Rumor of a female bogatyr: a letter from the story-teller Marfa Kryukova

Abstract

Hereby we publish a letter from the Arkhangelsk storyteller Marfa Kryukova (1876-1954) to the folklorist E. G. Borodina-Morozova, 1948. Their correspondence had been going from 1936, when they first met, till the storyteller’s death in 1954. The letter is published after the manuscript, in accordance with the original spelling and punctuation; the source itself is kept in the Manuscripts Department of the Institute of Russian Literature (the Pushkin House) of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The letter retells a rumor of a “savage female bogatyr” discovered in the “mountains of the Carpathians” arriving to Moscow and contains a request to describe her. The letter from N.G. Okhotin, sent by demand of the governor, is also published, retelling the same plot: after the war the kids in Moscow used to go to the railway station to witness the arrival of a giant woman (it took her a whole rail gantry to lie down) reportedly captured in Siberia (in the Russian Far East), and the police chased them away.