I read the entire puppet book at the beginning of last night, with the puppet on my hand, turning the pages for me, her head bobbing forward with each turn and smacking against the words and pictures. I read lines like this, written by the author Nina Efimova: “Puppets repel . . . They captivate not by beauty but by hidden charm,” and this: “Puppets were created primevally by the god of puppets without feet. They spring on stage from below, and dive down to make their exit.” Each time I read a line like the latter, I looked down at Lydia the puppet, and said to her something like, “See, this is why you look the way you do.” At around two in the morning, I came to the end of the book, where there were pictures of the author’s own puppets. And, remarkably, there was my puppet—the third picture in, looking happy and comfortable on the hand of her maker, her hooked nose like a ginger root, her mad mess of black hair, her dark head and ragged clothes. I looked at the caption. It read: “Nina Efimova and the puppet of Baba Yaga.”

“Shit,” I said. “Is that you?” I made the puppet nod her head and stroke the page. “And is that your mum?” She nodded again. “Baba Yaga,” I read out loud. I googled the name.

Baba Yaga, it turns out, is a figure in Slavic folklore. She is a witch, earth goddess, ogre, manifestation of stormy weather, cannibal; she is the Russian figure of death. Her name, Baba, is derived from the word for grandmother; and Yaga, from darker words: horror, shudder, anger, witch, fury, disease, abuse, belittle, exploit, doubt, worry, pain. “Wow, Baba Yaga,” I said, and she looked back at me, her face innocent and blank.

I read that Baba Yaga appears in over a thousand folktales. Each time, she is visited by various people, young men, usually, travelers lost in the forest, where she lives in a hut that is perched on top of a pair of chicken legs. She either helps them along their way, or she eats them, her mouth sometimes gaping open from earth to sky. In her hut, I read, she can often be found lying across her stove, stretched from one corner of the hut to the other; to travel, she flies through the air in a mortar, using a pestle as an oar, and a broom to brush away the trail of her flight behind her. “Wow, that’s pretty weird, Yaga,” I said. Often, she is written about in crude and hateful language, I found, that describes her body—particularly her genitals and breasts—as disgusting and rotting. I held her closer to me as I read one more thing about her: “Baba Yaga’s teeth are extremely sharp and are said to be made from iron or stone. Sometimes, she drinks milk,” it read, “and other times, blood.”