The Annotations of Vasilisa

Editor’s Note Regarding the Provenance of This Document

The following text was discovered among the papers of Dr. Aleksandra Nikolaevna Gorokhova (1842—?), formerly a lecturer in Slavic philology at the Imperial University of Kazan, in a cedar chest that had been bricked into a wall of the university’s east wing during renovations in 1903. The chest contained 412 pages of handwritten annotations on the folk tale commonly known as “Vasilisa the Beautiful” or “Vasilisa the Brave,” which Dr. Gorokhova had been transcribing from oral sources in the villages of the Vologda and Kostroma provinces between 1871 and 1889. The annotations are remarkable both for their scholarly rigour and for their increasingly personal character, which by the final pages has abandoned all pretence of academic distance. The circumstances of Dr. Gorokhova’s disappearance from university records in 1891 have never been satisfactorily explained. The chest smelled, when opened, of birch smoke and something sweeter underneath — honey, perhaps, or old wax. Several pages bore scorch marks that did not correspond to any fire in the building’s history.

What follows is a selection from the annotations, arranged in the order Dr. Gorokhova numbered them. Ellipses indicate passages too damaged to transcribe. Footnotes are hers unless otherwise noted.

Annotation 1. On the Death of the Mother.

The tale begins, as so many of them do, with a dying mother. “In a certain kingdom,” the old women say, and then immediately a woman is on her deathbed giving her daughter a wooden doll and telling her that the doll will help her if she feeds it and asks its counsel. This is the part the scholars note and move past. This is the part I cannot move past.

I have read nineteen versions of this opening. In eleven, the mother’s illness is unnamed. In four, she dies of a fever. In two, she simply “fades.” In one version, collected near Kostroma in the winter of 1874 from a woman named Darya Petrovna who was herself dying of consumption, the mother says to Vasilisa: “I am going into the ground and I will not come back, but I am leaving you something of myself that the ground cannot take.”

The scholars — my colleagues at the Imperial University, men who sit in warm rooms annotating what old women murmur in cold ones — treat this doll as a narrative device. A proxy for maternal protection. A metaphor for the persistence of love beyond death. (See Afanasyev’s commentary, Vol. III, p. 247, in which he devotes exactly one sentence to the doll’s significance before spending three pages on the structural parallels with the Grimm tales, as though Russian peasant women were merely translating Germans they had never heard of.) They do not ask what it would feel like to be eight years old and to hold a thing made of wood and cloth and be told it was all that remained of your mother’s love. They do not ask because they have not held it.

I held it.

This is the confession I have been building toward through eighteen years of annotations and two hundred years before that, and I find that writing it is both simpler and more ruinous than I imagined. My name is not Aleksandra Nikolaevna Gorokhova, though I have answered to it for forty-nine years and published eleven papers under it. My name, the one my mother spoke over me while her body cooled from the inside out like a house whose fire has been allowed to die, is Vasilisa. I am the girl in the story. I have been the girl in the story for a very long time.

The doll is in the cedar chest with these papers. She is smaller than you expect. Her painted face has worn to bare wood in places, from handling, from being held against my chest on nights when the centuries pressed too close. If you feed her — a little bread, a little milk, nothing extravagant — she will open her painted eyes and they will be dark and very patient, the way my mother’s were. She will not speak unless you ask her a question, and when she speaks her voice sounds like thread being pulled through linen: soft, continuous, purposeful.

She told me to go to Baba Yaga. She told me I would survive it. She did not tell me what surviving it would cost.

Annotation 7. On the Stepmother and Her Daughters.

I will not linger on the stepmother. The tale gives her enough attention and I will not give her more. But I must correct the scholarly consensus — advanced most thoroughly by Professor Dahl in his 1879 lecture at Petersburg and repeated without examination ever since — that the stepmother functions merely as an obstacle, a structural necessity who creates the conditions for the heroine’s journey.

She was not structural. She was specific. Her name was Irinia. She had a mole on her left wrist and she twisted it when she lied. She beat me with a birch switch across the shoulders, not because I had done anything wrong, but because my face reminded her that my father had loved someone before her, and that the someone had been beautiful, and that beauty in a dead woman is an impossible enemy because it can never age or disappoint.

