The Bear and the Nightingale

The Bear and the Nightingale is a fairy tale about a Russian girl that gets lost in the woods and meets an ancient, cruel bear. It’s also a story about religion, depicting a battle over the imagination of the people, changing their beliefs and behavior. The novel, written by Katherine Arden, offers a touching tale packed with layered characters and discussions.

The book opens with a story being told at night. The people in Pyotr’s house – a Russian boyar – gather to hear old Dunya tell the tale of a maiden who is sent to the forest to marry the king of winter, Frost, because her jealous stepmother wants her to die. The forest is cold and silent, and yet the maiden doesn’t complain, even when the blue-eyed king appears and makes the weather even harsher. Her display of bravery impresses Frost, who sends her back home with gold and precious jewels. The stepmother is taken aback and sends her own daughter to the forest, expecting the same result, but is rewarded only with death. Treat the old spirits – and nature by proxy – with respect, the story intends to teach, or else.

The protagonist is Vasilisa Petrovna, Pyotr’s youngest daughter, who is born with the gift of second sight: unlike her brothers and sisters, Vasya can see and talk to the forest spirits near her house, who she tries to help and befriend. One day, she wanders too far into the forest and meets a one-eyed man near a gnarled oak tree. He’s a bear and a spirit, and he tries to claim her soul. Vasya is saved at the last minute by another folkloric being, but the bear is bound to come for her again.

The forest is the main setting of The Bear and the Nightingale. It’s as wondrous as it is dangerous. It’s not seen by Vasya as a dark, evil place – the home of Christian demons – but it can still be merciless if one is not careful. This distinction is at the heart of the story: while Christianity deals with absolutes, the spirits of the old folk tales are more complex. While God is all good and the Devil is pure evil, the spirits can be gentle and cruel, friendly and hostile, benevolent and merciless, good and evil.

Their lair – the forest – is the same: it’s a place of magic and fairy tales, holding many beauties and even the solution to some of Vasya’s problems, but it also guards her enemies and can mean her death. When Vasya gets lost in the woods in the winter, the narrator explains how her body would only be found “when the spring came to lose her shroud – if she was found at all.”

The narrative is quick to make the forest feel like home to the girl. “It was cold, by Vasya did not think of it. She had been born to cold,” the narrator explains. Vasya is often compared to animals and the weather, with her persona being treated as a thing of nature: her sister calls her a frog, her manner is described as “catlike,” she runs “like the wind,” and her eyes “were the color of the forest during a summer thunderstorm.” It doesn’t come as a surprise to us, then, when Vasya starts to treat the spirits she sees wandering around her house with kindness and respect. She talks with them, gives them offerings, and is properly rewarded with news skills and knowledge – a Vazila teaches her how to ride and speak with horses, for example.

The story is set in a time where these spirits are treated with respect by those that are old and wise, but scorned by those that are young and Christian. The Church is gaining power in the region – Vasya’s brother, Sasha, even wants to leave them and become a man of God – and the changes it brings are painted with dark colors.

Early on, Pyotr remarries. Vasya’s stepmother is Anna, a young, frail, pale, pious woman. Anna has the second sight, too, but that is a curse to her, not a gift. While Vasya treats the existence of spirits with casualness – for the girl, they’re part of nature, after all –, Anna is terribly afraid of them. For her, they’re not “spirits” but “demons.” When it follows her point of view, the narrative turns briefly into a horror story. In Anna’s eyes, Pyotr’s house “was alive with devils. A creature with eyes like coals hid in the oven. A little man in the bathhouse winked at her through the steam. A demon like a heap of sticks slouched around the dooryard. In Moscow, they had never looked at her, never spared her a glance, but here they were always staring.”

Vasya dislikes Anna, but we can only pity the woman. She’s still young and has to become the mother of a stranger’s daughter, having to marry him against her will. She has to please him every night: Pyotr may be gentle, but he’s also persistent, which is its own kind of horrible. This is a time when women had little choice in the way of things and were treated and traded as commodities. It’s a time when a man is deemed to be a good husband because “he is kind to his horses.” No wonder Anna becomes bitter, resentful, and cruel.

Her stepdaughter grew up hearing tales about the forest spirits, so she learned to respect them as she does the winter. She knows that some spirits a friendly, some are mischievous, and some are dangerous. She knows that leaving small offerings to them usually bear good fruit. Anna, on the other hand, was taught that they are all hellish creatures that should be expelled in the name of Christ.

This difference is key. While Vasya learns with the spirits, growing wiser and stronger by interacting with them, Anna’s God makes her paralyzed with fear. Vasya’s religion is depicted as empowering and liberating, while the Church makes Anna weak and easy to manipulate.

A new priest eventually arrives at their lands from Moscow. Father Konstantin is young, handsome, and ambitious, being able to capture people’s hearts with his speeches and sermons. Anna is easy prey in his eyes.

