ABSTRACT
We conclude this study of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian folk belief with a shift in perspective that gives the peasant himself the final word. The very notion of “double faith” presupposes an outside perspective; for the peasant, who insisted on his identity as an Orthodox Christian, the crucial opposition was not between Christian and pagan, but between beneficial and harmful, “clean” and “unclean.” Russian folk narratives about the supernatural give us an inside view of the peasant’s spiritual world. In these little stories we enter a realm in which the intrusion of supernatural beings—be they positive and beneficent (saints, angels, and, sometimes, the domovoi) or malicious (the devil, leshie, vodianye, rusalki, an alien domovoi, and others)—is accepted as fact.