Her daughters were not cruel by nature. Katerina, the elder, once shared her bread with me in secret when Irinia had forbidden me supper. She whispered, “I’m sorry,” and her breath smelled of cabbage and something frightened. She was thirteen and she already understood that kindness toward me would be punished. I have thought about Katerina more often than the scholars would expect. The tale disposes of the stepsisters neatly — burned by the skull’s fire, ashes scattered, a sentence and done. I carried that fire. I did not choose who it consumed. But I remember Katerina’s whispered apology every time I read a version that calls them wicked without qualification.

The scholars want archetypes. I am telling them there were people.

Annotation 12. On the Approach to the Hut.

Here is where the tale narrows to a path through dark forest, and here is where I must be most careful, because what happened in that forest is the thing I have spent two hundred years trying to understand and eighteen years trying to write, and I am not certain that writing can hold it.

The old women in the villages tell it quickly: Vasilisa walks through the forest, she sees the three riders — White for Day, Red for Sun, Black for Night — and she arrives at Baba Yaga’s hut, which stands on chicken legs and is surrounded by a fence of human bones. It takes them perhaps two minutes to tell. It took me three days to walk.

I want to say what the forest was. Not what it represented. What it was.

It was birch, mostly, and spruce. The birch trees were white as stripped bone and the spruce were so dark they looked wet. The ground was covered in a moss so thick and so green that my feet sank into it as though the earth were swallowing me one step at a time. There were no birds. This was the first wrong thing. In any Russian forest there are birds — woodpeckers, jays, the small darting things whose names I never learned — and their absence was louder than their presence would have been. I walked in a silence that had texture, that pressed against my ears like water.

The White Rider passed me at dawn of the first day. He was mounted on a horse so pale it seemed to be made of fog, and his armour was white, and his face was white, and he did not look at me. He rode through the birch trees and where he passed the light came with him and stayed behind him like something shed. I felt dawn arrive not as a gradual brightening but as a single clean cut, darkness peeled back like bark.

I was not afraid of the White Rider. I was not afraid of the Red Rider when he came at noon, burning through the trees with a heat that made the moss steam and the air taste of metal. I was afraid of the Black Rider, who came at nightfall and who was not mounted on a horse but on the darkness itself, who did not pass me so much as absorb the space where I stood, so that for one moment I could not feel my own edges and did not know where I ended and the night began. I fed the doll a piece of bread and held her against my chest and she said, in my mother’s voice pulled through linen: Walk forward. Do not turn aside.

I walked forward.

Annotation 16. On the Hut Itself.

(The following passage exhibits a marked change in Dr. Gorokhova’s handwriting, which becomes smaller and more compressed, as though the writer were trying to fit something very large into a very small space. —Ed.)

The hut stood on two legs, which were yellow and scaled and flexed at the joint like a living thing breathing in its sleep. The fence was bones. I must be precise about this because the scholars treat it as set dressing, as Gothic ornamentation, and it was not ornament. The bones were human. They were arranged vertically, like palings, and atop each one sat a skull, and inside each skull a fire burned — small, blue-white, steady, the way a candle burns in a room with no draft. I counted them. There were forty-three skulls and forty-three flames and they threw forty-three shadows that moved independently of the wind or the moonlight or any physics I have since been taught.

One of the skulls was dark. Unlit. The gate post on the left. I did not know then what that meant. I know now. It was waiting for me — or rather, waiting for the fire I would carry out.

The hut turned when I spoke to it. “Little hut, little hut, turn your back to the forest and your face to me.” Every version of the tale includes this formula, and every version treats it as a kind of password, a ritual phrase that compels obedience. What none of them record is how it felt to speak those words and have a house obey you. I had never been obeyed by anything. I was a girl who owned nothing, who had been beaten for the offence of being alive, who slept by the stove because there was no bed for her and ate what was left because she was served last. And here was this impossible thing — bone and wood and chicken-legged and breathing — and it turned for me. It turned for me. The door faced me and the door was a mouth and the mouth was open and the warmth inside smelled of iron and herbs and something animal, something that lived in the walls.

