Vasilisa the Beautiful

Also Known As: Russian Василиса Прекрасная, Vasilisa Prekrasnaya; also Vasilisa the Fair, and in older English collections Wassilissa and Vaselesa; the given name descends from Greek basilissa, “queen”
Region/Culture: Central and Eastern Europe
Mythos: Russian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: She carries a small feeding doll left to her by her dying mother, and the doll does the impossible work she is set while she sleeps.
Role in Mythos: She is the stepdaughter sent into the forest for fire, who comes back out of Baba Yaga’s yard alive and carrying the light that kills the people who sent her.
Relation to Humans: Vasilisa is human throughout, a merchant’s or a poor man’s daughter depending on the telling, and the tale spends most of its length on the ordinary cruelties of a household rather than on anything supernatural. What she offers a reader is a method rather than a power: feed the thing that helps you, answer rudely to no one, and bribe the cat.

The birch splinter in the corner burned down to a stub and went out, and with it went the last light in the house. Rain came at the walls sideways. Three girls sat over unfinished work in the sudden dark, and two of them had already settled which of the three would be walking into the forest.

That is how the story starts moving, and it is worth noticing what it does not do. There is no prophecy, no curse, no god leaning in. There is a household in which one girl is disposable, and a night in autumn when the women’s work of spinning and weaving runs past sundown and somebody has to go and beg a coal from the neighbour. The neighbour is Baba Yaga.

Vasilisa had been living on borrowed help for years by then. Her mother had died when she was small and had left her a doll the length of a hand, with instructions that sound less like a blessing than a set of operating conditions: keep it hidden, tell no one, and when trouble comes, feed it before you ask it anything. So each morning Vasilisa milked the cow, shut herself in the pantry, poured a little milk in front of the doll and told it what was wrong. The doll drank. Then the beds were weeded and the water carried and the fire lit while she sat in the shade plaiting flowers into her hair, and her stepmother could never work out how.

The walk to the hut takes a day and a night, and the tale marks its passage with three riders. A man in white on a white horse with silver harness overtakes her before dawn. A man in red on a red horse passes as the sun comes up and dries the dew off her plait. The third comes at dusk, black horse, black harness, and rides straight through the gate and vanishes, and the moment he is gone the skulls on the fence light up from inside.

The fence is the detail everyone remembers. It is built of human bones and topped with skulls, the gateposts are leg bones, the bolts are arm bones, and the lock is a set of teeth. When the eye sockets kindle, the glade is as bright as noon. Then the ground starts shaking and Baba Yaga arrives overhead in a mortar, driving it with the pestle and sweeping her own tracks away behind her with a broom, and she stops at the gate and sniffs and says she smells Russian flesh.

Vasilisa bows and calls her Grandma and asks for a light. This is the whole of her strategy and it works. Baba Yaga, who turns out to be some sort of relation of the stepmother’s, sets her to work instead of eating her: a sack of millet to be picked over seed by seed, then peas to be sorted out of poppy seed, with the same terms both times. Fail and be eaten. Both nights Vasilisa is given a crust, and both nights she puts the crust in front of the doll and cries, and the doll tells her that morning is wiser than evening and to go to sleep. Birds come in flocks for the millet. Mice come in swarms for the peas. She wakes to finished work and a furious old woman who has nothing to say about it.

The escape is not a fight. Baba Yaga finally asks how the work keeps getting done, and Vasilisa answers that it is her mother’s blessing, and Baba Yaga throws her out of the house on the spot, wanting nothing blessed under her roof. On the way through the yard the cat comes at her and gets a pie. The dog comes at her and gets bread. The birch that tries to whip her eyes out gets its branches tied with a ribbon. The gate that tries to shut gets its hinges greased. Every one of them lets her through, and every one of them afterwards tells Baba Yaga, to her face, that it served her ten years for nothing and got a crust from the girl. She never lifts a hand against anyone in the entire story.

She goes home with a skull on a stick, because the alternative is arriving in the dark with nothing and being killed for it. Her stepsisters take it indoors, complaining that no light they strike will stay lit. The eyes fix on the three of them and follow them around the room, and by morning the stepmother and both daughters are cinders. Vasilisa buries the skull in the yard. In one telling a bush of red roses comes up on the spot. Then she moves to town, lodges with an old woman, and spins thread as fine as a hair and weaves cloth that will pass through the eye of a needle, and the cloth is what gets her married, first to a tsarevich in some versions and a tsar in others. Her father comes home from his travels and moves into the palace. She keeps the doll in her pocket for the rest of her life.

