Dubravka Ugresic, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg
Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac, Celia Hawkesworth andMark Thompson.
Canongate 327 pp
By Marina Warner
Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is the latest and most inventive volume in the series of
Myths that Canongate has been commissioning from writers all over the world; the
first title, a novella, was Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad, a harsh revisioning in
Penelope's voice of the concluding scenes of The Odyssey. With her own special bite
and chill, Atwood singles out for dramatic treatment the girls who worked for
Penelope in the palace and fraternised with the suitors; she reminds us how pitilessly
Homer's Odysseus orders them to be hanged, every one. The resonances with
contemporary matters, which the series of books aims to stir, are powerful in this new
handmaid's tale, a mythic revisioning. Similarly, David Grossman's choice, the story
of Samson from the Bible, locks tightly with current Palestinian-Israeli conflicts. The
production of Handel's opera at Buxton last year seemed to respond directly to
Grossman's meditation on Samson's self-immolation, when he brings down the
temple of the Philistines around his ears – and asks, Was Samson, the Jewish hero
and proto-martyr, a suicide bomber? Was he the first suicide bomber?
The series opened with an introduction to myth by Karen Armstrong which
stresses its archaic origins and its links to religion and ritual, to survival and national
or tribal identity. This could be said to be the ontological version of myth, which
assumes the stories to connect to a metaphysical belief system that maps on to a
culture's history and ethics. But, to borrow Chris Warnes’s contrast between ontology
and irreverence in his recent book about magic realism, Dubravka Ugresic’s approach
– and that of many other contemporary retellers of myths - shows that the readers she
has in mind are hardly concerned with sacred matters and impatient with spiritual
meaning. In consequence, a looser, secular conception has established itself in this
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mythological literature: it flattens hierarchies between faith and superstition, and no
longer discriminates, as a Victorian anthropologist would have done, between high
and low cultures, between stories about gods, which are rooted in belief and
performed in ritual, and tales of goblins and fairies and witches, told to raise shivers
of pleasurable fear on a winter’s dark night. But in uncoupling itself from belief, the
vision of fairytale/myth can be angled more sharply to certain other tasks. Voltaire
showed the way: from his vantage point, Zeus turning into a bull, Nebuchadnezzar
into a wild animal, or the Beast bridegrooms of fairy tale are much of a muchness, if
faith is in question. But even as he mocked the motifs and premises of religion,
enchantment and myth, he found he could do what he needed to do far better through
the conventions of fabulism. Dubravka Ugresic belongs in his broad descendance,
where the literature of myth broadens to designate storytelling as fantasy, as play, as
the non-representational patterning of experience, and a defining activity of
consciousness and human critical interaction. Secular, acerbic, comic, springing from
scepticism, her fiction reflects a return to earlier forms – allegory, parable, fable,
aphorism- in short, proverbial wisdom literature.
Fairy tales have woven in and out of this lineage, and occupy a distinctive strain
in Russian literature and culture, involved with its own local and original folklore
stories and figures - Baba Yaga herself, as well as the Firebird and Koshchey the
Deathless, for example (Roman Jakobson made a tally and estimated that a third of
Russian fairy tales were specifically Russian, unknown in Western Europe). Pushkin,
Leskov, and Platonov among the writers, Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinksy, Kandinsky,
Chagall among the numerous composers, artists, and designers drew their inspiration
from the oral body of stories which polite society had hitherto kept to the fields or the
kitchen. Not only for the stories themselves, the enchantments and diversions, but
also for the style, the direct speaking manner, the comic-melodramatic tenor of the
voice, the irony and savvy. The chief source of was – still is – the anthology
published in l855-64: Russian Fairy Tales by Aleksandr Nikolaevich Afanas’ev, who,
although he is usually credited with collecting firsthand, in fact combed earlier field
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collectors’ records, and, like the Brothers Grimm before him and Italo Calvino later,
patched and pieced and retold and re-voiced the traditional oral folk material.
