Russian folklore is immeasurably rich in songs, legends, dances, and fairy tales. The latter represent an invaluable layer folk wisdom. Its bearers are a variety of fairy-tale characters. Quite colorful among them is the cat Bayun. It is present in a large number of Russians folk tales. Storytellers always portrayed him as a cannibal cat of enormous size.

This cruel, scary cat loved to sit on a pole, most often an iron one. Basking in the sun, he patiently waited for travelers. When he saw the pilgrim, he began to purr contentedly, anticipating pleasure. An unsuspecting traveler approached the cat, and he, fluffing his tail, began to quietly in a beautiful voice tell tales and legends.

His voice had magical power. It lulled a person into sleep, made him pliable and defenseless. In the end, the traveler fell fast asleep, and the terrible cat jumped from his post, released huge strong claws, tore the unfortunate man into pieces with them and ate the warm flesh, purring carnivorously. These are the horrors he did, and there was no justice for him.

The word “bayun” itself has always been associated with a talker and talker. It comes from the Russian verb “bayat” - to lull, to lull. That's why the scary cat was given such a nickname. After all, what Bayun was doing was cradling and putting a person to sleep, and then committing violent acts against him and taking his life.

There lived a man-eating cat far away in the thirtieth kingdom. All around there was a dense forest, where there were no animals or birds. The forest thicket was cut through by a narrow road leading to a pillar with a monster sitting on it. It was believed that if someone defeats a cat, they will receive salvation from all diseases. Therefore, many good fellows went to distant lands, dreaming of defeating the monster, but they died, besotted by Bayun’s magical voice.

However, all Russian folk tales had a happy ending. And if so, then there was always a fellow who did not succumb to the charms of the terrible cannibal. One of these heroes was Ivan Tsarevich. He went to distant lands to fight the monster. Seeing him, the cat Bayun began to tell fairy tales in his magical voice. But the prince put an iron cap on his head, pulled iron mittens on his hands and fearlessly rushed at the cannibal.

The good fellow won in this fight. He exhausted the cat, deprived him of his strength, and he plaintively asked for mercy. He promised that he would fulfill any wish of Ivan Tsarevich. He took the cat with him, brought him to his father’s palace, and the once formidable monster began to meekly and obediently serve the king. He told him fairy tales and healed him from various illnesses.

This is how he was - this fairy tale character cat Baiyun. Creepy, scary, cruel towards the weak and defenseless. But, as they say, a good man is among the sheep, but a good man is the sheep himself. The one who defeated the man-eating cat became its sovereign owner and master. The monster turned into an obedient and helpful animal, spending its healing gift for good purposes.

Stanislav Kuzmin

Newly baptized O.I. “Cat Bayun”

The fairy tale seems to describe all the main details of this character: he sits on a pole, is capable of breaking an iron cap, otherwise you can’t take him with pliers (also iron), and, most importantly, he reasonable, at least at the level of Asimov’s robots, otherwise it would be impossible to conduct a constructive dialogue with him.

Tikhonov Igor Vsevolodovich “Cat-Bayun”

Stop. We forgot something else - dimensions Kota. At some point, it was generally accepted that Kot-Bayun was not only a cannibal, but also of enormous size, probably the size of a horse.

Hm. Cat... Ogre... Huge size... What kind of animal is this?!
Yes, we know what: tiger, lion, other large cat predators. All cats, from small to large, both domestic and wild, are alike: they are all predators, attacking their prey from ambush, obtaining it not only with their teeth, but also with their claws...

Bayun the cat looks like Jack Nicholson

Let's get back to the sizes. Is Kot-Bayun huge? Older drawings - by K. Kuznetsov - for example - do not give us the opportunity to judge this, but newer drawings - O.I. Novokreshennykh or I.V. Tikhonov - they think that yes, it is huge.

Chizhikov, who illustrated Uspensky’s fairy tale “Down the Magic River,” simply depicted Bayun as a huge black cat (and really, it’s not a white Persian or a black-and-white Siamese to depict him?), no longer only a horse, but also a horse with a rider .

Victor Chizhikov. Illustration for the book by E. Uspensky "Down the Magic River."

In a word, Kot-Bayun is not “just” a domestic cat “the size of an elephant”, or just a super-large and magical black panther or a melanistic tiger. But it's not that simple.

In the above tale, for example, Bayun’s size is not mentioned, but the fact that he jumped on the main character’s head still indicates that he is smaller than a tiger, and even a leopard, puma and lynx.

Victor Chizhikov. Illustration for the book by E. Uspensky "Down the Magic River."

A large relative of the domestic cat, attacking its prey from behind (a lynx on a hare, a tiger on a deer, a lion on a zebra), knocks it to the ground without any problems. The fact that Kot-Bayun did not do this in the battle with his adversary (Andrei, Fedot, Ivan) suggests that he is still small in size, say - no more than a domestic cat, since main character(let's say Andrei the shooter) was able to bring it home in a cage. (That’s right, because a cat on a leash is nonsense and a mortal insult to the animal, too.)

