Abstract
The Eastern Slavic rusalki are feminine mythological beings associated commonly with water, death, and sexuality. They were already thoroughly ethnographically described, classified and compared.
This paper presents a re-evaluation of D. K.
Zelenin's classic interpretation of these beings as the souls of women deceased by untimely or unjust death. By means of analysis of their function and embedding in the whole social-cultural environment it is shown in this paper how rusalki worked in the context of the symbolic system of the East Slavic folklore.
One of the main goals is to understand how intricately were rusalki and stories about them connected with the Orthodox liturgical year, specifically with the week following the Pentecost. The paper concludes that these feminine revenants were a symbolic representation of an eternal unripen-ness, which needed to be annually revived temporarily in order to help the symbolic system to cross the liminal phase of the agricultural and liturgical year cycle.