As Ugresic commented, in conversation with Lisa Appignanesi at the LRB
festival earlier this summer, during the Soviet era the tradition gave writers freedom.
The use of traditional material appeared to conform to populist and nationalist policy
(Lenin commented warmly that a writer ‘could write from this material beautiful
studies about the hopes and longings of our people.’) An authentic proletarian
background, supposed naivety, and a target child audience could also provide a cloak
for subversive thoughts and political criticism; fabulist metaphors acted as enigmas
which were hard to censor. Platonov’s fables, such as the story ‘Among Animals and
Plants’ and the novel Soul, speak through this apparent innocence of the folktale form
to indict with lacerating poignancy the conditions of existence in Soviet Russia. The
same stratagems were being used in Central Europe until the very end of Soviet
control – by Miroslav Holub in Czechoslovakia, by Danilo Kis in the former
Yugoslavia.
Ugresic is highly aware of these and other Russian and Slavic variations on the
form's ironic potential, and she has been circling this territory for a while. In her new
book, the tradition of upside-down, modernist myth-making or ironical fable has also
freed her tongue and her fantasy, into a new mood. Skittish at times, affectionately
comic, and lavish with improbable and ingenious fairy tale plotting, her handling of
the genre here is deft and light: Baba Yaga Laid An Egg finds Ugresic in much higher
spirits than her recent collection of essays, Nobody’s Home (2008) and her
courageous, withering attack on the book trade, Thank You For Not Reading (20 ),
and her ironic and prophetic fictions, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and
The Ministry of Pain.
Baba Yaga is the true Witch of the North, the supreme scare figure of the
Russian nursery and popular lore, a monstrous old hag who haunts children and eats
them. She doesn't exactly appear in character, but she hovers off stage, and directs th
action. Old women are Dubravka Ugresic’s heroines and old womanhood is her
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theme. Although her powers of observation remain as finely focussed as in previous
criticism, there's more mercy in her mockery here. This new book is a hybrid work, a
comic fable in three parts, combining autobiography, travel, memoir, fable, satire,
essay. She begins with an elegy about her own mother's decline into dementia; hoping
to reawaken her mother's memories, she makes a pilgrimage to Sofia, her mother’s
home town; she sees herself as a ‘bedel’ (a bedel was the double whom rich men used
to pay to go to Mecca or fight in the army in their stead). But when she returns and
proffers photographs and anecdotes, her mother recognises no more of present day
Sofia than does her daughter. This is vintage Ugresic territory: the impossibility of
belonging, the ineluctability of loss, and yet, somehow, the preferable distinctiveness
of remaining apart.
By contrast, in the second section, ‘Ask Me No Questions and I’ll Tell You No
Lies’, Ugresic spins a mischievous tale about a triad of crones. The heart of the book,
it beats with the sheer joy of inventive storytelling. Kukla, Pupa, and Beba, a
declension of ageing and variously disintegrating females, are attending a beauty spa,
the internationally famous Wellness Centre. It's an absurd luxury resort, all special
mud baths and speciality massages, a product of the new, global market free
enterprise Czech Republic, and Ugresic brings her reporter's talents to the details of
salve and bath foam, potion and nostrum, slogans and promises. Its founder, Dr
Topolanek, observes how his contemporaries and compatriots do not have his
survival skills: 'The freedom for which they had fought turned out to be fatal. It
destroyed them the way oxygen destroys buried frescoes when they are suddenly
brought into the light.' (p 98) Yet the Centre ultimately does turn out to be a fairyland
of a kind, where they will all find a surprise set of happy endings: a gentle, longed-for
passing on, a foundling child, a freak casino win, a home.
