Baba Yaga's Mortality In Koschei The Immortal

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Folktales are a vital oral tradition in Russian culture. They are a powerful form of imaginative expression of some of the oldest beliefs and ideas of the nation. It is exceptionally common for Russian folklore to have a mythological aspects, as it strongly voices Russia’s pre Christianization beliefs such as pagan spirits. By understanding the pagan beings in the folklore, one can have a better understanding of the Russian spirit; Russian folklore is tightly intertwined with its culture. The most infamous and reoccurring mythological character in Russian folklore is Baba Yaga. She is generally a complex female antagonist with an incredibly interesting duality. Koschei the Immortal, Baba Yaga’s male counterpart, hides his mortality in a needle making him …show more content…

Koschei the Immortal is an archetypal male antagonist and is mainly described as the abductor of the hero’s wife. There are no tales that actually describe Koschei’s appearance, although films and cartoons portray him as an unappealing elderly man, remarkably comparable to his female counterpart. His most memorable attribute is the hidden location of his death. Koschei has made it so he cannot be killed by conventional means such as just attacking his body, since he separated his mortality from his body. He placed his mortality in matryoshka doll resembling fashion, an object within an object, and the final objects that holds his death is a needle. Many scholars have compared Koschei’s relationship to the hero that to of father (or father-in-law) and son. This relationship is a symbolic sexual rivalry between father and son for a woman. In a few Russian communities, there have been household heads that had sexual relationships with their sons’ wives. This would be premeditated, as fathers would send their sons off to work outside the community or to join the military in order to better his chances of the daughter-in-law accepting his advances. In 19th century Volga region, this occurred to an

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