The pantheon of Slavs is very rich, and only recently modern Russian cinema began to comprehend a huge layer of that culture. From fairy tales, most of us remember the main representatives of the mythological heritage of our ancestors - but who knows who Baba Yaga, who was familiar from childhood, really was and who was personified by Tugarin the Serpent?
Nightingale the robber
Everyone probably well remembers the tale of Ilya-Muromets and Nightingale the Robber. This character of East Slavic philosophy has a very definite progenitor: in one of the popular prints, a typical Polish nobleman is depicted in the form of a robber. This is how the Russian people interpreted the period of clashes with the Commonwealth. Unlike many other magical creatures, the Nightingale the Robber also has a strong courtyard and a tower where his family lives.
Famously one-eyed
Failure was personified by many Slavic peoples. In Russia, the embodiment of evil fate was the character of the One-eyed Dashing: he appeared ("pursued") next to a person who then began to be overcome by failures. In the annals, Likho was portrayed as a one-eyed giantess-man-eating.
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Zmey Gorynych
This is almost the main embodiment of evil in Russian mythology. The serpent Gorynych was portrayed about several (most often about three) heads, knew how to fly and usually lived at a certain "Kalinov bridge", along which the souls of the dead passed into the kingdom of the dead, that is, it can be compared with the Greek Cerberus, who also protected the other world from invasion from the outside.
Miracle Yudo
Miracle Yudo remained to the Slavs from even more ancient, pre-Slavic mythology. Modern researchers associate Miracle Yudo with sea animals from the ancient epic. The famous historian Vladimir Demin even proposes to correlate our native Miracle Yudo with the ancient Greek Medusa Gorgona. All together, the archetypal image of Leviathan from the Old Testament can be common for many peoples.
Idolische filthy
Most likely, in the form of the Pogany Idol, the Russian people portrayed the hostile Tatar force - it is characterized as "unbaptized", "unholy", "hasty idol". In one of the epics, Ilya Muromets saved Kiev by building a new bell tower - for a clearly Muslim Idol, church bells were destructive.
Baba Yaga
This is one of the most complex and unusual characters in Slavic mythology. In our folklore, Baba Yaga has several definite and invariable attributes: she flies on a mortar, lives on the border of the forest in a hut on chicken legs, and she has a bone leg. According to Vladimir Propp, the monster's dwelling is a portal to the world of the dead, and Baba Yaga herself is its keeper.
Tugarin Snake
An evil hero going out to battle against the Russians Dobrynya Nikitich and Alyosha Popovich. In the very name of Tugarin, researchers see echoes of the struggle of the Slavs with nomadic tribes and even find a historical prototype of the character - the Polovtsian Khan Tugorkan.