The egg in question comes from a riddling fairy tale about a quest for love: as
Kukla summarises it, ‘ Ivan falls in love with a girl, but to make her fall in love with
him, he has to find out where her love is hidden. And he sets off over seven
mountains and seven valleys, and reaches the ocean. There he finds an oak tree, in the
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oak there is a box, in the box a rabbit, in the rabbit a duck and in the duck an egg. It is
in that egg that he girl’s love is hidden. The girl has to eat the egg. And when she eats
it, the flame of love for Ivan flares in her heart.’ P 128 Ugresic's Ivan is Meklo, a
new kind of dumbling hero, a young masseur in the beauty farm and a Bosnian
orphan with a heart of gold, who suffers from a permanent erection ever since a bomb
exploded beside him in Sarajevo. But he will find the egg, and there will be a
beautiful future for him too - love, fortune, family - and restoration from Beast-like
priapism to the normal human droop, which he has long desired.
A long mock appendix tails the book: 'If You Know Too Much, You Grow Old
Too Soon', by one Dr. Aba Bagay, sets out a compendium of stories about witchcraft,
etymologies, gender studies interpretations. We learn more about Baba Yaga, how she
lives deep in the forest in a hut that runs about on chicken legs and turns away from
visitors so that they can't find the door; it’s fortified by a palisade surmounted by
skulls with red lamps inside. She has one bone or metal leg, half-blind blood-shot
eyes, and dugs so long she slings them over the rafters when she goes to bed. When
she travels, she ferries herself through the air in a pestle and mortar, using a broom to
sweep her tracks behind. But her bark is worse than her bite, and several stories,
including Ugresic's updating, reveal her magic powers at work on behalf of strays and
protégés.
Ugresic is a parodist with many voices, and an intertextual high-wire walker, and
so she gives her translators a tricky task, with much wordplay to render: in Baba
Yaga, the ends of chapters echo the traditional storyteller’s rhyming envois (‘What
about us? We keep going. While life humps and bumps to stumble on, the tale keeps
hurrying and scurrying along.’) In her earlier, technically virtuoso novel, Fording the
Stream of Consciousness, each character had a particular prose style as a character in
a ballet might have a theme: so the detective’s story sounds like hardboiled Chandler,
the heroine muses in a Woolfian, interior fugue, and so forth (the veteran translator
Michael Henry Heim in action). Here, Canongate have reproduced her polyphony of
registers by commissioning three translators to work on the different parts of the book
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and in this way give the memoir, fiction, and essay a different feel.
Ugresic studied in Moscow in the Seventies and when she reflects on the
folklore of witches, and on the horror and terror old women inspire, she is drawing on
her background in Russian linguistics and avant-garde literature. This expertise did
not endear her to the new regime in her native Zagreb when the nationalist
government came to power in l991, Ugresic was numbered among the Five Witches
attacked during a nasty and dangerous press furore for their ‘unpatriotic’ opposition
to the regime. Her position at the University in Zagreb became untenable. Crucifixes
appeared on the walls; national flags on the desks of colleagues; Serbo-Croat was
abolished, the new national language was to be purged of all non-Croatian elements.
Even her mother’s birth in Bulgaria was a strike against her. Interestingly, in that
conversation with Lisa Appignanesi, Dubravka said she hadn’t consciously connected
her own denunciation as a witch with her heroines – Kukla, the oldest, is always
accompanied by a cool breeze, has a way of losing her husbands to premature graves,
and when she first enters the story, the clerk at the hotel suffers a stroke at her
appearance in the lobby.
I met Dubravka before all this, in the late Eighties in San Francisco. It was at
one of the Wheatland Conferences (the last, I think), which gathered together writers
from all over the cold war map with ecumenical zeal for cultural fellowship in those
very different times. Dubravka gave a wry speech about coming from a small
country. I didn’t have a sense then that she felt the wind blowing from the future. But
only a few years later, in her now much smaller country, she became a victim of the
witch-hunt, and in l993, she entered that state of ‘willed homelessness’ (Edward
Said’s phrase) of the émigré, and began a wandering existence from one temporary
visiting fellowship or residency to another until she settled a few years ago in
Amsterdam. She has a Dutch passport and a following, but does not speak the
language. She still writes in her native tongue, now designated ‘Croatian’ in the
Canongate translation, and she is published in her homeland again, but is read widely
and internationally in many languages (24!).