I went in.

Annotation 19. On Baba Yaga.

She was sitting by the stove and she was enormous.

I do not mean tall. I have read accounts that make her tall, gaunt, skeletal — the iron-toothed crone of the illustrations, all angles and menace. She was not that. She was enormous in the way a thunderstorm is enormous: she filled the space she occupied and then exceeded it, so that the hut, which should have been a single room, seemed to contain distances. Her legs were stretched out before her and they reached from the stove to the door. Her nose — yes, the famous nose, the one the tales never tire of — curved from her face like a question. Her eyes were the color of birch bark: white with dark streaks, and wet, and watching.

“So,” she said. “You’ve come for fire.”

It was not a question. Nothing she said was ever a question. She spoke in declarations, in facts already established, and the world rearranged itself to match her statements rather than the other way around. This is what power is, I have learned. Not the ability to do extraordinary things, but the ability to say what is and have it be so.

I said, “My stepmother sent me.”

“Your stepmother sent you to die,” she corrected, and her iron teeth showed when she said it. They were not grey or rusted, as the stories suggest. They were polished black, like obsidian, and they fit her mouth perfectly, and when she smiled — which she did now, without warmth but with what I can only describe as recognition — they caught the firelight and held it.

“I know why your stepmother sent you. I know what she hopes. She hopes I will eat you, and she will be rid of the girl who reminds her of the woman she replaced, and she will tell your father that you wandered into the forest and were lost. This is what happens to girls in stories. They wander. They are lost. The story moves on.”

She leaned forward. The stove crackled. The iron teeth gleamed.

“But you,” she said, “have a doll in your pocket, and the doll has your mother’s voice, and your mother was a woman I knew before she chose to be mortal and bear a daughter and die for the privilege. So we are not strangers, Vasilisa. And I will not eat you tonight.”

Tonight. She said tonight. I held that word in my chest like a coal.

Annotation 23. On the Tasks.

(Here a scholarly aside is warranted. The tasks Baba Yaga sets Vasilisa — sorting poppy seeds from dirt, separating mildewed grain from good, cleaning the hut, cooking the meals — have been read by Propp and his followers as tests of the heroine’s domesticity, proof that feminine virtue is synonymous with labour. This reading is, I have come to believe, exactly backward. The tasks are not tests of submission. They are tests of resourcefulness, which is to say, tests of power — specifically, the power to command help, to delegate to the doll what cannot be done alone. Baba Yaga was not asking whether Vasilisa could sort poppy seeds. She was asking whether Vasilisa could use what she had been given. There is a difference between those questions that the masculine academy has consistently failed to observe. —A.N.G.)

The tasks took three days. Each morning Baba Yaga flew out of the hut in her mortar, steering with the pestle, sweeping her tracks behind her with a broom of silver birch, and I was alone in the hut with the work and the disembodied hands that served her — three pairs, pale as flour, that emerged from the walls to do her bidding and sometimes paused to hover near my face, their fingers spread, as though reading me by touch.

Each night she returned and inspected what I had done and said nothing, which was worse than anger. Silence from Baba Yaga was not the absence of speech. It was the presence of judgment too large for words.

On the third night she asked me a question. The only question she ever asked me. “How do you accomplish these tasks?”

I could have told her about the doll. The doll in my pocket, who woke when I fed her bread and milk and sorted the seeds with her small wooden fingers while I slept. But my mother’s voice — the real one, the one I remembered, not the linen-thread voice of the doll — said inside me: Do not give her everything. Keep one thing that is yours.

“By my mother’s blessing,” I said.

Baba Yaga’s face changed. It was not softening. She did not soften. But something shifted in the geography of that face, some tectonic adjustment, and she said: “Blessing. Yes. That is a word for it. Your mother was a creature of blessings — she blessed everything she touched until the blessing burned through her and left nothing but a girl and a doll and the memory of what she had been. I told her not to love a mortal man. I told her that love would make her mortal too. She chose it. She chose you. And here you are in my house, sorting my seeds, carrying her blessing in your pocket like a weapon you don’t know how to fire.”

She stood. The hut groaned under her weight, though I think the weight was not physical but something else — the gravity of what she was about to do.

