Who is she really?
When we read fairy tales in childhood, we take their characters for granted. So the storyteller wanted Ivan Tsarevich with a hut on chicken legs to exchange a few words, so he calls her - turn, they say, back to the forest, and in front of me. I wanted Baba Yaga to help the hero - she helps, although she grumbles.
In fact, Russian fairy tales, like most fairy tales of any other people, are such a time machine that has brought to us traces of long-dead traditions, customs and rituals. Therefore, the events that take place in her, as well as her characters, are by no means accidental, but obey the strictest rules.
All this almost a hundred years ago was convincingly proved and shown on the material of a Russian fairy tale by the great Soviet philologist Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp. We will not retell the content of his works here, especially since it is much more interesting to read them yourself.
Let's analyze only one of the images - Baba Yaga, who is painfully familiar to everyone from early childhood. This is not just a strange old forest woman. Everything is much more serious and curious.
Of course, this is also a completely random heroine. Otherwise, she would not have wandered from fairy tale to fairy tale, being almost the most constant character.
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So, to begin with, let's see how it is described in Russian fairy tales: "On the stove lies a Baba Yaga, a bone leg, from corner to corner, her nose has grown into the ceiling."
It's a familiar formula, but if you think about it, then questions arise: what is this strange, cramped hut in which the grandmother cannot even lie down normally - you have to stretch from corner to corner. Moreover, the ceiling is so low that your nose rests? At the same time, her leg is bone for some reason. Not wooden, like that of one-legged pirates or cripples, but bone. That is, its own, but devoid of flesh.
Propp's answer suggests itself. A hut is not a hut, but … a coffin. And Baba Yaga is a dead man.
Another proof of this is the situation in which the hero meets her. Ivan comes to the edge of a huge forest, where, as we later learn from a fairy tale, various miracles take place. Exactly on this edge is the dwelling of Baba Yaga.
All this is very reminiscent of the description of the border between the world of the living and the world of the dead in the myths and legends of different peoples. The hut is a kind of roadblock through which the hero must pass in order to get into the kingdom of the dead, where a battle with the owner of these places - Koshchey the Immortal - is ahead.
This short summary contains only the very minimum of arguments. And for more detailed information, you can refer to the book "The Historical Roots of a Fairy Tale" by Vladimir Propp. Published in 1946, it has not lost an iota of its relevance and fascination.