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Exiles read contrapuntally, Edward Said wrote in a memoir essay, 'Reflections on
exile’, and he developed these thoughts into a full theory of interpretation in Culture
and Imperialism. ‘Home and culture aren’t something one belongs to but also things
one possesses…,’ he added in an essay on Erich Auerbach, ‘and require the drawing
of boundaries to define and own them.’ Said’s own personal story, as a Palestinian
and a Columbia professor, gave him two positions at once (at least) to occupy. He
advocated uncovering meanings in a text by attending to the counterpoint between
them and listening to that oscillation, that fruitful tension and the ensuing harmonies,
dissonances and resonances. In Ugresic’s case, she has written contrapuntally from
the start, and her parodist’s irony was sharpened – roughened, too – by her state of
homelessness (her most recent collection of essays is called, with characteristic
double-tongued pointedness, ‘Nobody’s Home’).
In an article on Ugresic and one of her sister witches, Slavenka Drakulic, Sanja
Bahun (also Yugoslav-born, and a colleague of mine at Essex) comments on the
dilemma of Yugo-stalgia for writers in their position, and connects their loss of place
and history to the montage technique Ugresic uses, juxtaposing different fragments,
voices, and literary forms in what become many-branched acts of retrieval:
‘Melancholia is used strategically here, and it is attached, specifically and stubbornly,
to the image of the former Yugoslavia.’ Ugresic admits herself, ‘ I often think that my
countrymen are not people at all but cuttlefish in human form: you have only to touch
them, and they emit a black cloud.’ (Nobody’s Home, p 22) ‘The former Yugoslavia’
has indeed given Ugresic over a long writing career a case by which to examine
contrapuntally – and dramatise and confabulate – symptoms of the rise and fall of
global marketing democracy across the world which she has roamed for the last
twenty years: migrant workers, refugees, tribalism, faith politics, identity politics,
consumer branding, sentimentality, and, in Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, her specific
target, the beauty industry and the worship of youth, with its attendant phenomena,
cosmetic surgery, sex enhancement, nutritional supplements. History unmade
Yugoslavia, the country she was born into, and though she can go back now, what
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was home has vanished, and there is no will for or possibility of any return to that
order – not that Ugresic would want that either. Like the hero of another Russian fairy
tale, she may well say, ‘I will go I know not where; I will bring back I know not
what.’
But this new book has carried her to another place, one more fruitful for fictive
exuberance as well as pointedness. Her title, 'Baba Yaga Laid an Egg', comes from
the modernist Aleksei Mikhailovich Remizov's reworking of folklore; it's funny in the
original, a tongue-twisting nonsense rhyme, and Ugresic has even used it before, for
the Polish translation of an earlier novel, Life is a Fairytale. But the phrase has a
darker side: it draws attention to Baba Yaga as a kind of sport of nature, fit for a
cabinet of curiosities or a sideshow in Ripley's 'Believe it or not!' Seventeenth century
almanacs used to report the occasional miracle of this kind, and woodcuts showed the
woman sitting on her nest to hatch her brood; another prodigy, the subject of a
famous print by Hogarth, involved the star attraction Mary Tofts, who in l726 gave
birth to a litter of rabbits and became so famous that Dr Johnson went to inspect. But
Baba Yaga laying an egg alludes to the impossibility in another way: she's too old to
have any kind of offspring, egg or other, but like a basilisk who is male but also lays
eggs, she contravenes nature. Baba Yaga isn't quite a woman, and certainly not
feminine; there's something of Tiresias about her, double-sexed and knowing.
