The Face, January 1998.

Rusalki: Anthropology of Time, Death, and Sexuality in Slavic Folklore by Jiří Dynda from Vol.20 (2017) of Studia Mythologica Slavica.

I would wholeheartedly recommend you all to read it, especially given it is not a long paper at all. but for those curious as to why I’m so thrilled who have little time at the moment - and also to serve as a bit of an ad - please see some of my favourite fragments:

it is rare to actually see this idea of “slavic nymph (but nastier and deadlier)” being challenged! and as you know, I’m an absolute hater of “x is a Slavic >insert Greek or Roman entity or idea<  so this was already promising.

folklore NEVER truly know the conclusively original version! yes! so so so incredibly important! never trust a paper that claims otherwise - reaching very old archetypes is possible, yes, but it’s never possible to state with absolute certainty that it was the first of the first of its kind.

how human, the above, no? is that all they are? can we blame them?

can’t overstate how important this is and HOW EASILY OVERLOOKED. feminist analysis of myth does tend to pay attention to the ideas of the men who ruled the field, yes, but then it overlooks even its own biases. and then, a huge part of historians and ethnographers simply pretend their own contemporary cultural bias never finds a way in.

they do not know how. 

how very slavic and how very true, how very reflective of our own strange human nature and our own strange spirituality. neither here nor there. neither dead… nor alive.

and death and birth is the same, and one, and the cycle coils and closes. ancestors are patrons of this revival, yes, and so are gods and so is Christ - but the flowering, the ripening, the most in-between, the liminal, the misunderstood, the tragic yet crucial…