Everything was just wonderful and so in tune with what I was feeling and needing at that point I truly felt like it was divine ✨️. And all of this is set again the backdrop of the Cold War and the always lurking dread of “the great A-bomb annihilation,” which would make time pretty much irrelevant for everyone concerned. Slavs never really have she’s off their pagan roots, they have become tangled in the fabric of the culture. There had been exotic palaces, expansive suites, and countless garbage pits where they were forced to dig for mildewed scraps of sustenance.

Some lubki feature a ship below the crocodile with Baba Yaga dressed in what has been identified as Finnish dress; Peter the Great's wife Catherine I was sometimes derisively referred to as the chukhonka ('Finnish woman').Never mind that his murder investigation was interrupted by this unfortunate event, he’s going to beat this thing!

The writing wasn't bad, but I'm over halfway through and I just don't care about any of the characters, except maybe the police detective that was turned into a flea (yes, seriously! Mussorgsky's 1874 suite Pictures at an Exhibition has a movement titled "The Hut on Hen's Legs (Baba Yaga)".

The ensemble of characters come armed with varying weapons, indicative of the colourful archetypical characters readers can identify with that are deconstructed as the story flies apart at its seams. Gaiman also used Baba Yaga in The Books of Magic comic series, and the way he has deployed the character highlights her moral ambiguity: where she was helpful in Sandman, she is more of a baddie in Books of Magic. The stories span centuries, with Sara Tantlinger's Of Moonlight and Moss offering a dream-like evocation of one of the classic Baba Yaga stories, Vasilisa the Beautiful, while Carina Bissett’s Water Like Broken Glass sets Baba Yaga against the backdrop of World War Two. He's a poet, first and foremost, which makes this novel glow beyond the excitement of the crazy stream of events.

Each chapter develops the fairytale of Vasylyna the girl who is sent to the frightful witch and Baba Yaga herself narrates explanations of folk lore represented in the tale. I also ended up skimming or skipping most of the witch's songs (written in verse and reminiscent of Tolkien's elf ballads, which I also find tedious).It feels intentionally misleading and piggybacking on the trendy topic in attempt to gain credibility. Coincidentally, we had a cold snap while I was reading this book and reading about the horrible winters in Russia was particularly effective sitting on my sofa with a throw over myself. In Lomonosov's grammar book, Baba Yaga is mentioned twice among other figures largely from Slavic tradition. She appears in traditional Russian folktales as a monstrous and hungry cannibal or as a canny inquisitor of the adolescent hero or heroine of the tale.