The hut on chicken legs: Encounters with landladies in Russian literature

Russian fiction depicts countless examples of landladies (khoziaiki ) who provide food and shelter to travelers or long-term boarders. Although the landlady is a familiar character in Western European novels, a native Russian prototype is found in the tradition of Russian oral prose narrative, where the folktale hero encounters the witch-figure baba-iaga and spends the night in her borderland forest hut. The folklorist Vladimir Propp cites baba-iaga as the best example of a donor, a figure who bestows upon the hero a magical agent that will aid him in his adventures. Authors of Russian belles-lettres of the past two centuries have transposed and perverted this folkloric model (along with the mythic symbolism attached to baba-iaga's hut) in their stories and novels, where landladies and the symbolic space they create can offer their lodgers unexpected---and sometimes ironic---"gifts.";The first chapter of this study examines the folkloric roots of the literary landlady topos and uses anthropologist Victor Turner's notions about liminal symbolism to describe the potential power of the landlady's space. Chapter two establishes baba-iaga as an important source for the khoziaika figures Nikolai Gogol's "Vii" and Dead Souls and argues that Gogol transforms the folkloric topos into a literary one by aestheticizing baba-iaga's magical gift. Chapter three charts the development of the topos in several of Fedor Dostoevsky's early works as well as in Crime and Punishment, showing how Dostoevsky brings his characters' inner struggles into relief against the backdrop of their rented lodgings. The final chapter considers Isaac Babel's twentieth-century transposition of the topos in Red Cavalry and other stories.