Rusalka

The rusalka is a female spirit of East Slavic folklore. In Ukraine she is linked to water, in Belarus more to forests and fields, and in Russia belief varied. Rusalki usually have loose hair, which may be fair, black, greenish or green, and are pictured as beautiful naked maidens, though some regions imagined them as hideous and hairy.

In 19th-century accounts, they were the restless dead: young women who drowned themselves after unhappy marriages, or were drowned against their will, often after becoming pregnant. A week in early June, called Rusalnaya nedelya, was the time when they were considered most dangerous. They swung from birch and willow branches at night, swimming was forbidden, and the week ended with a ritual banishment or burial of the rusalki, a custom that survived as entertainment in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine until the 1930s.

Earlier lore did not always tie rusalki to drowning. The folklorist Vladimir Propp argued that early rusalki were fertility spirits who brought moisture to the fields and were not evil before the 19th century. The name itself is thought to come from a term for Pentecost, which reached Slavic languages through Byzantine Greek.

The figure became a literary and operatic staple: Mikhail Lermontov’s poem Rusalka (1831), Alexander Dargomyzhsky’s opera Rusalka (1856) and Antonín Dvořák’s opera Rusalka (1901).

A pale young woman with long loose hair, green or fair, often naked; in some regions hairy and ugly.

Rivers, lakes, fields and forest edges, particularly around Pentecost and early June.

Rusalka week customs of banishing the spirits survived in village life into the 20th century, and the rusalka remains one of the most recognisable Slavic figures in music and literature.