

It is accounted by most stories that the soul of a young woman who had died in or near a river or a lake would come back to haunt that waterway. However, the initial Slavic lore suggests that not all rusalki occurrences were linked with death from water. According to Dmitry Zelenin, young women, who either committed suicide by drowning due to an unhappy marriage (they might have been jilted by their lovers or abused and harassed by their much older husbands) or who were violently drowned against their will (especially after becoming pregnant with unwanted children), must live out their designated time on Earth as rusalki. In 19th-century versions, a rusalka is an unquiet, dangerous being who is no longer alive, associated with the unclean spirit. They came out of the water in the spring to transfer life-giving moisture to the fields and thus helped nurture the crops. Īccording to Vladimir Propp, the original "rusalka" was an appellation used by pagan Slavic peoples, who linked them with fertility and did not consider rusalki evil before the 19th century. Those names were more common until the 20th century, and the word rusalka was perceived by many people as bookish, scholarly. In southern Russia and Ukraine, the rusalka was called a mavka. "she from the water" or "the water maiden"), kupalka ( Russian: купа́лка "bather"), shutovka ( Russian: шуто́вка "joker", "jester" or "prankster") and loskotukha (or shchekotukha, shchekotunya Russian: лоскоту́ха, щекоту́ха, щекоту́нья "tickler" or "she who tickles"). In northern Russia, the rusalka was also known by various names such as the vodyanitsa (or vodyaniha/ vodyantikha Russian: водяни́ца, водяни́ха, водянти́ха lit. Rusalki appear in a variety of media in modern popular culture, particularly in Slavic language-speaking countries, where they frequently resemble the concept of the mermaid. Folklorists have proposed a variety of origins for the entity, including that they may originally stem from Slavic paganism, where they may have been seen as benevolent spirits. In Slavic folklore, the rusalka (plural: rusalky/rusalki Cyrillic: русалка Polish: rusałka) is a typically feminine entity, often malicious toward mankind and frequently associated with water, with counterparts in other parts of Europe, such as the French Melusine and the Germanic Nixie.