At the same time, however, he has sufficient strength to break two iron caps, as well as steel-iron claws, with which he wanted to gut the king when they were presented to each other.
Yes, but with all this, he also possessed not only reason and speech, but also reason, decency, or something: Andrei the shooter ordered him to calm down and not touch the king, the Cat did not touch the king.
Cat Bayun is a cat squared, and Andrei's victory over him is people's dreams of the final victory over cats - a cat that retains its natural cat qualities and listens to a person like a dog. (Can't wait!)

Cat Bayun, no matter how you twist it, he is a cannibal. (Like any other large wild cat, whether fabulous or real.)
And now we are back to the original question? Why is Kot-Bayun so not popular? E. Prokofieva, who wrote a certain reference book about evil spirits, was able to mention him in only two instances: in “Ruslan and Lyudmila” by Pushkin and “Down the Magic River” by Uspensky.

As for Pushkin's "Scientist Cat", he is not very similar to Bayun: he does not destroy people, does not send them sleep, although, like Bayun, he tells fairy tales and also sings songs. But unlike Bayun - “I sat under him, and the learned cat told me his fairy tales. I remember one: this fairy tale, now I will tell the world...” That is. This cat not only did not touch Pushkin, but also told him his fairy tales without such arguments as those rods with which Andrei courted Bayun.

The cat Bayun in Slavic mythology is a cat-guide. According to legend, the cat Bayun sits on an iron pillar near a golden mill far away. This pillar (for Pushkin it is a centuries-old mighty oak) is border axis between the world of the living and world of the dead .
When going down, the cat sings, when going up, he tells fairy tales. The bayun has such a strong and loud voice that it can be heard very far away.

Now let's look at the miracle cat with modern points of view. More precisely, his voice.

The voice is essentially sound. Sound, like color, has a spectrum of different frequencies. And we hear only a small part of them. There are such concepts as ultrasound and infrasound. They are beyond the range of the human ear, but some animals can hear them. This is where we will dig...

Maybe some people know such a thing as “the voice of the sea.” It is this phenomenon that explains the sudden disappearance or death of ship crews. The voice of the sea is destructive for humans, just like Bayun’s songs. The same explains the death of animals in anomalous zones called “devil’s glades.”

The fact is that some frequencies can have harmful effects and not on the organs of hearing, but on the entire body as a whole. The worst thing is that a person does not hear these frequencies and cannot move away from the source to a safe distance in time. First there is a headache, then the state of health worsens, the person loses consciousness... and then death occurs... But animals can hear at these frequencies, and disappear from dangerous place. Everything fits!

And from a fantastic point of view, the image of the Cat - Bayun can even be considered as an ancient weapon of mass destruction using sound waves!

And yet Bayun was forgotten. Why? He left too fragile an image in fairy tales; in Pushkin it is only in the prologue, and Uspensky is now also half-forgotten, and cannot “help” Bayun.
It's a pity!
In books of the Slavic fantasy genre, he would not have taken the last place, no worse than some Serpent Gorynych... But it’s clear that this is not fate.

But domestic cats are thriving to this day, and it doesn’t hurt to be kind to them - what if they tell their grievance to such a Bayun? It will be bad then! Incl. treat them humanely - and you will be rewarded a hundredfold.
End

Russian folklore is full of descriptions of fantastic creatures, the prototypes of which are familiar animals. Slavic mythology gave the authors of epics and fairy tales material for their works, and curious narratives attract the interest of modern children, despite the age of the works. Cat Bayun is a little-known character, as he rarely appears in literature. This image previously appeared in many fairy tales, but today it has been unfairly forgotten. However, the characterization of this hero of Russian narratives is extremely unusual.

History of creation

Cat Bayun is a fairy-tale character, a cannibal cat whose size is difficult to imagine. He has a magical voice that lulls travelers he meets to sleep. The cat kills his rivals and does not disdain easy victims who are unable to fight his charms. At the same time, the hero who is able to defeat the cat can receive salvation from any ailments, because the four-legged fairy tales are healing.

Bayun means “storyteller, talker.” The verb “bayat” is interpreted as “to talk” or “to lull.” The animal sits on a tall iron pillar in the middle of a dead forest that stretches far away, in the thirtieth kingdom. There are no living creatures in the area.

Description of this fairy tale hero rarely found in epics and folklore. Modern sources archaic tales and epics - collections of folk tales, compiled, and essays. Writers, without downplaying the importance of the character, talked about him on the pages of their works, proving that the image of the hero contains the wisdom of centuries.

Image and character

Fairy tales give an accurate description of a fantastic animal. A cat sitting on a pole has remarkable strength. For example, it easily breaks a metal cap. You can pick it up using steel pliers. The beast has high intelligence and is capable of constructing long dialogues. At the same time, its dimensions are described in a specific way. The breed of the animal remains unknown, but the authors note that the cat is huge, comparing it to a horse. In addition, the animal is a cannibal.