“Take your fire,” she said. “Take a skull from the fence. The light inside it will do what you need it to do, and then more than you need, and then more than you want. This is what fire does. You will learn. Your mother learned. I learned. Every woman who carries fire learns the same lesson, and the lesson is that fire does not care about your intentions.”

Annotation 27. On the Skull.

I took the skull from the left gatepost — the dark one, the waiting one — and the moment my fingers closed around it, a fire kindled inside that was not blue-white like the others but deep amber, the colour of pine resin or old honey or the last light before the sun drops below the birch line in October. It was warm in my hands. It was alive in my hands. It was, I understood with a certainty that preceded thought, the same fire my mother had carried before she gave it up for mortality, and her mother before that, back through a lineage of women who held fire and were changed by it and changed the world around them and were punished for the changing.

I walked home. It took three days again, but the forest was different this time — the birds were back, the moss did not swallow my feet, the riders did not come. The forest knew what I was carrying and gave me room.

When I arrived home, the skull’s light fell on my stepmother and her daughters and they burned. This is the part of the tale that is always told simply, even triumphantly — the wicked are punished, the good prevails, the fire knows its enemies. I have allowed this version to stand for two centuries because the truth is worse and the truth requires me to admit what I am.

I did not aim the fire. I did not choose. The skull’s eyes opened — I had not known they could open, those dark sockets that I had thought were empty — and the light that came from them was not illumination but judgment, and the judgment was absolute. Irinia burned. Her daughters burned. Katerina, who had shared her bread with me, who had whispered I’m sorry in a voice that smelled of cabbage and fear — Katerina burned. She burned standing in the doorway with her arms outstretched, and I do not know whether she was reaching for me or reaching for help or simply reaching because that is what a body does when fire takes it.

I have published eleven papers on Slavic folk narrative. I have annotated this tale nineteen times. I have never written this.

The fire did not care about my intentions. Baba Yaga told me that. She told me exactly what would happen, in the precise and undeniable way she tells everything, and I carried the skull home anyway because I was cold and I was angry and I was sixteen years old and I wanted to stop being afraid. And the price of not being afraid was Katerina, burning in a doorway, reaching.

Annotation 31. On What the Scholars Do Not Record.

(The handwriting here becomes erratic. Certain words are pressed so deeply into the page that the nib has torn the paper. —Ed.)

After the burning I was alone in the house with the ashes and the skull and the doll. My father was away — he was always away, in the tales and in life, because fathers in these stories exist only to marry badly and absent themselves from the consequences. I swept the ashes. I set the skull on the windowsill and its light filled the room with that amber glow that has since become the only light I can tolerate for sustained reading. (My colleagues at the university think this is an eccentricity. It is not an eccentricity. It is a haunting.)

The tale says I went to live with an old woman in the village and took up weaving, and that my weaving was so fine that I attracted the attention of the Tsar, and that the Tsar married me, and that I lived happily. The tale is efficient with women’s lives. A few sentences to cover years of learning, of becoming, of discovering what the fire in the skull could do and what it could not and what I could do that had nothing to do with fire at all.

I did learn to weave. The doll taught me, her small wooden fingers guiding the shuttle, and the cloth that came from my loom was — I will not be falsely modest — extraordinary. It was the cloth itself that changed me, not the Tsar. The act of making something beautiful from raw thread, of imposing pattern on chaos, of sitting with the work for hours and hours until my fingers bled and the pattern emerged not because I forced it but because I understood it — this was the first time I felt the power that Baba Yaga had seen in me, and it was not the power of fire. It was the power of making. Of craft. Of turning the raw material of the world into something that had not existed before and that bore, in its structure, the mark of my attention.

The Tsar. I should address the Tsar. He was not unkind. He was not kind either. He was a man who saw beautiful cloth and wanted to own the woman who made it, which is a form of admiration that I have encountered many times since and have learned to recognize as a cage decorated with flowers. I married him because the alternative was to remain a girl in a village with a burning skull and no protection, and marriage to a Tsar is a kind of protection, and I was young enough to mistake protection for love.

