Chochlik

Also Known As: plural chochliki; from Belarusian хохлік, khokhlik, a little devil, literally a little tufted one, from chochoł, a tuft or forelock and also the top sheaf set on a stook like a small roof
Region/Culture: Central and Eastern Europe
Mythos: Slavic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: He misleads people who are in no state to notice, carries fire inside a body small enough to be mistaken for a cat, and ruins small things without ever quite destroying them.
Role in Mythos: He is the idle and ill-natured half of the pair of sprites who serve Goplana, queen of Lake Gopło, in Juliusz Słowacki’s Balladyna, and outside that play he is the general Polish word for an imp of mischief.
Relation to Humans: He walks beside a drunk man through a marsh at night, steers him wrong for hours, and then offers him snuff. Most of the harm he does now is done to writing, where the chochlik drukarski is the imp blamed for every misprint that slips past the proofreader.

The mud along Lake Gopło runs red, and at sunrise a drunk man is still sitting in it. Grabiec has been in the marsh all night and has come out caked to the knee, and something small has walked beside him the whole way, steering him wrong. He settles on calling it a dog. Then he decides it is a cat, reaches down to stroke it, and comes away with a handful of fire. The thing offers him snuff instead. Asked where the snuff came from, it says: from Mr Lucifer.

That is the chochlik’s best scene, and it takes place in a play. Juliusz Słowacki wrote Balladyna in Geneva in 1834 and published it in Paris in 1839, and in it he gave Goplana, the water nymph who rules Lake Gopło, two servant sprites. Skierka is the sweet-natured one. Chochlik is not. Nearly everything anyone can say about a chochlik’s temper comes out of the gap between those two.

The word came first, and it did not begin in Polish. Słowacki lifted it out of Belarusian folk speech, where chochliki are little devils and where the name means, flatly, tufted ones. Belarusian tellers pictured the devil with a forelock on his head like a Cossack’s and called him chachłaty, tufted. Aleksander Brückner, assembling his etymological dictionary of Polish in 1927, filed the creature under chochoł, the crowning sheaf of a stook, the one laid on top as a little roof against the rain, and disposed of the chochlik himself in four words: a Ruthenian spirit.

What he is not is a figure of Polish peasant belief. Leonard Pełka’s survey of Polish folk demonology, published in 1987, finds room for the skrzat, the kłobuk, the latawiec, the płanetnik and the boginka. The chochlik does not appear in it once. In the dialect record the word shows up mostly as a gloss, the neat standard-Polish term a scholar reaches for when he needs to explain what a domowik is to someone who has never met one. The chochlik is a word doing the work of a creature.

So there is no body to describe, and the play takes care not to supply one. Goplana can shut him inside a frog’s shell, which sets a ceiling on his size and tells us nothing else. When he wants to be seen he becomes a small travelling light, and on his last night he offers to run ahead of his mistress like a hajduk carrying a flame. Warmth, weight, a shape at the edge of the reeds. That is the whole inventory.

He arrives complaining. Dawn on the lake, swallows knocking rings into the water, pine and spring air coming off the shore, and Chochlik is reciting the summer’s chores to Skierka. Butterfly eggs to be packed into empty acorns. Ant roads to be swept. The armour of May beetles unfastened so the things can fly. Hive law read aloud to the bees out of an open book, the statutes and the oath of loyalty to the queen. Swallows called into the reeds and first-year mothers taught to build. Bird traps sprung early, deliberately, to spite the fowler. Do not steal, trumpeted into a magpie’s ear morning after morning. Then winter behind a peasant’s stove among the pots, a gap-toothed old woman and a child. Skierka’s reply runs to one line. You are lazy, Chochlik.

Goplana sets him to work and he does almost none of it. Ordered to shadow Grabiec and keep him away from the girl, he answers that no devil ever stopped a pair of lovers yet, and for that she has Skierka seal him into a frog’s shell and push him out onto the open water. He goes pulling faces like a thwarted child. Skierka comes back to report that the prisoner is hopping down the streams and riding out onto the lake in the carriage of a deceased frog. Later, when Grabiec is sitting crowned in a stolen castle, Chochlik stands behind his chair as royal minister, appointed on the stated grounds of being stupid, and thanks the toasting nobles in a silly voice. He also finds his king a coach. Four black horses that kick sparks of moonlight, with proper shoes, on loan from hell, and a strict instruction not to mention any of it to Goplana, who dislikes borrowing from there.

What he can do is small and precisely aimed. He turns a road a man has walked all his life into a road that man cannot find, sits him down in a bog, and keeps him there until morning, all while looking like something harmless enough to pet. He holds fire inside a shape the size of a cat. He passes for a dog, for a cat, for a light on black water, and he has a supplier in hell who is named out loud. His later career has run along the same line. A chochlik is the reason a letter goes missing from a word and leaves a different word standing in its place. The chochlik drukarski, the printer’s imp, is the Polish name for that particular species of ruin, and it is a straight rendering of a German trade joke about the Druckfehlerteufel, the devil of misprints.

His limits are the limits of a servant. He is owned. Goplana tells him plainly that she cannot kill him, but she can put him in a shell and float him away, and he begs her to kill him instead, which says what he thinks of the alternative. Laziness blunts every scheme he is handed before it starts. He is trusted with nothing that matters, and the one errand that did matter he refused on principle. He is also dependent in a way he never admits. When Goplana is banished north, hanging onto the tail of a line of cranes, having tangled human affairs so badly that a thunderbolt has to come down on them, Chochlik does not stay behind and torment the neighbourhood. He offers to light her road and follows her out.

Polish kept him regardless. He sits in the dictionaries now under three headings: a spiteful little sprite, a small error in a text that quietly changes its meaning, and the mischievous glint in somebody’s eye. Only one of those is a creature, and it is not the one the language uses most.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a chochlik?

A chochlik is a small mischievous sprite in Polish usage, a little devil rather than a household helper. The word came into Polish from Belarusian, where chochliki are minor devils, and it means literally a tufted one, from chochoł, a forelock or tuft. In modern Polish it also names a typographical error and a mischievous glint in a person’s eye.

Where does the word chochlik come from?

It is a borrowing from Belarusian folk speech, brought into Polish by the Romantic poet Juliusz Słowacki. Belarusian tellers imagined the devil with a Cossack’s forelock and called him chachłaty, tufted, so a chochlik is a little tufted one. Aleksander Brückner, in his 1927 etymological dictionary of Polish, filed the name under chochoł and called the chochlik a Ruthenian spirit.

Who is Chochlik in Słowacki’s Balladyna?

Chochlik is one of two sprites serving Goplana, the nymph queen of Lake Gopło, in Balladyna, which Słowacki wrote in Geneva in 1834 and published in Paris in 1839. He is the lazy and ill-willed one, set against the gentle Skierka. He leads the drunk Grabiec astray in the marshes, is punished by being shut in a frog’s shell and floated out onto the lake, and later serves Grabiec as royal minister.

What is a chochlik drukarski?

The chochlik drukarski is the printer’s imp, the sprite Polish blames for misprints and typographical errors. The phrase is a translation of a German printers’ joke about the Druckfehlerteufel, the devil of printing errors. It is by far the most common use of the word chochlik in Polish today.

Is the chochlik part of Polish folk belief?

Not in the way the skrzat or the kłobuk are. Leonard Pełka’s 1987 survey of Polish folk demonology covers the skrzat, the kłobuk, the latawiec, the płanetnik and the boginka, and does not mention the chochlik at all. In the Polish dialect record the word appears mainly as a standard-language gloss used to explain East Slavic household spirits such as the domowik.