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First, rusalki, as they appear in sources, usually sing, laugh and dance and they try
to lure young lads to approach them.12 It is important to stress here that their victims
are most often adult (or adolescent) males, rusalki attack children or girls just rarely;
they almost never attack adult women.13 When the male victim comes closer, rusalki
playfully tickle him,14 dance with him, and bathe and joke with him. However, do not
be mistaken, the eroticism of rusalki is rather “fake and terrifying” (Propp 1963, 132).
When they start to tickle, they tickle to death (and if someone would doubt the sexual
character of this deathly tickling, there are some records of rusalki tickling their victims
with their enormous breasts [grudjami, cyckami]; Zelenin 1995, 201).15 When they start to
dance, they also dance till the exhaustion and death of their male dancing partner. When
they seduce a boy, and take him into a kind of erotic jacuzzi in a river, they drown him
11 A fact which Zelenin in particular found quite fascinating (cf. Zelenin 1995, 160–161, 176–177, 215–217).
12 Cf. the manifold ethnographic data in Vinogradova & Levkievskaja 2012.
13 It should be also noted here that the majority of narrators of our East Slavic sources were males.
14 The terms are: sčekotajut, ščekočut, zaščekotajut, zaščekočivajut, (za)loskotajut, (za)loskočujut, kyzikajut,
etc. (cf. Zelenin 1995, 177–201).
15 For ethnographic data from Polesia see Vinogradova & Levkievskaja 2012, 555–564.
RUSALKI: ANTHROPOLOGY OF TIME, DEATH, AND SEXUALITY IN SLAVIC FOLKLORE 91
eventually, usually by simultaneously tickling him. Even when the victim manages to
escape somehow, he becomes melancholic, mute or withdrawn from reality for the rest
of his life (Zelenin 1995, 158–160).16
“The beauty of rusalki is the dead beauty and it emphasizes their lack of maternal
features – that is why they are terrible,” concludes Propp (1963, 132). But is it really
like that? Are rusalki truly just dead, bloodthirsty spinsters who hate humankind and just
want to eradicate men by tickling them away? In other words, is their hysterical laughter,
tickling, dancing and bathing to death really a “conscious” malevolent act from their
side? Or could it be, as Moyle (1985, 225) suggests, rather evidence of their playful, but
eventually tragic essence because of which they cause death and bring destruction only
inadvertently?
