When Baba Yaga grows old: Dubravka Ugrešić’s “Baba Yaga Laid an Egg”4 min read
“Baba Yaga laid an egg.”
An elderly witch laying an egg is a good indication that Dubravka Ugrešić has no intention of treating Slavic mythology with excessive reverence. In Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (Baba Jaga je snijela jaje, 2007), the writer takes one of the most familiar figures of Eastern European folklore and turns her into a guide to ageing, female invisibility, desire and death. The result is part novel, part fairy-tale reconstruction and part mischievous literary essay – and it is much funnier than any of those descriptions suggest.
An old witch for a modern world
The book is divided into three very different sections. The first follows a narrator whose elderly mother in Zagreb is slowly losing her memory, her vocabulary and her independence. Their relationship is affectionate but difficult, shaped by the indignities of old age and the daughter’s helplessness before them.
Into this story comes Aba, a young Bulgarian admirer of the narrator, who later accompanies her on a journey to Varna, Bulgaria. The section is intimate in tone, but already full of clues pointing towards Baba Yaga: old women, birds, eggs, strange legs and houses acquire a second, folkloric meaning.
Then the book changes register completely.
Its second section follows three elderly friends – Pupa, Beba and Kukla – on a trip to a Czech spa. Their holiday develops into a comedy involving rejuvenation treatments, massages, doctors, flirtations, businessmen, Russian gangsters, money and death.
Ugrešić’s old women are not decorative grandmothers. They are jealous, lustful, irritable, vulnerable, funny and occasionally – pretty outrageous. Their bodies may be failing them, but their curiosity and appetite for life have not disappeared at all.
The final section changes form again. Aba Bagay, now presented as a folklorist, provides an almost encyclopaedic guide to Baba Yaga and explains the symbols scattered throughout the preceding stories. Suddenly, seemingly random details turn into parts of an elaborate puzzle. Ugrešić has not simply retold a folktale; she has skillfully smuggled it into contemporary life.
A writer between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria
Dubravka Ugrešić was born in 1949 in Kutina, in what was then Yugoslavia, to a Croatian father and a Bulgarian mother. Her mother, Elizaveta Stoykova, came from Burgas, and Ugrešić spent time in Bulgaria during her youth and spoke Bulgarian.
That connection gives the Bulgarian passages in Baba Yaga Laid an Egg a particular resonance. Bulgaria is not simply an exotic “East” inserted into the story. It belongs to the writer’s own family geography, alongside Croatia and the wider cultural space of the former Yugoslavia.
Ugrešić studied comparative and Russian literature in Zagreb and became an academic as well as a novelist and essayist. During the wars that accompanied Yugoslavia’s disintegration, she was outspokenly anti-war and anti-nationalist. Vilified in parts of the Croatian press, she left the country in 1993 and eventually settled in Amsterdam.
Exile, belonging and nationalism recur throughout her writing. Yet Baba Yaga Laid an Egg also shows an ability to approach serious questions through parody, folklore and grotesque humour.
Why is it so funny?
Much of the comedy comes from Ugrešić’s refusal to treat old age solemnly. Her characters complain about their bodies, compare ailments, pursue men, undergo dubious treatments and observe each other with merciless precision. The spa scenes are particularly funny because they turn the modern obsession with fighting ageing into a kind of contemporary magic ritual. Creams, massages and rejuvenation therapies promise what fairy tales once promised through enchanted apples or miraculous potions.
Behind the jokes, however, is a sharp observation: women become increasingly invisible as they grow older.
Ugrešić responds by doing the opposite. She places elderly women at the centre of the story and allows them to be as complicated, ridiculous and desiring as everyone else. Baba Yaga, traditionally depicted as an ugly and frightening old woman, becomes the perfect figure through which to ask why ageing women have so often been transformed into monsters.
Why read it?
Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is not an easy book. Its changes of style are abrupt, and the final folkloric catalogue may surprise readers expecting a conventional novel. But its oddness is precisely what makes it so compelling.
The book can be read as a comedy, a feminist reinterpretation of folklore, a meditation on mothers and daughters, or an exploration of how myths could actually survive in ordinary life. It is also a reminder that cultural identities rarely fit neatly inside national borders: Ugrešić’s literary world stretches across Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and the broader Slavic imagination.
Above all, the novel restores something to its older women that society often takes away from them: visibility.
After reading it, Baba Yaga no longer seems like a remote witch from a childhood fairy tale. She might be the woman at the next table, your neighbour, your colleague, your close friend, your mother – or, eventually, you.
Perhaps laying an egg is the least surprising thing about her.
