Da isbá na floresta gélida à caverna tropical: aproximações entre as personagens Baba-Iagá e Cuca

Abstract

The main goal of this research is to accomplish a comparative analysis between the character Baba-lagá, who appears in fairytales of the Slav folklore, and Cuca, a folkloric character from Luso-Brazilian culture, also present in lullabies, literary fragments, religious festivals and in Monteiro Lobato s book, O Sací. Leaving the premises of the Russian formalist Vladimir Propp, we analyze morphologically the creation of the characters in his narrative, as well as tracing their ritualistic origins. Based on the psychological concepts of Carl Gustav Jung, and his followers, we are looking for a symbolic understanding of these two sorceresses. The hypothesis proposed of similarity is that they are rooted on the same archetypal and hystorical ground, in the way that both are representatives of maternal images in its terrible form, and that has its origins in rituals of the sacred and profane. For the differences found we discussed the hypothesis of an inexhaustible manifestation of the archetype as an image and of cultural diversity. Throughout the research we can confirm these hypotheses by analyzing Monteiro Lobato s book and by reflecting on the characteristic features of the literary genres in which these sorceresses fall, concluding that if fairytales and lullabies were to resonate with their narrators voices, through shared experiences from around the world, in the field of modern literary art this reflection would pass into the metalinguistic and the text would gain, from the form, the capacity to consciously contribute to the reformulation of the world it mirrors