. Even though they are male, they may help with women’s household chores in exchange for food and drink left out by the family. These characteristics form the basis of stories about them and their interactions with their human families.

Sometimes people may tell how the domovoy feeds animals or grooms them, even braiding a horse’s mane and tail. If the domovoy has done that, it means that the horse is his favorite, and humans should not unbraid its hair or risk the domovoy’s displeasure. The domovoy is choosy. He sets standards for people and animals that must be obeyed or he will punish them in various ways. Many tell, for example, of how the domovoy would only accept animals of a certain color into the home.

One woman tells of how her domovoy would only allow calico cats into the household (all others he drove away in short order), and how she learned to respect his wishes by only adopting calicos throughout her life. Another relates that her domovoy liked only bay horses. When her husband brought a grey horse home, the domovoy tormented the horse by riding it at night and preventing it from eating or sleeping. As a result, every morning the horse was exhausted and could not work on the family farm. Ultimately the family realized the poor beast would die of starvation. They decided to sell it and bought a bay horse, and the domovoy left the animal in peace.

Many stories deal with the domovoy’s displeasure over a family’s poor housekeeping. One lazy woman did not do the dishes after the evening meal. All night long, as she was trying to sleep, the domovoy was in the kitchen, clinking glasses and clattering plates. In the morning, she found that all the dishes had been washed, and now she always does the dishes after each meal.

A more disturbing story is set during World War II. A mother comes home late after working all day. Exhausted, she lays down next to her sleeping children, but suddenly hears a horrible gasping noise, like a dying animal, coming from behind the stove. She turns to look and sees the domovoy emerging. Due to the war shortages, she doesn’t have oil to light a lamp, but she stands up and asks, “Whom have I offended, everything is clean, as needed. I am tired and still I do everything I should.” She had assumed that the domovoy was angry because of her poor housekeeping. After her outburst, the noise stops, and she returns to bed. Later she discovers that she actually saw the domovoy on the night her husband was killed at the front.

A death in the family is the most common outcome of interaction with the domovoy and why seeing or hearing him can be so terrifying. Another story about the portent of death concerns a woman whose husband was also at the front. Every night she would feel a pressure on her chest and could not breathe, as though someone was suffocating her. She consults with her grandmother, who tells her to ask if he (the domovoy) has come for good or ill. The next night, when she senses his presence, she asks him the question her grandmother told her. Then she hears two men talking by her baby’s cradle. She first feels hot, then freezing cold, but she cannot move as long as they are speaking. Finally, when the voices stop, the paralysis passes, and she jumps up and tells her grandmother what happened. Her grandmother tells her that the domovoy was letting her know that her husband had died, but that, since there were two men’s voices, she would marry again, which turned out to be true.

The domovoy’s predictions about death are not limited to soldiers. People also tell of how a family member, who may not even be ill at the time, dies soon after they saw or heard the domovoy.

As we move away from the home toward the bathhouse and the forest, the spirits become much more dangerous. There are few stories about how a bannik or a leshy help anyone. Instead, they are bent on mischief and harm to the people they encounter. The traditional Russian bathhouse is a small hut set near a water source at some distance from the homestead. It is an eerie place, dark and damp. The bathhouse was the location of childbirth, an unclean process associated with access to the spirit world in the Russian traditional worldview.

Interaction with the spirits was always potentially a threat, especially for those who were unprepared for it or unsuspecting, as certainly anyone taking a bath would be. Being close to water itself was also a frightening prospect, because water was said to trap the souls of the drowned. These unquiet spirits were also dangerous to the living.

Perhaps the most famous story of the bathhouse spirit is one about a young girl of ten, a priest’s daughter, who was kidnapped and raised by a bannik. While there are hundreds of variants, the essential plot is the same. A woman takes her infant daughter with her when she goes to the bathhouse to bathe. The mother forgets her soap or her towel and leaves the child unattended as she runs back to the house. But she makes a fatal error, forgetting to make the sign of the cross over the child before she leaves. When she returns, she does not realize that the bannik has stolen her child and left a changeling in its place.

Years later, when the girl has come of age, a party of young men and women go to the bathhouse. One young man, who is left alone in the bathhouse by his friends, is accosted by the girl (the one who was kidnapped), who makes him promise to marry her. Despite her horrific and shabby appearance, he agrees to return at midnight with clothing for her. When he gives her the clothing, she turns into a lovely young woman, perfectly suitable to be a bride. A short time after the wedding, his wife asks him if they can go to visit her family. He is shocked, thinking that at best she was an orphan and at worst an undead spirit. He consents, and they set off.

When they arrive at her parents’ house, they enter and find a squalling infant in a cradle. The wife asks about the child, and the parents explain that the baby girl was born years ago, but has never grown and cries incessantly. The young woman says that she can cure the child, then picks her up and tosses her out the window. She explains that she is, in fact, their daughter and had been kidnapped and raised by the bannik all those years ago. The shocked parents look out the window and find only a block of wood in place of the infant/changeling. They rejoice and embrace their long-lost child.

