Домовой

Не так страшен чёрт, как его малюют.
(The devil is not as scary as they paint him.)
-Russian proverb

And neither are domovoi, the house spirits of Slavic folklore. I first learned about these mostly-friendly sprites from my friend pantodapos, who took a Russian fairy tale class in college. He tacked up pictures of them all over his apartment, and we had fun blaming them for missing items (especially homework!) and appliance malfunction.


I have been thinking about domovoi again recently because of a series of strange events in the house. The toilets in three of the bathrooms have been taking turns backing up, with no discernable pattern. The downstairs refrigerator stopped cooling. The radio plays NPR without provocation. Light bulbs burn out. Normal wear and tear on an older house? To the unimaginative mind, perhaps. But me, I choose to see a more sublime cause. Clearly, I need to prepare an offering.

In my search for more information about these spirits, I came across this great excerpt from Times foreign correspondent Chris Wren's book The Cat Who Covered the World, in which he talks about the tradition of domovoi. Wren was the Moscow bureau chief for the Times from 1973 to 1977, and I discovered in reading the chapter that he lived there--in the Foreign Correspondents' building--in the same apartment where my friends from Baltimore now live! I met this couple at the Russian School of Middlebury College in the summer of 2001, where we were all first-year students, right before they moved to Moscow for him to assume the post of The Sun's bureau chief. The next summer, when I studied in Moscow, I spent a quite a bit of time in their apartment, as it was absolutely luxurious in comparison to . . . well, most residences in the city, but in particular to my modest dorm room. But more stories from Russia will have to wait for another day; in the meantime, consider the appeasement of your domovoi. It just might be the best thing you ever did.