The Deathless Sorcerer Whose Death Hides in a Needle
Koschei the Deathless is the withered sorcerer-king of Russian wonder tales: an old man thin as a skeleton, sitting on heaps of gold, who carries off the hero's bride or mother. His name is usually connected with kost', "bone." His deathlessness follows a fixed mechanism, for his death is kept outside his body: on the point of a needle, the needle inside an egg, the egg inside a duck, the duck inside a hare, the hare shut in a chest hidden in or under an oak on a far-off island, which some versions name as Buyan. Only when the needle's point is snapped does he die.
His fullest appearance is in "Marya Morevna" from Afanasyev's collection. Chained with twelve chains in a locked chamber by the warrior queen Marya, he is unwittingly revived when Prince Ivan gives him three buckets of water; he bursts his chains and abducts her. Three times Ivan steals her back and is overtaken by Koschei on his magic horse; the third time he is chopped to pieces, sealed in a barrel and thrown into the sea, then revived by his eagle, raven and falcon brothers-in-law with the waters of death and life. After herding Baba Yaga's mares for three days he earns a scraggy foal, finally outrides Koschei, and the sorcerer's skull is crushed under a hoof, his corpse burned and the ashes scattered on the wind.
That cremation ending recurs across the versions: the deathless must be destroyed down to ash. In modern Russian "Koschei" has become a byword for a gaunt old man or a miser, and the demon Kashchei of Stravinsky's ballet The Firebird (1910), whose immortality is sealed in a great egg, descends directly from him.
