looking for good Russian ghost stories

[Natalie O. Kononenko]

Dear Devin and other Seelangers interested in Halloween,
        My former graduate student Jann Lacoss wrote her
dissertation on scary materials, disgusting verse and prose
stories, some of which were about things like grannies who
snack on corpses.  She should be posting to SEELANGS soon.
        In the meantime, no, there is no Halloween in Russia.
All hallows eve comes on the eve of All Saints day which is
Vsekh sviatykh in Russian and that does exist as a church
holiday.  But the folk stuff -- dressing up, going door to
door, asking for treats, though not candy, comes as part of
winter sviatki, usually done in conjunction with New Years.
There are all sorts of sources.  See Chicherov's Zimnyi tsykl
(meaning winter caledary festivals).  For more recent things,
there is Ivleva's Riazhenie v russkoi kul'ture.  Maslov in her
folk costume and obriad book has stuff on dressing up also.
        Russian yearly cycle festivals are quite different from
festivals in the west.  Commemoration of the dead occurs at all
sorts of times in the year.  At sviatki and in the spring,
after Easter, the dead are believed to return, sort of like the
presence of spirits at Halloween.  Sokolova discusses spring
and summer celebrations in Vesene-letnie obraidy.  Also, there
is a discussion of spring and summer ritual in the new book
Russkii eroticheskii fol'klor, among other sources.  I will try
to get my current grad student, Anne Ingram, who is writing
about the dead, including the unquiet dead to post also.

Natalie Kononenko