Old women do more complicated symbolic work in literature and myth than
males in their third age; they embody disgust with sexual appetite after fertility and
promote joyless moralising. Bawds and procuresses in paintings of brothels are
usually shown as chapfallen, toothless crones extending a wrinkled palm to a punter
while pressing towards him a dewy young thing who contrasts strongly with their
own sere and haggard state. Dutch paintings from the great era of prosperity in that
country specialise in such scenes; yet madams at the time, unlike witches whom they
otherwise resemble, were not usually aged, but were middling-young women who
had left the game as soon as they could, to set up themselves up in business running
other – younger -women instead. The historian Lotte van de Pol discovered this
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surprising piece of demographic history in her study of prostitution from court
records in Amsterdam (the fullest in the world on this subject, a consequence of the
Dutch Republic’s combined sense of faith, decorum, and business). 1 Artists and poets
in duplicitous satires on lewdness and folly continued however to portray brothel
keepers as old hags in the tradition established by the classical myths. Raddled Strife,
or Eris; the Fates; the Harpies, et al., set the tone for cruel diatribes such as the brutal
poem, long attributed to Horace', De Vetula (On the Crone) with its grotesque
numbering of parts and their sorry condition. The tradition hasn't faded away: J. M.
Coetzee's male protagonists (no spring chickens themselves) frequently note the
fallen state of female flesh with unfeeling displeasure and a distinct sense of superior
difference.
By contrast, the earliest Beauty and the Beast, written by Mme de Villeneuve in
l746, describes how the hero was turned into a Beast by his godmother; she fancied
him, and when he turned her down, cursed him. She's not portrayed as especially old
- just an older woman. For Charles Perrault and the contemporary women writers
who took up the genre, like Marie Catherine d'Aulnoy, fairies – les fees – behaved and looked like – grand court ladies; the old crone played the part of the story teller,
or the beggar woman sent to test the heroine's sweet nature, or the dear old Granny
who gets eaten by the wolf and then impersonated – though here there are sexual
overtones. All of these roles – the narrator, the needy old woman, and the
grandmother – are predominantly wise rather than hideous, sympathetic rather than
repulsive, and they also mirror the authors' own part in the story, in which they lay
their own designs on the listener and the reader.
The nursery also fostered another dimension to the old crone, a character who
was above all funny but in a fearsome fashion, who was sometimes literally the wife
of an ogre, but at other times an ogress in her own right - or an ogree, as in the
eighteenth century when the word was first introduced into English via French and
Italian fairy tales, who 'with raw head and bloody bones … chases after little children
1
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Lotte van de Pol, The Whores of Amsterdam
to gobble them.' Such figures raise a laugh, often in travesty as pantomime dames;
but, as Dubravka Ugresic knows very well, they also know how to mock and to laugh
at others. And however ancient they are, they're seldom decrepit; however feeble they
seem, hunched over a stick with their nose meeting their chin, they still exercise
uncanny power - the fairy godmother or the evil queen. But no storybook crone, not
even Sir Frederick Ashton and Robert Helpmann as the Ugly Sisters in Cinderella, or
Ian McKellen camping it up as Widow Twankey, reach the monstrosity of Baba Yaga.
Ironic affection can follow such figures: in The Rake's Progress, W.H. Auden
and Chester Kallman gave her name, Baba, to the Bearded Lady whom Tom
Rakewell marries on his way up in society, and Stravinsky, to whose interest in
Russian folklore they were responding by adding this figure to the usual cautionary
tale, has fun with musical jokes about Baba's caprices and Tom's growing boredom.
At the close of Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, the mysterious Dr Abay herself sprouts
feathers and finds her mouth stretching into a beak, and takes off on another magical
flight - the author revealing her presence and making her claims. Ugresic's approach
to myths and her way of writing them here opposes the archaic view that there is a
given, time-hallowed truth there waiting to be unveiled. It flies into a future of its
own making, treating the stories as volatile and dynamic – as polysemous – instead;
users of enchantment in this mode are attempting to move thinking and values in a
different direction, continuing the fabulist tradition of visionary, oppositional
struggle. Kafka saw this. So did Calvino. Ugresic herself in some odd way is
mirroring the very mission she gives her comic villain, Dr Topolanek of the Wellness
Cetnre, and through her affectionate variations on Baba Yaga, attempting to dispel the
ill effects, misery, prejudices and disgust that bedevil female ageing.
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