The House with Chicken Legs

The House with Chicken Legs is loosely inspired by Russian and Slavic folktales of the character Baba Yaga. According to these storytelling traditions, Baba Yaga is a wicked witch. She lives in a house with chicken legs, which races through the forest in search of children she can eat. She is evil, maniacal, and bloodthirsty. However, she also has positive traits that subvert literary traditions of the witch trope, and she has been called “the most feminist character in folklore” (Barnett, David. “Baba Yaga: The Greatest ‘Wicked Witch’ of all?” BBC, 20 Nov. 2022). She is a fixture in Russian storytelling tradition but has found new life in the stories of authors including Sara Tantlinger, Carina Bissett, EV Knight, and Neil Gaiman; these reimaginings are preceded by a rich literary history of the character beginning in 1775.

In traditional tales and retellings of the Baba Yaga story, Baba Yaga possesses the aspects of the traditional witch and the traditional fairy godmother characters. She is the embodiment of femininity itself—possessing good and evil, maternity and intensity, wildness and constancy. According to Lindy Ryan—editor of Into the Forest: Tales of the Baba Yaga (2022)—“The essence of Baba Yaga exists in many cultures and many stories, and symbolises the unpredictable and untameable nature of the female spirit, of Mother Earth, and the relationship of women to the wild” (quoted in Barnett).

In The House with Chicken Legs, Anderson reimagines Baba Yaga once more. The first Baba Yaga—Marinka’s grandmother—is more godmother than witch. While she indeed has a close connection with and loyalty to the dead, she is kind to everyone and exhibits more traditional caretaking qualities. Marinka’s character—the future Yaga and Guardian—is closer to the traditional Baba Yaga figure. Like the Slavic character, Marinka is both caring and good, “clever, stubborn and fiery” (102). She longs for predictability, a place to call home, and a family who loves her. At the same time, Marinka feels trapped by her stifling domestic reality with Baba, Jack, Benji, and the dead. She grows to hate the chicken-leg house because she cannot leave it and she is easily bored by the guiding rituals. She longs for adventure, exploration, discovery, and excitement. She is fierce and brave, while thoughtful and reflective. She straddles the bounds between good and evil. Her seemingly conflicting traits mirror the dichotomous nature of the traditional Baba Yaga.

Yi Izzy Yu—one of the authors who contributed to Into the Forest—holds that the Baba Yaga figure “complicates the passive female nurturing role with a type of ‘I’ll do whatever the heck I want’ outlaw power that you ordinarily only see associated with men” (quoted in Barnett). Marinka exhibits these traits, too. She especially loves Baba’s stories about her mother breaking the rules, “sneaking out of the house and stealing a gondola in the middle of the night” (15), because her mother was fearless and powerless like her. Marinka constantly wants to act on her impulses because she is desperate to exercise her agency and experience the world on her own terms. These aspects of her character directly align with those of the original Baba Yaga.

Anderson further toys with the Baba Yaga tradition by casting the dichotomous witch character as a young girl rather than “an old hag.” Because Marinka is an adolescent, her adventurous and rebellious traits feel organic to early girlhood. She is trying to forge her own path and balance her competing ideals.