The Repeatedly Dying Russian Girl
A new female character trope has surfaced in some of my favorite recent television. I call her the Repeatedly Dying, Shape-Shifting Russian Girl. She’s Nadia Vulvokov (Natasha Lyonne) in Russian Doll (Netflix), Nina Azarova (Brit Marling) in The OA (Netflix), Oksana Astankova (Jodie Comer) in Killing Eve (BBC America). I’d previously written about my Russian immigrant feelings watching the cold-war spy drama The Americans (FX) where Keri Russell plays a morally complex chameleon, but I think these newer series are exploring a whole other generation of the post-soviet femme fatale, one that is revealing something spectral about the contemporary psyche.
What are the telling features of this heroine? She’s ethnically (or at least nominally) Russian but raised in a post-soviet cosmopolitan landscape, speaking flawless and confident English. She’s highly intelligent and multi-talented — Nadia is a programmer and video game designer, Nina is a masterful persuader and plays transcendent violin, Oksana is a highly inventive international assassin. She’s the protagonist — it’s her heroine’s journey we follow, not a man’s who makes her an object of desire. She’s not a good girl — Nadia is a rude alcoholic chain-smoker; Nina in her multiple iterations can be demanding, cold, and manipulative; Oksana is a diagnosable psychopath and a murderer. But most significantly, the Russian girl keeps dying and re-emerging, not as a zombie, but as a self that has been reset, given another chance. In Russian Doll, Nadia walks out of her birthday party and onto a moving taxicab, but is then returned back in time, to the party bathroom, only to die dozens of different ways until she solves the riddle and can stop the cycle. In The OA, orphaned and American-adopted Nina is kidnapped by an obsessed scientist who forces her to undergo repeated near-death experiences, until she leads her cellmates into discovering a way to navigate through multidimensional realities where they may enact wholly different lives. In Killing Eve, a Russian-born Oksana is legally registered as having died in prison, but gets to live out multiple personas in her day job as an assassin named Villanelle, disappearing and re-appearing over and over to serve the needs of different international bosses.
What do we call this archetype? The too-obvious label would be “Matryoshka” — the common name for the Russian nesting doll — a wooden toy that twists open to reveal multiple identically-shaped, proportionally smaller pieces inside of it. Like a matryoshka, Nadia, Nina, and Oksana have multiple selves, and the story of unlocking these deeper layers structures their respective narrative journeys. The name Matryoshka comes from “matyer” for mother, and the characters are certainly very femme-centric, with male relationships forming only a side story to their existential explorations.
But I want to offer another genesis for these leading ladies, that of Vasilisa the Beautiful (alternatively known as Vasilisa the Wise), a classic Russian folk tale. Vasilisa’s story is kind of like Cinderella’s, except true to folk vs. fairy tale discrepancies (quick recap: fairytales, first written down by literate aristocrats, basically erased the rebellious spirits and ghastly imagery out of oral versions of folktales to preach virtues of obedience and promise a happy, magical resolution; see also: false consciousness), there’s no prince charming or glass slipper or magical fairy godmother. Instead, in traditional Russian style, things are a lot more chilling.
The story goes like this. Vasilisa’s mother dies when she’s a young girl and her father remarries a mean stepmother with two other daughters. The three taunt and torture little Vasilisa, making her do all the chores and resent her purity and natural beauty. Eventually, they scheme to get rid of her altogether by telling her that the fire in the house has gone out and she must travel deep into the woods to find Baba Yaga and ask her for more fire. Baga Yaga is Russia’s notorious forest witch. While she’s not explicitly good or bad, she’s unsentimental and frightening— she is known to eat people if she dislikes them, she lives in a house that walks around on chicken legs, and she flies around in a cauldron. She’s hideous and old and covered in warts, but is revered as a keeper of ancient magic. Vasilisa summons her courage, ventures into the woods, finds Baba Yaga, and, after solving the old crone’s various tasks and challenges, is given a fire source — a skull with glowing eyes, which she brings back home. The skull’s mystical power immediately torches the mean stepmother and stepsisters into ash. Note there’s no prince, riches, or happily ever after, just a story of an orphan girl’s courage, survival, and violent triumph.
