Reseña del libro "The Hut on Chicken Legs (en Inglés)"
Come in. Shut the door behind you. The draught finds everyone in the end.Winter, 1880. In Rodniki, a village deep in the forests of the Russian north, the twelve holy nights between Christmas and Epiphany have begun. Work has stopped. Mummers in masks and animal skins go from house to house, girls pour wax and look into mirrors to see their future husbands, and in Avdotya's house, by the great whitewashed stove, the family gathers every evening to talk about the old woman of the forest.Baba Yaga. She lives in a hut that turns on chicken legs, flies in a mortar and sweeps away her tracks with a broom. She eats children, or helps them, depending on the tale and on the child.Over twelve evenings, a grandmother, an old soldier, a village midwife and a travelling pedlar tell the tales they know. Between the tales, a present-day narrator steps out of the village to follow Baba Yaga through two hundred years of scholarship, art and imagination: why her hut stands on chicken legs; what her oven has to do with an old rite for sickly babies; why the great folklorist Vladimir Propp saw her as the keeper of the border between the living and the dead; how an old woodcut of Baba Yaga fighting a crocodile may have mocked Peter the Great; who her sisters are across Europe, from the Czech Ježibaba to the witch in Hansel and Gretel; how Bilibin, Vasnetsov and Mussorgsky gave her a face and a voice; and how she ended up in John Wick.The village is invented. Everything else is real. The tales are real tales, recorded from real storytellers, and the customs are those of real Russian villages. Wherever something is only guessed, or is somebody's bright idea that nobody has been able to prove, you will be told so.Illustrated with the art of the Russian fairy tale: the illustrations of Ivan Bilibin, the paintings of the nineteenth-century masters of village life, and the bright popular prints that pedlars once carried from village to village.The first book in Twelve Nights by the Stove: Russian Folklore and Myth, Told by the Fire.
