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kitnotmarlowe's reviews
912 reviews
The Witch and the Tsar by Olesya Salnikova Gilmore
adventurous
emotional
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
1.0
She's not your baba's Yaga; she's young and hot Baba Yaga. Please clap for my terrible joke. Maybe this is a hot take, but I don't think it's very feminist to take one of Slavic folklore's most enigmatic and fascinating figures, strip her of all power and complexity, and have her end the story as a housewife! Olesya Salnikova Gilmore makes a fuss in her author's note about how the figure of Baba Yaga has been turned from a powerful earth goddess to a malevolent crone by men who feared her power. So, to "restore" Yaga to her original form (yes, that is the word that Gilmore uses), she turns a tricky and fascinating woman into a hot 30-year-old whose naivete brings her dangerously close to born sexy yesterday territory. In trying to reclaim folklore as a feminist, Gilmore presents a character who is less feminist than in tales popularized by men.
Gilmore acknowledges Baba Yaga's duality within the Slavic pantheon. She can either help or hinder the hero of the story, act as a mother figure, or fry up children for lunch. Even within the texts that Gilmore is so eager to declaim as misogynist and retrograde, Baba Yaga cannot easily be pinned down or ascribed basic good-evil morality. And yet, in trying to shape her narrative, Gilmore strips Baba Yaga of her tricks, wildness, and flaws. She reduces a fearsome and beloved figure to an archetype of faux-feminist reclamation, scorned by men who don't understand her and seeking nothing more than love.
In this fourth-wave feminist (or even post-feminist) publishing landscape, women cannot create themselves. Instead, they must reshape and re-imagine women whose stories have been told wrongly by men or not told at all. Gone are the hags and sorceresses of old who seek only chaos and destruction, who are evil for the sake of revelling in it. Gone are the bitches and sluts, the social climbers and golddiggers. Gone are the women who were crafted in a proto-feminist world and who are a million times more interesting to consider than sanded-down girlbosses who hate the world because they were wronged by men. There is an urge, not just in publishing but in the larger culture, to be hypercritical of media. Everything has to be problematic, and while some things (many things) are deeply harmful, nothing is allowed to be provocative and make audiences uncomfortable. We don't want our women to be slippery and complicated. We want to be able to root for them, and we cannot do so unless they are unambiguously the misunderstood heroines of their story, cruelly mistreated by men.
I think it's helpful to think about why figures like Baba Yaga have been maligned and mistrusted across folklore and history. What about older single women living by themselves at the edge of society that makes people so uncomfortable? Is it the fact that they're too old to be fucked into submission? That they hold property or power in their own right? That they refuse to participate in a society that would scorn them anyhow? About 100k people were accused of witchcraft across Europe between 1400 and 1775. Women were four times more likely to be accused of witchcraft than men, and of those women accused, an estimated 75% were above the age of 50. Looking at witch trials from the Early Modern period, the women who were most likely to be targeted were overwhelmingly poorer and older than their accusers. Many of these women were spinsters or widows or otherwise lacked male protection. There is something about older women that unsettles society, particularly those who exist outside of gender roles or perform those roles in ways that make an increasingly paranoid and religious society nervous, i.e., midwives and cunning women whose traditions and practices hearken back to a pre-Christian society.
This brings us to The Witch and the Tsar, a story that pits one sexy 30-something against the encroaching Russian empire. Here, Yaga is, quite frankly, dumb as rocks. Gilmore wants her to be both powerful and vulnerable but instead gives her the self-awareness of a child and pays lip service to the idea of power. In the original tales, Baba Yaga is wily. She's clever and slippery; asking for her help is a gamble that could cost you her life. This Yaga is taken out of the forest and into the kitchen; her wild ways are tamed, and any fear she inspires is chalked up to Men not understanding her power. There are hints of the conflict between the pagan old ways and the spread of Orthodox Christianity as a means of widespread political suppression, but Yaga fails to connect the two. She also prays to the Christian God at one point, which, well, let's leave it at that.
Having run out of ways to describe how spayed this depiction is, let's move on to the romance. It should come as no shock that every single man in this universe is some variety of strawman misogynist, except for Yaga's love interest. God forbid a woman existing outside of society means she also exists outside of heterosexuality. God fucking forbid a woman's life not include romance. Vasily is nothing. He's a nothing character who adds nothing to the plot. Yaga falls madly in love with him because he is apparently the one man in the entirety of Russia who believes that maybe women, even witch-women, are people. And then it gets worse. Gilmore establishes early in the book that while Yaga has taken mortal lovers before, she cannot get pregnant due to her magical heritage. So, take a guess as to what will happen by the end of the story. Vasily and Yaga's whirlwind courtship results in the most implausible pregnancy since the immaculate conception! It's so sweet that Yaga's womb defies the laws of nature and magic so she can get pregnant, which is apparently everything she has ever wanted. Yaga starts the novel as a feared wise woman and ends it as a tradwife with a baby. She doesn't lose anything; neither does Gilmore, who keeps all her darlings intact.
What else is there to say about The Witch and the Tsar? The writing is the same vaguely contemporary-sounding dreck haunting recent historical fiction releases like the spectre of communism was haunting 19th-century Europe. It wants to be described as lush and poetic but not at the risk of being remotely challenging to read. Despite including a glossary (yippee! I love supplementary material!) Gilmore will immediately translate any Russian words she includes, as though not trusting the readers to understand the context. Her prose relies almost entirely on telling over showing and cliches. There is no weight to anything she has to say, no sense of wonder or history, but there are an awful lot of adjectives.
What else? Gilmore makes up an empire that didn't yet exist rather than acknowledge the Kyivan Rus'. She lays the responsibility of 25 years of war at the feet of supernatural forces rather than Ivan the Terrible's imperial ambitions. Catherynne M. Valente does the same thing in Deathless, a book which I am, admittedly, very fond of, attributing the Siege of Leningrad (and 1.5 million deaths due to starvation, disease, cannibalism, and continued military battery) to two men fighting over a woman, as opposed to the Nazis. It's insensitive in both cases. Removing the responsibility for historical atrocities is a whitewash of history, and I wish authors would stop doing it. For my final complaint, I am putting on my insufferable pedant hat. Gilmore almost exclusively measures distances in kilometres, a unit of distance first conceived in 1670 and not adopted until 1799. Also, and I am saying this as someone who uses the metric system for distance, it's not a particularly effective way to imagine travel between places. It's much easier to translate those kilometres into hours, specifically with long distances like the characters travel in this book. It would make more sense if Gilmore just said "three days ride" rather than "300 kilometres" for an audience which I imagine is largely American and unfamiliar with the metric system.
We can't even have hags anymore. Because of woke. At least Marya Morevna is bisexual. Marya Morevna, call me!