ABSTRACT
The main events in the bylina “Ivan Godinovich,” which has been collected sixty times, can be summarized as follows. At an opening feast, Prince Vladimir reproaches Ivan Godinovich because he alone is still not married. Ivan Godinovich replies that he has a prospective bride (Nastasia or Avdotya Likhodeyevna) in a distant land—in Lithuania, in India, in the Golden Horde, or, as in the translated song, in Chernigov, which is north of Kiev and is treated as a foreign city. After he asks for and receives help from Prince Vladimir, Ivan Godinovich and several bogatyrs set out to obtain the bride. When her father refuses to give Nastasia in marriage to Ivan Godinovich because she has already been promised to someone else (Koshcherishche, Afromey Afromeyevich, or Koshchei Tripetov), the Russian heroes abduct Nastasia by force. On the way back to Kiev, Ivan Godinovich is overtaken by Koshcherishche, and they start fighting. Ivan overcomes his opponent, sits on him to rip open his heart and liver, and asks Nastasia to give him a knife. However, she, tempted by Koshcherishche’s promise that she will become a tsaritsa if she marries him, grabs Ivan Godinovich by his “yellow curls,” throws him on the ground, and gives the knife instead to Koshcherishche, who ties Ivan Godinovich to an oak tree and amuses himself with Nastasia in the white tent. When some “prophetic” birds perch on a tree and talk among themselves about the ominous situation, Koshcherishche, angry at the implication of their words for him, wants to kill them with a bow and arrow. Ivan, much as Ilya Muromets in “Ilya Muromets and Kalin Tsar,” recites an incantation that causes the arrow instead to hit Koshcherishche and to kill him. Nastasia begs forgiveness from Ivan, asks him for a promise that he will not “beat and torment her,” and, after receiving a vague answer, attacks him with a saber. Ivan suddenly frees himself by shattering the oak tree and cruelly executes Nastasia in a scene that resembles the ending of “Dobrynya and Marinka.”
