Rusalka

Her hair is always wet. The old stories insist on that before they mention the beauty or the danger: water runs from it in the heat of June, when the reeds have gone dry and the riverbank grass has turned brittle and brown. She sits in the low fork of a willow with her legs folded beneath her, drawing a comb through the long strands, and where the drops fall the grass stays green. By the time a man is close enough to see her clearly, it is already too late.

She was a girl once. That is the heart of it. A rusalka is not a goddess or a beast but a soul in arrears, the restless dead of a young woman who left the world before her share of it: a bride who drowned before her wedding, a woman who walked into the river over a faithless lover, a girl murdered and sunk in the shallows, sometimes an infant dead unbaptized. The ethnographer Dmitry Zelenin, gathering these beliefs across the Russian countryside in the early twentieth century, set them among the unclean dead, the ones who die wrong and must serve out on earth the years they were cheated of. A rusalka is doing time.

What she looks like depends on where the story is told. Along the Danube and through Ukraine she is lovely, a slender girl with pale skin and a wreath of wildflowers or water lilies in her loose hair, singing in a voice that empties a man’s head of everything but the wish to come nearer. Travel north into the Russian forests and the same spirit turns wild and unlovely: naked, unkempt, heavy-breasted, more ambush than temptation. What holds across the whole range is the hair, worn long and unbound. A living woman braided hers and kept it covered; only the unmarried and the dead went with it loose, and the rusalka is both. It never dries, and in some tellings that is the whole secret of her. Let her hair dry out and she withers, so she keeps a comb that calls up water wherever she wants it, enough to raise a flood if she is angry.

The killing is close and unhurried. A man crossing a field at dusk hears singing from the water and turns toward it without quite deciding to. She winds her arms around him, and either she pulls him down into the current or she does the other thing, the thing the northern names remember her by. Loskotukha, one of them runs, from loskotat, to tickle. She tickles her victim, laughing while he laughs, and does not stop until his body fails and he drowns on dry land in his own helpless breath. Swimmers were dragged under. Women and children were not safe either, though it was young men she wanted most.

For most of the year she keeps to the water. The exception is a single week in late May or early June, the seventh after Easter, folded into the church calendar around Pentecost and known as Rusalka Week, or Green Week, the Trinity week. Then the boundary thins and she comes ashore, climbing into the birches and willows to sit and swing on the branches, wandering out into the standing rye. People stopped swimming. They left certain work undone, hung wormwood at their belts and their doorways because she cannot abide its bitterness, and watched the field edges through the noon hours. At the week’s close the village saw her off. In many places the women built a straw figure of the rusalka, carried it out with singing, and tore it apart or drowned it in the river or the rye, sending her back to the water for another year. The rite was called the provody, the seeing-off, and it was done with something between mockery and dread.

She was not always this frightening. Beneath the drowned brides lies an older figure, and Vladimir Propp, among others, argued that the earliest rusalki were not evil at all. They belonged to the spring, to fertility and the turn of the season, and they rose out of the water to carry its moisture into the fields and quicken the crops. Even the name points away from hauntings and toward a festival: it comes through the Rusalii from the Roman Rosalia, the feast of roses for the dead, so that the spirit was named after the holiday rather than the holiday after the spirit. The pull people feel toward rusyj, the word for fair or light-brown hair, came later and fits the picture a little too neatly to be the true root. Over the centuries the life-giving water-maiden hardened into the vengeful corpse, and both readings survive in the folklore side by side.

Her powers are the powers of the drowned and the powers of the water: a voice that overrides judgment, a beauty or a wildness that fixes the eye, tireless strength once she has hold of you, and command over the element she died in, sharpened by the comb that summons it. Her limits are the mirror of all that. She is chained to the water and to her wet hair, and she fails away from both. She is strongest only in her one week and along the water’s margin, and she keeps her distance from wormwood, from iron pins, from the sign of the cross. Above all she is a dead girl who never got to grow up, and what the dead do, in these stories, is want. She wants the wedding she never had, the years she never spent, the warm living body crossing the field at dusk. She takes the nearest one, and it is never enough, and the river closes over it, and the reeds go still.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a rusalka?

A rusalka is a female water spirit of Slavic folklore, understood in most tellings as the restless soul of a young woman who died before her time by drowning, suicide, or murder. She is bound to rivers, lakes, and ponds and counts among the “unclean dead” who must live out on earth the years they were cheated of. An older layer of belief instead treats her as a benevolent spirit of spring and fertility.

How does a rusalka kill her victims?

A rusalka lures young men to the water with her singing and beauty, then either drags them under to drown or tickles them to death. In northern Russia she was even called loskotukha, “the tickler,” because she would tickle a captured man without stopping until his body gave out. Swimmers, women, and children could also fall victim, but young men were her preferred prey.

What is Rusalka Week?

Rusalka Week is the one period each year, in late May or early June around Pentecost, when rusalki leave the water to roam the fields and forests and swing in the birches and willows. During this week people avoided swimming, hung protective wormwood, and left certain work undone. At its end villages performed the provody, a ritual “seeing-off” in which a straw effigy of the rusalka was carried out and destroyed to send her back to the water.

Why is a rusalka’s hair always wet?

A rusalka’s long, loose hair is described as perpetually wet because her life is tied to water, and in many accounts she will wither and die if it dries out. To prevent this she carries a comb that can summon water wherever she needs it, and folklore says an angry rusalka can use it to call up a flood. Her unbound hair also marks her status, since living married women kept theirs braided and covered.

Are rusalki the same as mermaids?

No. Although a rusalka is often called a Slavic mermaid, she is a ghost rather than a fish-tailed sea creature, appearing as a fully human young woman who is one of the drowned dead. Unlike a mermaid she leaves the water entirely during Rusalka Week to walk the land, and her danger comes from her origin as a wronged, unquiet spirit rather than from a monstrous body.

Related Entries

Vodyanoy, Vila, Nav, Topielec, Berehynia, Bagiennik, Mokosh, Veles, Näkki, Nix, Naiad, Iara, Undine, Siren