RUSALKA

RUSALKA

"Maidens who have lost their souls rise up one after the other from the depths of the Dnieper, their green tresses stream over their shoulders, the water drips splashing to the ground from their long hair;"

Nikolai Golgol, A Terrible Vengeance

"'Look, look!' She said quickly, 'she is here, she is on the bank, playing games among my maidens, bathing herself in the moonlight. She is sly and cunning, she has taken the form of a drowned maiden;'"

"But they were pale; their bodies looked as thought molded out of transparent clouds, and it seemd as though the moonlight shone through them."

Nikolai Gogol, A May Night

"Descriptions of rusalki from all over Russia present them as attractive young women, insubstantial beauties with delicate, pale faces and translucent skin, an indication both of their ghostly nature and of their long residence deep under the waters of river or lake, far from the light of the sun. The rusalki often had green hair, like the water weeds and the grasses along the river banks where they frolicked on moonlit nights. More significantly, the rusalka wore her hair unbraided and uncovered, a state that the Russians associated with the supernatural -witches did not cover their hair either - or with liminality, for a bride's hair was unbraided on the eve or her marriage as was the hair of a dead woman in her coffin."

Elizabeth Warner, Russian Myths