The variants are worth the small effort of holding in mind, because they change the shape of the thing. In some she is a merchant’s daughter and in others a poor old couple’s. In some the tale simply stops when the stepmother burns, with no wedding at all, which is unusual for a story with a grown heroine in it. Jiří Polívka noted in 1916 that a Slovak version from western Hungary keeps the three coloured riders but reassigns them, red for Morning and white for Day. Russian scholarship files the tale as SUS 480В*, “Stepmother and Stepdaughter”; Jack Haney, editing the complete Afanasyev in English, classified it as AT 480B*. Afanasyev himself, collecting in the 1850s and 1860s and reading folktales the way most of his generation read them, took the story to be weather in disguise: Vasilisa the sunlight, the stepmother the storm, the stepsisters the dark cloud. Almost nobody reads it that way now. Vladimir Propp, in 1946, put Baba Yaga at the threshold of the other world as the survivor of an initiation rite, which is why the hut has to be entered and served and escaped in that order. Andreas Johns, whose 2004 study is the fullest account of the witch in print, calls her a donor and a villain at once, and this tale the clearest case of it anywhere in the corpus.

What Vasilisa can do is narrow and absolute. The doll never fails, it never runs out, and it never asks for more than a crust and a little milk. What she cannot do is anything else. She has no spell, no weapon, no ally with rank, and no way to refuse an errand. The doll works only after it has been fed and only after she has admitted out loud what is frightening her, so the help is contingent on her saying the thing she would rather not say. And the blessing that keeps her alive inside the hut is the same blessing that gets her thrown out of it, which is either a joke or a rule, depending on how the teller feels that evening.

A last confusion worth clearing. Vasilisa the Beautiful is not Vasilisa the Wise, Vasilisa Premudraya, the shapeshifting sorceress of the Frog Tsarevna and the Sea Tsar tales, who solves her problems by out-thinking everyone in the room. The two get merged constantly. Aleksandr Rou’s 1940 film is called Vasilisa the Beautiful and tells the Frog Tsarevna instead; so does the 1977 Soviet cartoon of the same name.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Vasilisa the Beautiful?

Vasilisa the Beautiful is the heroine of a Russian folktale collected by Alexander Afanasyev in the nineteenth century. She is a stepdaughter sent by her stepmother and stepsisters to fetch fire from Baba Yaga’s hut, and she survives the witch’s household with the help of a magic doll her dying mother gave her. She ends the tale married into the royal household and still carrying the doll in her pocket.

What is Vasilisa’s magic doll?

The doll is a hand-sized figure left to Vasilisa by her mother with three conditions: keep it hidden, show it to no one, and feed it before asking it for anything. Once fed a little milk or a crust of bread, it does whatever impossible work Vasilisa has been set, calling flocks of birds to sort millet and swarms of mice to sort peas from poppy seed while she sleeps. It is the only supernatural power Vasilisa has, and it never fails her.

Why does Baba Yaga let Vasilisa go?

Baba Yaga throws Vasilisa out after asking how she completed the tasks and hearing the answer: her mother’s blessing. Baba Yaga wants nothing blessed inside her house, so she puts Vasilisa out and sends her off with a skull whose eyes burn like a lantern. Vasilisa’s manners help too, since she bows and addresses the witch as Grandma rather than arguing.

What happens to Vasilisa’s stepmother and stepsisters?

The burning skull that Baba Yaga gives Vasilisa destroys them. When Vasilisa brings it into the house, the light from its eye sockets fixes on the three women and follows them wherever they hide, and by morning all three have burned to cinders. Vasilisa buries the skull in the yard afterwards.

Is Vasilisa the Beautiful the same as Vasilisa the Wise?

No. Vasilisa the Wise, or Vasilisa Premudraya, is a separate figure from other Russian tales including the Frog Tsarevna and the Sea Tsar, and she is a shapeshifter and sorceress who wins by cleverness rather than by endurance. The two are frequently confused, and both the 1940 Aleksandr Rou film and the 1977 Soviet cartoon titled Vasilisa the Beautiful actually tell the Frog Tsarevna story.