Vasilisa the Beautiful- Slavic HeroHero"The Beautiful"

Vasilisa and Baba Yaga

Before she died, Vasilisa's mother gave her a small doll and told her: feed it, care for it, and ask its advice when you are afraid. When her father remarried, the stepmother and her daughters made Vasilisa's life miserable. One night, the stepmother sent her into the forest to fetch fire from Baba Yaga, expecting the witch to devour her.

Baba Yaga's hut stood on chicken legs in a clearing fenced with human bones. The witch agreed to give Vasilisa fire, but first she must earn it. She set the girl impossible tasks: sorting poppy seeds from dirt and separating mildewed grain from good. Each night Vasilisa fed the doll bread and water, and each night the doll completed the work while she slept. Baba Yaga, impressed despite herself, gave Vasilisa what she came for: a skull mounted on a stick, its eye sockets blazing with fire. When Vasilisa carried it home, the skull's gaze fell on her stepmother and stepsisters and burned them to ashes.

The Frog Princess

In the tale Afanasyev recorded as number 267, Vasilisa is the Frog Princess. Koschei the Deathless cursed her to live as a frog, and she was found by Ivan Tsarevich, who married her on his father's orders without knowing what she was. At court feasts, she shed the frog skin in secret and appeared as a woman who could weave shirts from starlight and bake bread that conjured visions of swans on a lake.

Ivan burned the frog skin to keep her human forever. She vanished, taken back by Koschei. Ivan searched until he found where Koschei's death was hidden: in a needle, inside an egg, inside a duck, inside a hare, inside a chest buried beneath an oak on the island of Buyan. He broke the needle, and Koschei died, and Vasilisa was free.