concept
Rusalka
little mermaid
also: русалочка, water-spirit
A female water-spirit of Slavic folklore, here the wood-sprite's intended bride, who sends him among humans to acquire sense before she will marry him.
Reading notes
- The Naive Wood-Sprite §2 little mermaid
A rusalka, the female water-spirit of Slavic folklore, here rendered as a diminutive 'mermaid' who is the wood-sprite's intended bride and sends him out to acquire sense among humans.
- To A. P. Lensky, 27 September 1889. Moscow. §6 "Rusalka."
Alexander Dargomyzhsky's opera "Rusalka," which the household went to hear on the Sunday evening they missed Lensky; not to be confused with the folkloric water-spirit figure elsewhere in the corpus, though the opera takes its subject from that same folklore.