Mrs. Yaga (2 page)

Then she turned to the gate, and the road, and the world beyond the fence of skulls, and began to walk.

O
f course I was going to write a story about the Baba Yaga at some point.
That was decided when my father departed for a refugee camp near Rome, beginning the long journey that would take me from a small village in Poland to the Canadian north.

I grew up in the Yukon Territory, for the most part, going from a Polish home to an English school and back again, growing up between Polish and mainstream western Canadian culture. I never did feel like I “fit” in the latter, but when I finally did make the trip back to my place of birth, I failed to find that sense of
belonging
I so desperately wanted there.

That was my borderland of identity, negotiating between one culture and another. In Polish folklore, the borders are where witches dwell. Witches buried their spells “na granice,” on the borders. And the most powerful witch of all lives in the borderlands between the field and the forest, between the human world and something other: an old woman with wild hair and bony legs and iron teeth. She lives in a house perched atop chicken-feet, and she flies over the woods in an over-sized mortar. She is a mainstay of Slavic fairy tales, appearing as jędza baba in Poland, jeźibaba in the Czech Republic, and (most famously) as Baba Yaga in Russia.

She’s fascinating, unpredictable. She’s fascinating
because
she’s unpredictable. For while Baba Yaga is a cannibal skilled in dark magic who holds a grudge against humanity, she will just as often help heroes as oppose them—by giving them useful items for their quest, by dispensing wisdom, by granting safe passage into the land beyond her strange hut.

Baba Yaga is the ultimate liminal figure, forged from criss-crossing identities, indelibly imprinted in Slavic culture as the eternal mother and yet living apart from it. I’ve been irresistibly drawn to her as a child and even more so as an adult, I think, because I’ve internalized her as a folkloric reflection of the immigrant experience.

That personal interpretation came into play when I started writing
Mrs. Yaga
. The initial spark, though, was encountering Midori Snyder and Taiko Haessler’s paired poems
The Baba Yaga Duet
about a year ago. It encapsulates Baba Yaga’s contradictions so well:

My daughter when you were small
How I wanted to eat you.

From there, I inevitably started to think about Baba Yaga’s daughter, who appears in a few fairy tales (though almost never as an antagonist). Surely
she
reflected what it was like to grow up na granice best! Yet she didn’t seem to appreciate her mother at all. Take, for instance, “The Bogatyrs Soska, Usynia, Gorynia, and Duginia,” where four Russian heroes (bogatyrs) encounter Baba Yaga and must do various tasks for her or face mortal punishment. Baba Yaga’s daughter hides them from her mother and helps them defeat the old woman in a final battle. The daughter is an aid and the ultimate prize, trapped in her mother’s home and waiting for deliverance.

That narrative doesn’t satisfy me...I like Baba Yaga too much to rejoice in her death. More importantly, I couldn’t accept the daughter meekly bringing about her mother’s destruction simply because the heroes were the heroes and that was the end of it.

I set out writing
Mrs. Yaga
in response to “The Bogatyrs Soska, Usynia, Gorynia, and Duginia” and stories like it, this time telling the tale from the daughter’s point of view so I could puzzle out how things
got
to that point. Yet the simple act of choosing that viewpoint ended up making me decide she
hadn’t
. All this was just one more of the many tests Baba Yaga foisted on the young peasant girls she allowed into her home. So the story diverged widely as more elements demanded inclusion. Well,
yeah
Baba Yaga immigrated to Canada along with all the Poles and Ukrainians who came here because western Canada
is
na granice,
duh
her penchant for testing the heroes would apply just as well to her adopted daughter, because she’d expect her daughter to become a hero in her own right. The bogatyrs vying for the daughter’s hand weren’t interesting to me. I wanted to explore the relationship between the daughter and her baba, between a second generation immigrant and her parent from the homeland. So I did.

That is the nature of retelling a fairy tale, adding our own lived experience to the bones of the story and coming out with something new.
Mrs. Yaga
is my small contribution to the corpus of tales surrounding Baba Yaga, as interpreted through my youth in an immigrant family. I hope you enjoyed it.

Mrs. Yaga
features Baba Yaga, a prominent mythical figure in Slavic culture. What drew you to this specific character? Are there any particular themes in the existing stories featuring Baba Yaga that you wanted to explore and subvert in your version?

I don’t think you can escape Baba Yaga if you have a Slavic background—she looms over tales and legends in an awe-inspiring way, and stands out as a truly unique archetype. I talked about my personal connection with the Baba Yaga in my “Inspirations and Influences” essay, about her chaotic, border-straddling nature. The first story where I became aware of this was “The Frog Princess.” It features a trio of Baba Yagas as the princess’s protectors, which is so different from what I’d associated with Baba Yaga until then.

