In preparation for next month’s draft, I am outlining a story loosely based around the Baba Yaga / Hansel and Gretel stories, in which a teenage boy (rather than a girl, as in Vasilisa the Beautiful, or a brother and sister as in Hansel and Gretel) with a difficult relationship with his father (rather than stepmother) discovers a hermit (rather than crone) living in the north woods and decides that he and the hermit are modern-day Cossacks: wild men, raiders and runaways from the serfdom (as it seems when you’re sixteen) of modern life. As Vasyl crawls deeper and deeper into this fantasy, he fails to consider that the hermit may have his own agenda.
By coincidence, Nadya Lev at Coilhouse also has Baba Yaga on her mind this week. (Perhaps she is also menaced by eerie, spindly buckthorn limbs spontaneously uprooting themselves and forming knobby matted fortresses in the woods surrounding her house?) The Bilibin illustration in her post is the same one that inspired me to start work on the Vasyl story a few weeks ago.
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Oh man, I swear I have wanted to write a story with Baba Yaga as a major character for years! This is good stuff! Are you going to go full out with the hut on chicken legs, and the enslaved animate tools?
BTW, I nicknamed the cleaning woman at our old studio “Baba Yaga”, but that is a different story…
The hut on chicken legs turns out to be a real thing that real people build for a real purpose:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baba_yaga#Cabin_on_chicken_legs
No way! It never even occurred to me that Baba Yaga would have a Wikipedia entry. Pretty soon everyone will no about her mysterious ways!
Baba Yaga uses Twitter. There’s nothing AT ALL mysterious about her anymore!