The novel deals with the rise in power of the Church, with Konstantin educating Vasya’s people about the wonders of God and the dangers of demons. His job is to make sure that her people let go of the old ways, abandon their gods, and be at his mercy. He’s to make them afraid of God, so he can save their souls and control them. Vasya, of course, is a thorn in his side.

She grasps what’s happening to her people and is distressed by the change. Before, they dealt with the spirits directly, with small offerings, looking for practical benefits, appeasing their gods to get a better harvest or a less harsh winter. Their relationship was one of respect and the stakes were relatively small: they gave a little to receive a little.

Now, with God, there’s a strong power dynamic at play: Vasya’s people must humble themselves and serve. They start to pray for intangible things, like their souls or eternal salvation. Too worried about the afterlife, fearing the pits of hell, they conform to their present woes, believing that their suffering is necessary if they want to atone for their sins and get back in God’s good graces. Guilt becomes part of their vocabulary.

To make matters even more complicated, now there’s also an intermediary between them and the divine: the Church, represented by Konstantin and his earthly ambitions – he’s a holy man, but the keyword is man; not holy. Vasya, always perceptive, is quick to realize the dangers of having a man speaking for a god: “I have never seen Tsargrad, or angels, or heard the voice of God. But I think you should be careful, Batyushka, that God does not speak in the voice of your own wishing. We have never needed saving before,” she warns him.

Konstantin becomes one of the main antagonists in the book because of his ideology. For him, women should be pious and humble. The Church teaches that women should serve and men should rule. Vasya is too independent, too wild, too free. Konstantin’s teachings make her own people start to fear her and whisper “witch” at her back. The priest can’t fight her directly – she’s a Boyar’s daughter – but he can turn her society against her. He can use his sermons to attack his personal enemies, disguising his vendetta as a holy crusade.

What makes Konstantin such a fearsome foe is that he doesn’t need to do much. Some men are prone to hate women who are better than them and Vasya never hides her prowess at anything: the word “witch” just offers them a good pretext to vent their misogynistic frustrations. Her society already treated women as lesser beings, giving them only two options in life: becoming a mother or a nun. “It’s the lot of women,” Vasya’s brother explains to her, when they’re talking about her future.

But Vasya is not having any of that. While her father proceeds to find her a man who will treat her like a mare, Vasya finds a stallion for herself. She’s rebellious and impulsive, but also merciful and kind: she saves Konstantin’s life more than once even though she knows full well the harm he does to her people. She becomes the protector of the old spirits, their last bastion against Christianity, preventing them from vanishing away – which gives the story some American Gods vibes.

Anna functions as a warning, the other side of the coin, showing us what Vasya may become if she can’t escape her fate. Even Konstantin is touched with sorrow when he imagines the girl marrying a man – although his feelings may also be tainted with lust and jealousy as well. The priest wants to turn Vasya into her stepmother, and yet he respects the former and scorns the latter. The contradiction doesn’t escape the priest, but Konstantin, of course, puts all the blame for his conflicted feelings on Vasya.

Although this is Vasya’s story, the novel dedicates some time to her family, including their points of view. Her father is depicted as a just man, but one that’s also harsh and resolute. There’s an early scene where he’s put in a horrible position of choosing between the lives of two of his children, and he doesn’t hesitate before giving his answer. This also shows how Pyotr, despite being a boyar, is often powerless in the narrative.

This is made clear early on, when he goes to Moscow, a city “of smiling enemies and barbed favors” that is marked by social inequality, filled with beggars and princes, muddy streets, and golden palaces. His new wife is chosen for him, one of his sons wants to abandon him for the Church, while the others are threatened by a spirit. His arc in the story is about the juxtaposition of his drive to protect his children and his inability to do so.

This makes his narrative function shift throughout the novel. He always wants to protect Vasya, but his ways are not always the best. Sometimes, he’s right next to her, protecting her against the people who intend to do her harm. But there are times when he’s directly against Vasya, accusing her of folly for pursuing fairy tales in the woods – he hears his people calling her a witch, after all – or searching for a husband for her against her will, accepting even a cruel one if it means she will survive and have a future. Vasya prefers death to prison, but Pytor thinks the latter is “the lot of women” anyway.

As the story moves forward, preparing for the final confrontation between Vasya and the bear she met at the forest, and Konstantin plots her downfall with Anna’s help, The Bear and the Nightingale starts to mirror the events of the fairy tale told by Dunya at the beginning of the novel.

The book shares some of the same elements (the maiden, the forest, the cruel stepmother, Frost) but seeks to add more to the tale. The stakes are higher now that there’s also religion at play. The situation is more complex now that the stepmother is not cruel for egotistical reasons, while her daughter, Irina, truly loves Vasya instead of just copying her mother’s resentful nature. Vasya also has brothers, who love her even though she scares them with her talks of creatures in the riverbanks. And her father, although still a bit complacent to her fate, is a more tragic figure.

In other words, The Bear and the Nightingale presents a more complex, layered version of the Russian fairy tale, using its motifs and characters to talk about courage, gender roles, and religion.

April 13, 2021.