It is easy to assume that the storytellers compared the cat Bayun with a tiger or a lion. Predators are large in size and easily deal with a person, attacking from cover, clinging to the body of the victim with their claws and teeth. Bayun's opponents in fairy tales are either Andrei the Shooter. The legends about these men mention that they carried the animal in a cage, which means that its dimensions were seriously exaggerated.

Despite the described bloodthirstiness of the beast, he is wise, decent and reasonable. The image of a cat, often used in folklore different countries, symbolic. This animal has never submitted to man. Brave warriors who are able to pacify a mysterious creature are an allusion to the desire of people to tame an independent beast and force it to carry out someone else's will.

In Slavic mythology

The legends of Russian folklore are deep and multifaceted. Based on their interpretation, the cat Bayun is a kind of conductor between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

The pillar on which the animal sits is replaced in the tale by an oak tree tied with a gold chain. The cat walks along the chain and tells stories. The tree he chose is associated with the World Tree growing at the North Pole, in Hyperborea. Bayun's voice is loud and melodic, so the soporific stories can be heard clearly and at a great distance.

It would be logical to assume that the hero is a forest dweller. Then he is the ancestor of famous predators: the lynx or the Siberian wild cat. Zoological sources confirm that such animals were not uncommon in the Urals or Siberia at the time when these lands were inhabited by our ancestors, the Aryans. It's about about the time 5-7 thousand years before the appearance of the Russians. The history of the mythical character is surprisingly long, no worse than the popular legends of Egyptian mythology.

The cat is capable of peaceful interactions with people because in some fairy tales he is invited to lull small children to sleep. Inhabitant other world responds to the call, speaking and putting to sleep. If the storyteller sees a victim in his interlocutor, he charms her with his voice and eats her. The cannibal sorcerer is able to magically heal his opponent if he resists the spells. Some fairy tales describe how the cat Bayun, conquered by brave warriors, remains in the service of the king.

The word "bayun", in addition to its direct decoding, is regarded as a mention of Bayan, a Russian storyteller, whose fame is comparable to that of the great writer. The storyteller told about legends of the past that were little known to the world. The mention of this person connects modern civilization and the disappeared civilization of Hyperborea.

At the end of this period, the cat Bayun moved to the dead forest and settled on the border of two worlds: the afterlife and the real, sitting on an iron pole. What is interesting in this case is the mention of the metal from which the warrior’s protective caps and the animal’s claws are made. After all, the legends date back to a time when such material was not known to the world.

The name Bayun is also consonant with the name Gamayun. is the name of the things of a bird that knows about the past.

The original Russian image of a cat has been cherished by history for 17 thousand years. The familiar image of an animal that plays the role of a home talisman in everyday life and a warm friend that brightens up loneliness is older than mythological characters. Ancient Egypt and Greece. Some parents even today sing a lullaby about a cat who is invited into the house for a pie or a glass of milk so that he can lull the baby who does not want to sleep.

Nejem cat, who lived during the reign Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the first cat to have a name. Transforming into a cat, which Professor McGonagle from Harry Potter, for example, can do, is called eluranthropy. The cat Bayun in Russian fairy tales is a huge cannibal cat with a magical voice. He speaks and lulls approaching travelers to sleep with his tales and mercilessly kills. But whoever can get a cat will find salvation from all diseases, since Bayun’s fairy tales are healing. In the time of Richard III, in Cheshire, there lived a forester, Caterling, who grinned fiercely when he managed to catch a poacher. They say he became the prototype of the Cheshire cat. Monument to the cat Begimot in Kyiv The color of a cat in fairy tales can be any color, but if the cat is black, then it has mystical properties. It is not surprising that Bulgakov’s Behemoth cat was black. Charles Perrault's Puss in Boots was of unknown color, however, he is usually depicted as red. Puss in Boots from Shrek is also red.
The cat from " Bremen Town Musicians"The Brothers Grimm was an elderly animal, which his own mistress, seeing his unfitness, decided to drown in a river. Actually, that’s why the cat ran away from home and ended up on the road to the glorious city of Bremen, where he was found by an equally decrepit donkey and a dog. The only animal that was young was the rooster. He ran away from home because they were going to kill him on the occasion of the arrival of guests. Rolan Bykov as Basilio the Cat ("The Adventures of Pinocchio") The cat Basilio and the fox Alice received their names only in the fairy tale about Pinocchio. In the tale of Pinocchio they are nameless. Goffman wrote a novel from the point of view of a cat" Worldly views The cat Murra, together with fragments of the biography of the conductor Johannes Kreisler, which accidentally survived in the waste paper sheets. "made Jerry the mouse and Tom the cat famous throughout the world. Full name Tom - Tomcat. This is a derivative of the name of all male felines in general. By the way, in the first episode of Tom and Jerry, which was released in 1940, Tom's name was Jasper. In the Hollywood film about the cat Garfield, a great original and gourmet, the role of Garfield's owner was played by actor Breckin Meyer. At the same time, in order to get this role, he hid one of his shortcomings - an allergy to cat hair.