Like Vasilisa, the shows’ protagonists — Nadia, Nina and Oksana — are orphans who have traumatic matrilineal histories. Nadia is haunted by the death of her mentally unstable mother, Nina resents her adoptive American mom for medicating her as a kid, dimming her nascent psychic powers, and Oksana’s erotic attention keeps fixating on slightly older women with big curly hair, perhaps as a substitute for a mother she lost early in life. These women also have a generally estranged relationship to their respective homes and motherlands. Nadia is deeply nostalgic for an older New York. Nina learns that across the many possible expressions of her life’s timeline, an opulent San Francisco apartment is just as much her home as a suburban bedroom in the Midwest or an underground prison cell in an abandoned mine. We see Oksana variously nesting in Paris, Amsterdam, and London, but she repeatedly says that she prefers not to speak Russian anymore, even with other Russians.
Like the folktale Vasilisa, each of the TV heroines are thrust into a dangerous quest. Nadia keeps dying and returning to the same moment and has to both break the loop for herself and save the world around her from disappearing and rotting (a macabre constrast to, say, Bill Murray’s curse of endlessly living and falling asleep through the same dependable Groundhog Day). Nina is trying to find a dimension where she and her loved ones can be safe and free, learning incrementally that each reality is a different configuration of traps and sacrifices. Oksana is professionally charged with many risky, life-threatening missions, but as she artfully completes them, we see her personally pursuing something else — an escape from life’s profound cyclical boredom through access to the genuine vulnerabilities of others— their fear, desire, the moment they recognize that death as imminent and spirit empties from their eyes.
Different archetypes are always being recycled in our collective mythmaking, but why is Vasilisa appearing in mainstream American television now? The answer may lie in the meaning of the original folk tale. Dr. Clarissa Pinkold Estes, the Jungian psychologist who celebrates the wild feminine in Women Who Run With The Wolves, proposed that Vasilisa’s story is the journey of a woman’s initiation into the potency of her intuition. By encountering, accepting, and learning from the great and terrifying death-giving power of Baba Yaga — a facet of every woman’s psychic inheritance — Vasilisa recovers her own internal fire, her source of energy, desire, and enlightenment, and discovers that she can use this capacity to destroy the malicious and false voices that have previously oppressed her. Estes says that this psychic journey requires making friends with the cyclical life-and-death nature of all existence, letting die what must die so that new life can emerge from the ashes.
For the mythical Vasilisa, what must die is her attachment to the good mother, the safe home, and to her own role as an obedient and compliant daughter. She must learn to become brave and incorporate some of Baba Yaga’s discernment and darkness into her own identity. For the post-soviet, contemporary, televisual Vasilisa, letting die what must die takes various forms: Nadia must learn to release repressed childhood guilt and with it her destructive cynicism; Nina lets go of previous mortal identities as she endures extraordinarily challenging circumstances, finding that underneath she has a deeper, universal name; Oksana betrays past lovers, kills former allies, and beds her enemies, persistently twisting society’s conventional morality while staying loyal to a kind of explosive and cerebral love. Most importantly, across the three stories, each woman has to let go of a previous self that has been weighed down by old ghosts and attachments. She has to accept, even embrace, her own death. To do that, she has to listen to her intuition, even if it makes her seem crazy for trying to get a bunch of teens to dance with her into another dimension (The OA), falling in love with the detective pursuing her (Killing Eve), or teaming up with an unlikely stranger stuck in the same death loop (Russian Doll).
Perhaps we are seeing the contemporary manifestations of Vasilisa’s story because she so deeply reflects our current anxiety as a civilization. We have become acutely aware of our collective mortality, via the murderous mania of our political ego, our suicidal treatment of the planet, the depression of our economic imaginations. And we are really scared of the impending catastrophe but at the same time, if we are honest with ourselves, we also really want a reset. We know that we can’t go on in the way we have been, but we also don’t really know how to be any different. We sense that we will have to face some scary and dark challenges, with stakes defined not by the false and oppressive system we have come to obey, but by something unsentimental, entropic, and morally ambiguous — an ancient, Baba Yaga-esque force. Perhaps Vasilisa is appearing in all these updated forms because we have the hunch that the post-soviet Russian girl might know something about how to make peace with and even transcend death, having survived the end of one totalizing world (i.e., the collapse of Soviet socialism) and emerged from the ruins of its cancelled future. Perhaps we have the idea that her journey might help us navigate our own societal apocalypse.
What wisdom does she have to teach us? You’ll have to watch yourself to find out but here are a few crumbs. Follow your intuition. Move at the speed of trust. Navigate experimentally until you can map the labyrinth. Make allies quickly but remember your ultimate allegiance is to life itself. Learn from but let go of the past. Let go of your self. Let go of the world as you know it. Be brave and be careful.
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Read Part II — where I repeatedly die myself and connect to my internal Baba Yaga wisdom.
