New WIP: Radical Women in Russian Folklore

Vasilisa Mikulishna, as drawn by yours truly in ProCreate on my iPad

Because of my fun doctoral research into Slavic warrior women (in case you missed any of the series of blogs I’ve been posting), I was approached to contribute an article for an anthology about Russian radicals and folklore. While the timing isn’t optimal, between querying The Night Chemist, my husband about to graduate vet school, and us being about to move to a different state...I accepted. Because I have zero chill and fundamentally do not know how to relax. And what’s one more life stresser, eh? The world is already going to hell.

(I can’t believe they let me have a PhD.)

I’m working on putting together an abstract for it, narrowing my focus to radical women who appear in Russian folklore. Somehow. I haven’t touched my doctoral research since I defended my thesis apart from sharing bits and bobs of it here, so there’s been a touch of brain dump in some areas. Thus, I’m wading through my actual notes again—I am a detailed, DETAILED notetaker; that might be why they let me have a PhD—and I’ve decided to explore the narrative of Vasilisa Mikulishna a bit more, because there is a lot there, and she is a radical figure indeed. She disguises herself as a man to rescue her hapless husband after he’s imprisoned by the prince for the dire offense of daring to brag about how smart his wife is.

Surely I can bend that in an appropriate vein, yes? The editors of the anthology seem to think so.

So as I wait for my queries for The Night Chemist (including the two full requests I have out right now with agents, woohoo!) to marinate, I’ll be putting my writing energy back into research. It’s a fun return to folklore, quite honestly, and has inspired some fiction as well. While I’m trying to sift through Vasilisa’s stories for something appropriately academic, I’m brainstorming a why-choose FFM romantasy retelling of her primary narrative, “Stavr Godinovich.” To include making some character art on my iPad, because obviously I don’t have enough going on.

Note that, despite Vasilisa being the obvious protagonist and hero of the folktale in which she appears, the story itself is named after her husband, who barely appears in the narrative and is not at all heroic. Gotta love misogyny in Russian epic folk ballads. I address this topic in my thesis, and I suspect it will come up in my article as well.

All for now. I’ll be back in a few days with my monthly reading roundup!