Biography of the mermaid

This is with Pushkin, and Lermontov, and Orest Somov, and many others. This motive is a literary romantic stamp, partially drawn from Western European literature, partly from Western European mythology. He came with romanticism and a set of ideas related to him, including with interest in national roots and folk tradition as a quintessence, as they would say now, national identity.

First of all, this trend comes with Zhukovsky, who in the years has translated German romantics a lot. He throws these plots into Russian literature, and everyone immediately begins to use them intensively.

Even Gogol, who knew the folk tradition well, was passionate about Western European romanticism and borrowed Western stories - this is found in “Evenings on the Farm near Dikanka” and in “Mirgorod”. The image of the mermaid is a literary and romantic stamp, gleaned from Western European literature and mythology, meanwhile, in the Slavic folk tradition, there are also female characters called mermaids, and female characters associated with water and able to drag a person into water.

How do they differ from mermaids and sea princesses Lermontov, Pushkin and Zhukovsky? Drawing by Giuseppe Cellini. This is a very famous, well -formed character that existed and still exists a huge number of texts with a very branched system of mythological motifs. First of all, these are not naval half-pastries, but ordinary women with legs, without any tails. They look like girls and women with loose hair in white clothes.

Very often they do not see faces, because they are dead. Moreover, not any dead, but incorrectly dead and because of this do not have a rest in the next world. Ivan Bilibin. This includes most often suicides, those who died without repentance, who were engaged in witchcraft and knew with evil spirits, as well as people who died before marriage, because from the point of view of the folk tradition, all the death of a person who has not outlived his idle age and did not fulfill the life program laid for him, especially if he died, without leaving the offspring, first of all, it concerns the offspring.

Girls who died in the period between betrothal and wedding. In addition, in the Ukrainian and Belarusian tradition, girls who died in the Trinity week often become mermaids. For the Trinity week, the peak of solar activity and flowering of plants accounts for, and in accordance with very ancient ideas, this is associated with the return of the souls of the dead to the Earth.

Probably, the word "mermaid" dates back to the ancient Greek "rosali", or "Russians" - a holiday that was celebrated in the ancient world in early May, when roses have bloomed. During this period, memorial rites were arranged and roses and pink wreaths were laid on the graves of the dead. In the East Slavic tradition, mermaids come to the ground for the Trinity Week, when the rye begins, so this week is called the “brown-haired Tizhenya” a rossal week.

Having returned, mermaids run around rye, swing on trees, dance, arrange round dances. Most often they appear in a gouns. During this period, they are very dangerous for people: they attack, scare, tickle to death, generally cause a lot of inconvenience. In addition, they can come to their homes, and there they leave food and some clothes for them, especially people whose relatives died a wrong death and had a chance to become a mermaid.

After the end of the Trinity week, on the first day of the Petrovsky post or on Sunday in front of him, the mermaids should go back to another world. In order for this to happen, there was a special rite, which was called “Seeing the Mermaid”, or “Exile the Mermaid”. For him, on the last day of the Trinity week, a straw stuffed up was made and with the singing of special songs to the whole village was carried beyond the boundaries of the village, in the field or into the forest, and there they ritually destroyed: drowned in the river, burned or torn into pieces and scattered across the field.

The second version of this rite is when some girl was dressed up with a mermaid dressed in light clothes, a face was covered, under the arms, with the singing of special ritual songs, taken out of the village and left. This girl, having sat for some time somewhere in the field or under the bush, quietly returned to her home and continued to live her usual life. Mermaids are almost not seducing men.

We see that semantically, these Eastern European mermaids are associated with plant vegetation, but not with reservoirs. The texts may say that they come out of the water, but this is one of the many options - in the same way they can come from the cemetery or just from the other world. In addition, in the folk tradition, the love storyline, which writers and romantic poets love to explore, is extremely poorly manifested: mermaids are almost not seducing men.Rare texts in which the mermaid nevertheless seduces the earthly man, as a number of folklorists suspect, provoked by book, knowledge of literary texts, and not by the people's tradition itself.

A joke with a crest in the North Russian tradition is another female character. It is quite rarely called a mermaid-rather a joke, a devil, some water woman. This character is devoid of clearly expressed seasonality, always appears alone and is associated with water space-with some river or lake. Very often they say that these jokes come from drowned girls and women.

In fact, this character manifests itself only in one plot: the joke sits on the shore, on some coastal stone or on bridges where they wash the laundry, and combs its long hair with a large bone, some unusual crest. When a person approaches, she thumps into the water and hides in it. Her crest remains on the shore. And if a person takes this comb with him, then she will then go to him under the windows, ask, dare, so that he will give it to her, and will not leave him alone until he puts the crest in place.