“Baba jaga” is a derogatory word in Polish aimed at older women, the equivalent of “crone” or “hag”. It’s a loan word from Russian, and the Russian Baba Yaga is the same person as baba jędza in Polish tales. But the Baba Yagas of “The Frog Princess” weren’t just stereotypical old witches, and the Baba Yaga rarely boils down to something so simple in Slavic fairy tales. Yes, she can be a spiteful worker of harmful magic and a cannibal who delights in the taste of peasant girls and boys, but she’s also full of wisdom, a guardian, a donor, and a judge of human worth. I really wanted to engage with those seemingly contradictory qualities in my story, to reconcile the child-eater of some Baba Yaga stories (and implicit in the insult “baba jaga”) with the benevolent Baba Yaga I knew from “The Frog Princess.”

Speaking of fairy tales and folklore, are you a fairy tale enthusiast? Do you have any favorites you’d like to share with our readers? Conversely, do you have a least favorite fairy tale (you must also tell us why, of course).

I am a fairy tale enthusiast! But that enthusiasm didn’t spring from childhood; I was certainly aware of fairy tales when I grew up…my parents had Polish translations of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm in the house along with a book of Polish folklore, I just didn’t feel any more interested in them than I was in other children’s stories. It wasn’t until I took a comparative literature course on fairy tales in undergrad that they began to fascinate me. Reading Marina Warner’s work for the first time was a big part of that; I found her scholarship on stories like
Beauty and the Beast
incredibly compelling. After that, I went back to that old book of Polish folklore with new eyes. Later on I discovered Terri Windling’s anthology
Snow White, Blood Red
, and Jane Yolen, and Patricia C. Wrede, which deepened my appreciation of fairy tales and the art of retelling them.

My favourite fairy tale is the story of the Wawel dragon. A dragon demands the sacrifice of the King of Krakow’s daughter, but a clever cobbler defeats it by stuffing a sheep full of sulphur. When the dragon eats the sheep, it ends up trying to quench its thirst by drinking so much water from the Vistula it explodes. There’s something so delightfully gruesome about that.

Least favourite? I’m not sure, probably the Disney version of
Beauty and the Beast
. I much preferred Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s version of the story, where the beast was kind-hearted all along.

We’d love to hear about your experience writing short stories. Your fiction has appeared in places such as
On Spec: The Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic
and
Daily Science Fiction
—what would you say are the advantages and potential pitfalls of writing short stories?

I’ve been writing short stories ever since I was in high school; I think I submitted my first short story to
On Spec
when I was 17 (back when *gasp* you had to submit by mail!). I’ve always been a big reader of short fiction; I like the economy of them. A great short piece can pack a huge amount of emotional resonance in such a short space; the brevity can pare away a narrative right down to the emotional core. Conversely, an unsatisfying short story ends up cutting away too much.

They’re also a great way to experiment with unusual voices or story forms without committing too much time to them. Except that’s not wholly true: short stories can be almost as time-consuming as novels during the revision process. Every word counts. There’s a huge sense of accomplishment in writing one that really
works
.

What are you working on next?

I honestly don’t know. I’ve been querying a novel to agents, a flintlock fantasy set in a cross between the medieval Baltic and 17th-century New France. I have some ideas floating around a character who’s a strzyga (another creature out of Polish folklore); another idea for a novel about clerical magic in 14th century Europe based on a seminar paper I wrote in grad school. We’ll see.

Finally, a question we ask all of our interviewees: We Book Smugglers have faced threats and criticisms concerning the sheer volume of books we purchase and read—hence, we have resorted to “smuggling books” home to escape scrutinizing eyes. Have you ever had to smuggle books?

I’ve certainly faced criticism sometimes for having too many books, and I’m always running out of room for them, but I haven’t had to resort to smuggling books yet.

Michal Wojcik was born in Poland, raised in the Yukon Territory, and educated in Edmonton and Montreal. He has a Master’s degree in history from McGill University, where he studied witchcraft trials in early modern Poland. His short fiction has appeared in
On Spec: The Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic
and
Daily Science Fiction
. Follow him on his blog,
onelastsketch.wordpress.com
.

Book Smugglers Publishing: Fall 2014

Hunting Monsters
by S.L. Huang (10/7/2014)

In Her Head, In Her Eyes
by Yukimi Ogawa (10/21/2014)

Mrs. Yaga
by Michal Wojcik (11/4/2014)

The Mussel Eater
by Octavia Cade (11/18/2014)

The Astronomer Who Met the North Wind
by Kate Hall (12/2/2014)

The Ninety-Ninth Bride
by Catherine F. King (12/16/2014)

Mrs. Yaga

Published by
Book Smugglers Publishing

Copyright © 2014
Michal Wojcik

Cover Illustration by
Jacqueline Pytyck