Abstract
The author will present an overview of Slavic feminine mythological beings associated with water, death, and sexuality. These beings - Eastern Slavic rusalki, Western Slavic bogińki or mavki, Southern Slavic vily and samodivy - were already thoroughly ethnographically described, classified and compared.
This talk will however briefly present some problems with the classification and comparison of these mythological beings within the PanSlavic as well as within the Indo-European scope. Subsequently it will focus only on the rusalka-type being.
I'd like to re-evaluate D. K.
Zelenin's interpretation of these 'Slavic nymphs' as the souls of women deceased by untimely or unjust death. By means of analysis of their function and embedding in the whole social-cultural environment and in the Orthodox liturgical year, I want to show how rusalki "made sense" in the context of the symbolic system of East Slavic folklore.
One of the main goals is to understand how intricately were rusalki and stories about them connected with the Orthodox liturgical year - specifically with the week following the Pentecost: so called Trinity Week (Rusalnaya nedelya) - and how the Christian movable Easter and Pentecost festivities might have disrupted the spring phase of pre-Christian Slavic calendar. In EvansPritchard's words, I want to show how 'œcological time' and 'structural time' were in a case of this spring ritual interconnected and what was role of the dead young women in it.