lar Amazon.[106] In one of the variants of the
story the representative of Marya Morevna fights the hero before she
marries him.[107] The Bluebeard incident of the forbidden closet is
one which often occurs in the Skazkas, as we shall see further on; and
the same may be said about the gratitude of the Bird, Bee, and
Lioness.

The story of Immortal Koshchei is one of very frequent occurrence,
the different versions maintaining a unity of idea, but varying
considerably in detail. In one of them,[108] in which Koshchei's part
is played by a Snake, the hero's sisters are carried off by their
feathered admirers without his leave being asked--an omission for
which a full apology is afterwards made; in another, the history of
"Fedor Tugarin and Anastasia the Fair,"[109] the hero's three sisters
are wooed and won, not by the Falcon, the Eagle, and the Raven, but by
the Wind, the Hail, and the Thunder. He himself marries the terrible
heroine Anastasia the Fair, in the forbidden chamber of whose palace
he finds a snake "hung up by one of its ribs." He gives it a lift and
it gets free from its hook and flies away, carrying off Anastasia the
Fair. Fedor eventually finds her, escapes with her on a magic foal
which he obtains, thanks to the aid of grateful wolves, bees, and
crayfish, and destroys the snake by striking it "on the forehead" with
the stone which was destined to be its death. In a third version of
the story,[110] the hero finds in the forbidden chamber "Koshchei the
Deathless, in a cauldron amid flames, boiling in pitch." There he has
been, he declares, for fifteen years, having been lured there by the
beauty of Anastasia the Fair. In a fourth,[111] in which the hero's
three sisters marry three beggars, who turn out to be snakes with
twenty, thirty, and forty heads apiece, Koshchei is found in the
forbidden chamber, seated on a horse which is chained to a cauldron.
He begs the hero to unloose the horse, promising, in return, to save
him from three deaths.

[Into the mystery of the forbidden chamber I will not
enter fully at present. Suffice to say that there can
be little doubt as to its being the same as that in
which Bluebeard kept the corpses of his dead wives. In
the Russian, as well as in the Oriental stories, it is
generally the curiosity of a man, not of a woman,
which leads to the opening of the prohibited room. In
the West of Europe the fatal inquisitiveness is