Many stories tell of the dangers to bathers in the bathhouse, some end in a funny manner, some horribly. The tradition in the bathhouse is for people to steam twice but to leave the third steam for the bathhouse spirit as an offering, just as food and drink were left for the domovoy. If people did not observe this ritual, then the bathhouse spirit would enter to steam with them and perhaps take offense. The most common result is a humorous story about how the bather leaps up and runs home naked. In other cases, the bathhouse spirit can be a serious threat if people transgress in this way. One woman laughs at this rule and steams in the third steam, so the bannik kills her as she steams. When her husband comes to find her, the bannik throws her skin out the door at him.

The leshy is the most vicious place spirit of all those in the Russian tradition and described as the largest, furriest and most animal-like of all of them. In stories about him, the leshy will often lead people astray in the forest, often in the guise of a trusted person, like a neighbor, relative or friend. In most cases, once people realize what is happening, they can counteract the leshy’s spell by putting on their clothing backwards or by saying prayers. Once they do that, the correct path is revealed.

If people are gathering berries or mushrooms, cutting wood or planting in the forest, the leshy may appear to them. He is seemingly interested in their activities and will ask how much they have harvested or what they have been doing. If they speak respectfully to him, asking his leave to work in the forest, he usually leaves them in peace. Many stories end badly though, especially if there is prolonged contact with the forest spirit.

One woman, Maria, lived a hard life. She was a war widow with three daughters, all of whom perished. She is barely hanging on, so she goes into the forest to gather berries and mushrooms. A man runs up and offers her a warm fire. He leads her into the forest and leaves her near the fire. She is then lost for forty days in the forest, subsisting on berries and mushrooms, sleeping under moss at night. When she finally makes it out, she is starving and naked, but for the collar of her dress. Her neighbors feed her and take her home, but she remains a little touched by the experience and is constantly shaken by convulsions.

Another common legend cycle about the leshy is how he steals animals and children. He may do this simply for fun, but typically it is because the animal’s owner or child’s parent curses them. The story usually begins with a person saying “May the leshy take you.” Then the child or animal disappears. The distraught family searches to no avail. They consult a znakharka, who will locate the child/animal or tell them how to proceed to find them. Sometimes however, they are not successful. In one such story, a mother says “I wish the leshy would take you” to her daughter when she was misbehaving. The child was a beautiful, good girl before she was taken, but she ended up being tormented for fifteen years after she was found. She was always ill, despite the cures they tried, drying up and wasting away until she died.

Legends also feature the rusalka, the unquiet spirit of a drowned woman or an unbaptized child. The rusalka is depicted as a mermaid in the water, and as a lovely woman with long hair, which she often combs, when she is out of it. Rusalkas are vengeful and lonely and often drown people, especially children, who swim in their waters. The stories describe how rusalkas were women who drowned themselves either because they were abandoned by a man who married another, or because they were pregnant out of wedlock.

Unlike the place spirits, there may be many rusalkas in a body of water, representing the spirits of all those who died there. The place spirits reflect the vagaries of the natural world, both its bounty and its threats. The rusalka, though, is never a positive force, because they are unquiet dead. Stories about them end in at least a serious fright. More commonly, a rusalka sighting results in death or another horrible fate.

If a man abandoned a woman who became a rusalka when she drowned herself, he usually becomes obsessed with his dead beloved. Day after day he sits by the waterside, singing songs and calling to her. When she appears, she will hug and kiss him and drag him into the water. When his family and friends go to look for him, all they find is the boat he left behind.

Many of these stories about the place spirits and rusalkas have existed in the Russian tradition for centuries. Like any folk tradition, they are constantly updated to reflect contemporary events, as in the stories about World War II widows and the place spirits predicting their husbands’ deaths. Rusalka stories are no exception.

One woman tells a story about her father, who went to look for his grazing horses that had strayed from the pasture. On the shore of the millpond, he sees a rusalka combing her hair and lamenting. When her dad returns home he says that he thinks something bad is going to happen to Ilya Petrovich, the miller. The next week he is arrested and exiled for being a kulak.

Another story makes specific reference to the environmental problems of modern Russia. The teller says that a fisherman she knew stole the rusalka’s pink soap that she used to bathe in the river. She tormented him until he returned it. The teller ends the story by saying that there were rusalkas once, but now they have all disappeared, because the rivers have been poisoned by chemicals.

At first glance it may seem that all these legends and personal narratives are conservative, designed to explain to children what happens if a person violates important rules. However, if we look a bit more closely, we see that the stories are much more complicated.

Stories about place spirits present an individual’s take on a belief system that helps us decode important cultural knowledge. They allow people to express their concerns over social situations, be it family life and parenting, war and revolution, or environmental and political concerns. They present a personal story that opens the door on debate over the nature of society and its most deeply held beliefs on both a small and large scale.

When we tell a legend, we are inviting comment, asking for people to react to the larger mysteries it describes and to consider the social contexts, both positive and negative, that lie behind it. For these reasons, this genre of the folk narrative has remained productive and popular even today in the oral traditions of peoples across the world.

Which doesn’t diminish the fact, however, that the sounds of banging pots and pans late at night are cause for concern... RL