I outlived him. I outlived his children and their children. The fire in the skull, which I kept hidden in a wooden box beneath our bed, had done something to me that Baba Yaga had not warned me about, or had warned me about in her oblique declarative way and I had not understood. The fire preserves what it has touched. The skull burns in my study even now — in a cedar chest that I will brick into a wall before I leave this city — and I have not aged past the thirty-two years I counted before I realized I had stopped counting.

Annotation 35. On the Academy.

I came to Kazan in 1842. I had been, before that, many women in many cities: a weaver in Novgorod, a midwife in Pskov, a bookseller in Moscow during the decade when bookselling was not yet entirely supervised by the censors. Each identity lasted twenty or thirty years before the absence of aging became conspicuous, and then I moved, and changed my name, and began again. The doll came with me always. The skull came with me always. My mother’s blessing — if that is the word — came with me always.

I chose the academy because I wanted to understand what had happened to me, and I believed that scholarship — the careful, patient, footnoted examination of evidence — might give me a framework that experience alone had not. I was wrong about this, but the wrongness was productive. What scholarship gave me was not understanding but language, and language, I discovered, is its own form of fire: it illuminates, it alters what it touches, it can burn.

I was the only woman in the philology department at Kazan. This required certain performances: I made myself smaller in meetings. I published under initials for the first five years. I attributed my most original insights to male colleagues and let them accept the attribution. (Professor Dahl, who has never visited a village in Vologda province, has dined out for a decade on an observation about the tripartite structure of the Baba Yaga cycle that I made to him over tea in 1876 and that he presented as his own at Petersburg three years later. I let him. What is a stolen observation to a woman who has watched centuries pass? But I notice that I am still angry about it. Two hundred years and I am still angry. Some fires do not go out.)

The other scholars — and I must be precise here, because imprecision about institutions is how they escape accountability — the other scholars did not suppress my work because they were individually malicious. Some were, certainly. Professor Volkonsky, who reviewed my 1882 paper on Baba Yaga’s function in agrarian ritual, wrote in the margins: A curious effort, but perhaps better suited to the domestic instruction of young girls than to the proceedings of this university. He was individually malicious. But the suppression was larger than any one man. It was structural. It was the assumption, so deep it did not need to be spoken, that knowledge gathered from old women in villages — knowledge carried in voices, in hands, in the patterns of embroidery and the rhythms of lullabies — was not real knowledge. That it required a man with a university appointment to make it legible. That the raw material of folklore had no authority until it was processed through the machinery of the academy, just as raw flax has no value until it is spun into thread.

I understood this machinery. I understood it because I had been the raw material. I was the girl in the story, the one the old women told about, the one the professors annotated. And I was also the professor, the annotator, the woman with the ink-stained fingers and the careful footnotes, and the distance between those two selves — the girl who held the skull and the scholar who wrote about the girl who held the skull — was the distance I had been trying to cross for eighteen years of writing and had never managed to close until now.

Annotation 39. On Why I Am Writing This.

Vasilisa goes to Baba Yaga. Vasilisa receives the fire. Vasilisa returns home. The wicked burn. The good survives. A Tsar appears. The story ends.

But the story does not end. That is what I have been trying to tell you through four hundred and twelve pages of annotations that began as scholarship and became confession. The story does not end because the girl who lived it is still living it, is still carrying the skull whose fire has not dimmed in three centuries, is still hearing her mother’s voice in the doll’s wooden mouth, is still standing in the doorway watching Katerina burn.

Professor Dahl will present his paper on the structural morphology of the fire-quest narrative at the All-Russian Philological Congress in April. He will cite Afanasyev and Propp and the Brothers Grimm. He will not cite the old woman in Kostroma who told me the version with the mother’s words I have carried all this time: I am going into the ground and I will not come back, but I am leaving you something of myself that the ground cannot take. He will not cite her because she had no university appointment and no surname that he recorded and no authority that the congress would recognize. She was raw material. She was the forest, and he is the man who makes maps of the forest from a warm room, and his maps bear no resemblance to the ground.