In some cases, she can harm a person into water - but this is in no way connected with gender signs, both a man and a woman can tighten. The sexual component, which is so strong in romantic literature, is not explicated here. When a person approaches, she thumps into the water and hides in it both Ukrainian and Belarusian mermaids and Russian jestings are quite normal, even beautiful women.

But if in the European romantic tradition their beauty is emphasized in every possible way, then the Slavic mermaids are not too relevant. In addition to outstanding appearance, Western European mermaids often have beautiful voices and sing beautiful songs, luring earthly men to their own. Slavic mermaids do not sing anything special and generally for the most part are silent.

That is, the Slavic mermaids are similar to ordinary girls and women, nothing especially from them either in appearance or behavior. Picture of Ivan Kramsky. This is an ugly mermaid-a shaggy, ugly, old, hunchbacked, dressed in some rowing, with long sagging breasts that she can throw over her shoulders. She often attacks children-kills them, scares them, generally harms them and commits some kind of violence against them.

Sometimes it is said that she has iron breasts, and children in Polesie, for example, often scared them: do not go to the living, otherwise the mermaid of the iron tsytsa is tummy. According to researchers, this image is a borrowing from Turkic ideas about a female demonological being called Albasta, or Albast, and which specializes in harm to children and women in labor.

In Turkic traditions, it sometimes attacks adult men, tickles them and can even act as a mythological mistress, luring them to himself and cohabiting with them. The ugly, old, hunchbacked, dressed in some kind of tear, with long sagging breasts that she can throw over her shoulders but in East Slavic reflexes on this subject, it manifests itself exclusively as a terrible woman with long sagging breasts, which can harm children.

It turns out that we do not find a prototype of a literary romantic mermaid in the eastern Slavs. The mermaid illness of the Southern Slavs also has some rosalc -like creatures, but in some of their manifestations they come closer to the Ukrainian and Belarusian mermaids: these are multiple and seasonal creatures that appear in the Trinity week. They appear on Earth during the flowering of such a plant, which is called Rosen in Bolgarian, and manifest themselves most often in the fact that they sing and dance in the meadow where this plant grows, and leave circles on the grass.

A person who stepped to the place where the mermaids danced, or violating the prohibitions on work prescribed for the Trinity period, gets sick with a “Rusal disease”, which manifests itself in some weakness, in an inadequate consciousness - a person is called not in himself. In order to cure it from this disease, the fellow villagers must dance around it a special dance of the Horo - such as our round dance, only accelerating all the time, with high jumps.

Participants in this round dance were called "Rusalia". An illustration of Lermontov’s poem “Mermaid”. Drawing of Mikhail Vrubel. In the Poles they are called sirens, or sirens: on the old coat of arms of Warsaw, such a siren is depicted - a girl with a fish tail; Her image is on the market square of the old city. But in those Polish folklore and ethnographic materials of the XIX -XX centuries I know, this character is poorly known, in the peasant tradition he is not popular.

In Polish and Czech mythology, in many nodal moments, the Western European, especially German, tradition was greatly influenced.Half-halves or women with dragon tails, sometimes women with two dragon or fish tails, are also found in different mythologies in northern Europe-Celtic, Baltic, German. Everyone has a set of common features: they are beautiful, very often sing beautiful songs, impressions of their voice are specially noted in stories.

They show themselves most often, entering into love relationships with earthly men. It can be called differently-Nix, Undine, Lorelei or Meluzin. All of them have a number of common features with ancient Greek sirens. I do not presume to say that all these North European characters are genetically connected with ancient Greek, but they behave similarly. Most likely, this plot, as well as the plots of dwarfs, entered the Polish tradition from the West-perhaps this happened somewhere in the Middle Ages-and by our time it has become a common place, such a tourist brand.

Now this lilac is depicted on souvenirs - magnets, cards and badges - as a symbol of Warsaw. Mermaid in decorative thread. Museum of Wooden Architecture on the Schelokovsky Farm in Nizhny Novgorod. The middle of the XIX century. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Russian ethnographer and folklorist Dmitry Konstantinovich Zelenin was one of the first to assume that the image of a half-prisoner-semi-Slavic mythology was borrowed.

The waves of the sea parted and missed the Jews, and the soldiers of the pharaoh drowned. Of these, half-people of semi-hollybies living in the sea arose. Therefore, one of the Russian names of such characters is the pharaohs.