A Fairy Tale in Russia Miriam R. Kramer Russian folklore comprises dazzling fairy tales that take place in dark forests in the deep winter. Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale and recently published The Girl in the Tower are two lovely novels in a fantasy trilogy about Vasilisa Petrovna, a woman in medieval Russia who straddles a world between myth and conscious reality. As a so-called witch, she is in reality an unconventional Russian soul, claiming her fate in a world that sees women only as mothers and wives. In a lyrical manner, Arden presents Vasilisa Petrovna as a heroine born under unusual circumstances in a beautiful natural world of sky, earth, and forest. The granddaughter of a princess once named a witch, she grows up on her father’s rural farm estate in Lesnaya Zemlya, Land of the Forest. Many miles from Moscow, she matures as an exuberant tomboy, balancing the constraints of female household chores with rambles across her father’s acres of fields and forests. Gifted with second sight, the adventurous Vasya sees domestic spirits that inhabit her house, bathhouse, courtyard, and stables, along with the rusalka, a water nymph who lures mortal men like a siren from the riverbank. Initially alone in seeing these mythical creatures, she pays them tribute and accepts them fully. Wandering into the woods, she encounters two spirits, Morozko, an alternately dangerous and beautiful spirit of frost and death, and his opponent the Bear, a one-eyed creature that feeds on fear and destruction. When a wandering priest, Konstantin Nikonovich, arrives in her village, he deploys his fanatic devotion to stamping out the villagers’ pantheistic beliefs in the spirits of the earth, sky, and forest. By turns fascinated and repulsed by her unconventional beauty and passion, he encourages the villages…