Leshy

Russia
The Russian North: the provinces of Arkhangelsk, Olonets and Vologda, the Onega basin and Russian Karelia, where the dated attestations and the shepherds' pacts are located; Dal's lexical and proverbial material is given as Great Russian in general, without localisation; cognates in Belarus, Ukraine and Poland

Leshy — the master of a stretch of forest in the East Slavic lands, who makes whoever enters without asking lose the way, pastures the wild animals and bargains with shepherds over the cattle left loose in the woods.

Variants and names

Russian ле́ший (leshy), which is a substantivised adjective and not a proper name. Russian synonyms and dialect forms: лесовик, лесовой, лешак, лешачина, лисун, боровик, моховик, зыбочник (from зыбка, the hanging cradle, because he swings on the branches), хозяин «the master»; feminines лешачиха, лешиха, лесовиха, лесунка; the children лешевики, лешачата. Belarusian лешы, лесавік, лясун; Ukrainian лісовик, also лісун; Polish leszy, leśnik, leśny dziad, borowy, gajowy. Vasmer, under ле́ший, writes in full: «др.-русск. лѣший "лесной, поросший лесом" (см. Срезн. II, 81). От лес», and adds that from this word were formed the verbs лешакаться, лешихаться «to name the leshy», which according to belief brings harm, referring to Zelenin, Tabu slov, part 2, p. 108, and to Havers, p. 113. The name therefore means literally «the one of the forest», and was itself under taboo. Dal', in 1863-1866, records the series лесной, лесовик, лесовой, леший, лешак inside the entry лес, not under a headword of its own.

What is told

He is not one demon among others: he is the master of a stretch of forest, and that stretch has boundaries, which other leshies dispute. Dal' in 1863-1866 already gives him complete: he sings at full voice without words, claps his hands, whistles, halloos, laughs and weeps, turns into a peasant with a knapsack, into a wolf, into an owl, and obkhodit travellers and woodsmen, that is, walks round them and makes them lose their way. He is mute and yet full of voice; he goes without a cap, his hair combed to the left, his kaftan lapped to the right, with no eyebrows and no eyelashes. In the northern belief narratives his height changes with the vegetation, as tall as the firs inside the forest and as a blade of grass on the meadow; he pastures the wild animals like a herdsman, moves them from one forest to another, loses them at cards to the neighbouring leshies. He does not kill: he punishes whoever behaves badly in the forest. On 4 October, Yerofey's day, he breaks the branches, scatters the beasts and sinks underground.

What it was forthe author’s reading

He regulated access to a resource nobody owned alone. In the forest provinces cattle spent the summer at free pasture in the woods and the herdsman did not keep them under his eye: losing a cow was an economic fact, and the pact with the leshy — the Easter egg and the bread and salt at the roots of an uprooted tree, the «promised» cow that must disappear during the season — was the contract that made the loss explicable and, in ritual, recoverable. The same held for hunting and for gathering. The ban on whistling, on swearing, on felling without asking, on sleeping on the paths is a discipline of the forest attributed to an invisible owner. And when a child did not come back, the parents' curse «may the leshy take you» supplied at once a culprit and a rite to perform.

Where it is attested

The oldest dated trace is lexical: Vasmer gives Old Russian лѣший «of the forest, overgrown with forest», referring to Sreznevsky, II, 81, and explains the name as an adjective substantivised from les. The earliest dated and localised narrative I found is a miracle in the Life of Nikodim of Kozheozero, in which the shepherd Grigory loses his way in the forest, meets a figure in grey vestments ringing bells and ends up in a dwelling where other abducted people are kept: the text carries the date «Бысть в лето 7196 маиа в 15 день, на Онеги реке, на реце, зовомой Сыжтуги», that is 15 May 7196 from the Creation, 1688, on the river Onega, at the stream Syzhtugi. The lexical and proverbial repertory sits in Vladimir Dal's Tolkovy slovar' zhivogo velikorusskogo yazyka, 1863-1866, inside the entry les, with the sayings «Был бы лес, будет и леший» and «Чтоб леший не обошел, вывернуть на себе рубаху наизнанку». Then come the collections: A. N. Afanasyev, Poeticheskie vozzreniya slavyan na prirodu, 1865-1869, chapter XVII «Древо жизни и лесные духи»; S. V. Maksimov, Nechistaya, nevedomaya i krestnaya sila, St Petersburg 1903, which already records the figure's disappearance («Перевелась ныне эта погань...»); M. A. Orlov, Russkaya chertovshchina, 1904, which recasts Afanasyev. Twentieth-century ethnography: S. A. Tokarev, Religioznye verovaniya vostochnoslavyanskikh narodov XIX - nachala XX v., Moscow 1957, and E. V. Pomerantseva, Mifologicheskie personazhi v russkom folklore, Moscow 1975, which works on belief narratives. The modern syntheses with page references: N. A. Krinichnaya, Russkaya mifologiya, Moscow 2004, pp. 247-323; E. E. Levkievskaya, Mify russkogo naroda, Moscow 2000, pp. 320-339; E. L. Madlevskaya, Russkaya mifologiya. Entsiklopediya, 2005, pp. 314-327.

Caution

Grade B, not A, for a reason of method and not of scarcity. The figure is very well documented, but in this session I could open none of the key texts: of Dal' and of Vasmer I read the entries reproduced in full on academic.ru, not the printed page; of Maksimov 1903 I have a single quoted sentence; Afanasyev, Pomerantseva 1975, Tokarev 1957 and Krinichnaya 2004 I have only as bibliographical records and as other people's page references. The 1688 date in the Life of Nikodim of Kozheozero also reaches me second-hand, with the Slavonic text quoted but the redaction of the Life unidentified: until the edition is opened, that date should be handled with tongs. I have not found, by opening it, any collection giving leshy belief narratives with the date and place of recording: that is exactly the material Pomerantseva works on, and I did not reach it.

What does not hold. The leshy as «Slavic god of the forest» has not a single medieval source: he appears in none of the lists of idols in the chronicles and in the sermons against paganism, where Perun, Khors, Dazhbog, Stribog, Mokosh and Volos stand. The name itself rules it out: it is an adjective, «the one of the forest», and a theonym is not formed that way. Putting the leshy into a reconstructed pantheon, with parallels drawn to Perun and Veles, belongs to the family of Boris Rybakov's hypotheses and to the Rodnover literature that revives them, and the method is rejected by Slavists. Nor does anything follow from the fact that the Russian Synodal translation of the Bible, 1876, uses лешие at Isaiah 34:14 for Hebrew śeʿîrîm: that is the choice of a nineteenth-century translator looking for a Russian word for the hairy demons of the desert. Finally the literary leshy must be kept apart: the «там леший бродит» of Pushkin's prologue, 1828, and Chekhov's Leshy, 1889, where the name is the nickname of a doctor who defends the woods and out of which Uncle Vanya would grow, are literature, not ethnography, and they are the channel by which the figure reached non-Russian readers.

The grade says how well the entry is documented, not how interesting it is. How the grades are assigned.