May Night, or the Drowned Maiden

"May Night, or the Drowned Maiden" (Russian: "Майская ночь, или Утопленница", Mayskaya noch', ili Utoplennitsa, 1831) is the third tale in the collection Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka by Nikolai Gogol. It was made into the opera May Night by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in 1878–79 and also a Ukrainian setting by Mykola Lysenko.

This story comes from the unnamed story-teller (who was previously responsible for "The Fair at Sorochyntsi").

In this tale, a young Cossack named Levko, the son of the mayor, is in love with Hanna. He comes to her house to talk about marriage and mentions that his father is not pleased with the idea, though he doesn't say anything directly and merely ignores him. As they are walking on the outskirts of the village, Hanna asks about an old hut with a moss-covered roof and overgrown apple trees surrounding it. He tells her the story of a beautiful young girl whose father took care of her after her mother died and loved her dearly. Eventually, he married another woman who she discovered was a witch when she cut the paw of a cat that tried to kill her and her stepmother appeared soon after with her hand bandaged. The witch had power over her father, however, and eventually she is thrown out of the house and throws herself into the nearby pond in despair. She reigns over a group of maidens who also drowned in the pond, but once, when she got a hold of the witch as she was near the pond, she turned into a maiden and the ghost of the young girl has been unable to pick her out of the group ever since, asking any young man she comes upon to guess for her.

As the story progresses Rudy mentions the mayor and a drunk walks into his house thinking it is his, tricked by local peasants. Then, his son, who is angry at his father for trying to steal Hanna away, and his friends decide to play tricks on the village and start to parade around causing havoc. They dress up the mayor's sister-in-law, who is assumed to be having an affair with him, as a demon with soot all over her face, tricking the mayor. He mistakenly throws her into the cellar and then finds out it's her, but she gets angry and goes outside, to be captured by the boys again and thrown into a hut. Meanwhile, the mayor and some of his closest friends decide to find the hooligans and instead find the sister-in-law again and almost burn her alive in the hut.

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