I am writing this because the annotations have failed. Eighteen years of footnotes and cross-references and carefully maintained scholarly distance, and the distance has collapsed, and I am standing in the hut again with Baba Yaga’s iron teeth gleaming in the firelight and her voice saying Take your fire and meaning also Take your grief and Take your power and Take the knowledge that these are all the same thing and that carrying them will not make you wise but will make you unable to pretend you are not what you are.

I am Vasilisa. I have been a scholar of my own story and the scholarship has not saved me from it. The doll is in the chest. The skull is in the chest. These pages are in the chest, and the chest will go into the wall, and the wall will hold it until someone opens it and finds a doll with a worn face and a skull with amber fire and four hundred pages of a woman trying to annotate her own life into something she can bear.

Annotation 41. On Leaving.

(The final annotation. The handwriting is calm. —Ed.)

I am leaving the university tonight. I have packed nothing because I own nothing that matters except the doll and the skull and these papers, and the papers I am giving to the wall. The doll will come with me. The skull will come with me. I will go into the forest — not the birch forests of Vologda, which I have walked too many times to fear, but the forest that Baba Yaga’s hut stands in, which exists in no geography the academy recognizes, which you enter not by walking but by being ready to enter, which I was not ready for at sixteen and am not certain I am ready for now but will enter anyway, because the alternative is another forty years of a name that is not mine and footnotes that circle the truth without touching it.

I think I understand now what Baba Yaga was offering me. Not fire. Not power. Not the destruction of my enemies, which was incidental, which was the fire’s choice and not mine and which I have carried as guilt for three centuries and will carry for however many remain. She was offering me the thing my mother gave up: the choice between mortality and knowledge, between a life that ends and a life that understands. My mother chose mortality. She chose love and a human body and a daughter and death. She chose to stop carrying the fire.

I have not stopped carrying it. I have tried — I have tried through scholarship, through the careful distance of the footnote, through the fiction that I am Dr. Aleksandra Nikolaevna Gorokhova and not the burning girl, not the girl with the skull, not the girl who watched Katerina reach. And the trying has been its own kind of fire, quieter but no less consuming.

The doll says, in my mother’s voice: Walk forward. Do not turn aside.

I am walking forward. I am not turning aside. I am entering the forest where the riders live and the hut breathes and Baba Yaga sits by her stove with her iron teeth and her declarations that reshape the world. I do not know what she will ask me this time. I do not know what tasks she will set. But I am not sixteen anymore, and I am not carrying only a doll and a mother’s blessing — I am carrying three centuries of fire and footnotes and the accumulated weight of every version of my story that men have told about me without asking what it felt like from the inside.

When she asks me how I accomplish my tasks, I will not say by my mother’s blessing. I will say: By my own hand. By the fire I have carried and the fire I have become. By the annotations in the cedar chest and the burning girl in the doorway and every word I set down in the margins of my own myth, trying to make the scholars understand what they were too comfortable to see.

The skull’s light fills my study. It is amber. It is warm. It is the light of the first fire and the last fire and every fire between them, and I have been afraid of it for three hundred years, and I am not afraid of it now.

The hut is waiting. The forest is waiting. Baba Yaga already knows I am coming. She has always known. She said so the first time, in her way that is not asking but declaring: You will come back.

I am coming back.

The remaining pages of the manuscript are blank except for a single line written in an ink that has not faded, in a hand that is steady and unhurried:

“The fire preserves. —V.”

(A note on subsequent scholarship: Professor Dahl’s 1891 paper on the structural morphology of the fire-quest narrative was well received at the All-Russian Philological Congress and is still cited in introductory folklore courses. Dr. Gorokhova’s annotations were catalogued by the university library in 1903, classified as “incomplete scholarly apparatus, of minor interest,” and were not read in full until 1987, when a graduate student named Yelena Alexeyevna Sorokina discovered them and recognized their significance. Sorokina’s subsequent monograph, “The Annotator and the Tale: Voice, Authority, and the Problem of Self-Reference in Slavic Folk Narrative” (Moscow University Press, 1991), was reviewed as “provocative but undisciplined” by three male colleagues and as “the most important work of folklore scholarship in a generation” by two female ones. The skull was not in the chest when Sorokina opened it. The doll was. Its painted eyes were open.)