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“That's how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you'd have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.��


I really commend Catherynne M. Valente for continuing to write and publish books to this day, because if I ever penned a novel like Deathless, I would consider my job as an author done once and for all.

It has everything modern bookish social media love—a villain love interest, Slavic mythology, morally gray female characters, feminist critique of fairy tale tropes—but written a decade before it became popular. The amount of care that Valente put into researching Russian history and culture shines through every page, resulting in a novel that brims with love for its setting. Classic Russian writers, from Bulgakov to Puškin and Akhmatova, are referenced throughout and were clearly a major source of inspiration for the author.

What seems to be most divisive among readers is the unorthodox and transformative (read: feminist) approach that Valente adopts when revisiting Slavic myths, particularly her choice to make the sexual subtext of the original fairy tales explicit. While I understand that this perspective can be off-putting for those who grew up with these characters, anyone with a passing knowledge of folklore studies can tell you that fairy tales often originate from cautionary stories about marriage and sexuality. In the vein of Angela Carter and Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Valente asks what these myths can tell us about gender roles, female resilience, and surviving toxic relationships. The choice to set the novel in Soviet Russia at the dawn of World War II further grounds the story in reality, allowing the author to imagine how these ancestral figures would adapt to life under communism.

Mythology, Valente seems to say, is not immutable and ahistorical; its tropes and characters evolve with the people who created them, adopting new meaning as the world around them changes. What happens, then, when those same people are made to endure unspeakable suffering at the hands of an oppressive government—a government that rejected the very myths and magic their culture is based on? Will the pagan gods return to their human form, escape from this world, or die altogether? This question lingers in the back of Marya’s story, looming like an existential threat to the world she knows. No matter how powerful they are, no matter how much they look down upon us weak and vulnerable humans, even Koschei the Deathless and Baba Yaga must bend to the forces of history.