The darkness, the more common occurrence of the thinning veil between the living and the dead mimics the rarer All Saints’ Day. Turgenev’s “Bezhin Meadow” emphasizes this mysterious and haunting time. The first suggestion of death weighing on the narrator, “a bulging game bag cut into my shoulders mercilessly,” counters the victory of a successful hunt with the burden and pain of carrying the dead around with him (24). This theme continues as the five boys, as many youths around a campfire are wont to do, tell ghost stories based in Russian mythology. The first tale of a water nymph, a rusalka, also takes place at night when a traveler loses his way. Some researchers, such as Ivantis in Russian Folk Beliefs, report the belief that the rusalka and other household spirits are actually the dead who have continued residence on this earth. The melding of worlds does not stop at the living and the dead, but also the future and the past: “you can see a living man too. I mean one whose turn it is to die in that year” (39). And the evidence of the accuracy of these portents is portrayed as steadfast, between the Ivanshka Fedoseyev that died in the spring and the ominous ending of the story in which the narrator notes that Pavlusha “died the same year” as when he heard the dead boy calling his name from the water (48). Interestingly, the Russians in this story take a rather fatalistic approach to these omens, “No use running away from your fate, is it?” which recalls many Greek tragedies like Oedipus that reinforces the accuracy of said prophecies (46).

The bridging of life and death arises again in Turgenev’s “Forest and Steppe” as he recounts, “You breathe in peace with every breath, yet a strange unrest comes upon the spirit…all the time images and faces of the beloved, dead or alive, keep coming to mind” (395). The black and blank night acts as a tapestry on which the mind projects these images, called forth by the haunting, cloying emptiness of night. Pushkin takes a darker turn in his poem, “When Lost in Thought” when he contrasts, “slimy graves awaiting with a yawn” and “some ancestral village keep, / Where all the dead in solemn stillness sleep” (200:13, 20-21). The chilling assumption in the latter that in the graveyard he stumbles upon, the dead are not as restful as one would hope (or expect). These reflections on Russian perceptions of the afterlife and the joining of the past and the present in the form of the living and the dead reveal the ongoing prevalence of folk beliefs merging with Christianity.

Note: I would have liked to delve deeper into the idea presented in the last sentence based on the conflict and comingling of Christian values and pagan beliefs. Examples include the use of the cross to ward off the rusalka and the changing views towards the spirits (the “evil” water nymph and forest demons in contrast with the helpful and omniscient wolf in “Ivan and the Grey Wolf”). This is a theme I found to be quite prevalent in Ivantis’s Russian Folk Beliefs and found quite interesting and compelling.