After re-reading the fairy tale by A. S. Pushkin “About Tsar Saltan” once again, one wonders: who is this brother-in-law, who is the hero of the fairy tale, and what is her real name? Incidentally, by surfing the Internet, you are surprised to find that the problem “What was the name of the match?” Was solved by more than one generation of fans of A. Pushkin’s work and literary scholars, and no definite answer was found. Nevertheless, let us try to analyze the facts and find the truth.
Let's walk in a relative
To begin with, let's determine what kind of family ties the heroes of the tale of King Saltan are connected with? Who does the royal family of SvyatĂ Babar Babarikh have, and why did she so fiercely hate the queen and her offspring?
According to Wikipedia, the bride is the mother of one of the spouses in relation to the parents of the other spouse, that is, the mother-in-law of the son or mother-in-law of the daughter. In this case, to whom and by whom does it have to? Tsar Saltan mother-in-law or young queen mother-in-law? If Svatya Baba Babarikha is the mother of Saltan or the young queen, then it is simply blasphemous to hate her own grandson! Only a step-grandmother could pitch a newborn into a barrel and throw into the open sea according to the will of the waves.
It can be assumed that Svatya Baba is an aunt or a nurse for someone from the royal family. The appeal of the woman in this case is justified. But here is the matchmaker? Could it be that in 1831 a woman engaged in matchmaking could be called a match? That is, the matchmaker who harbored resentment and found herself in the companion of two unsettled sisters of the young queen - the weaver and the cook?
But what if we assume that the bride-mother Babarikha was the mother of the first wife of Tsar Saltan? Where is her own daughter, the story is silent, but it becomes clear and hatred of the son-in-law's new wife, and intransigence to the "grandson". In relation to the young queen, ex-mother-in-law of Saltan combines the roles of mother-in-law and stepmother at the same time. An explosive mixture, you can’t imagine worse. So, we have figured out the nature of woman's hatred, now you can get to the definition of what was called a matchmaker.
We all noticed that in Pushkin’s fairy tale, the siblings of a woman did not even have a proper name, but was simply called Babarikha. Something like a nickname turns out, dismissive, offensive. What is it: a derivative of the name / surname of the husband or his occupation? Or does this point to her, svatina, "specialization"? Let's start in order.
We turn to the philologist for help
As the doctor of philological sciences A. Superanskaya noted, in the old days a woman, a wife, a woman was comically called a babarika, as they call a grandmother or a woman. In Pushkin’s fairy tale, Superanskaya notes, there was a change of mind, and the babarika turned into a babarikha, having become a typical suffix of women’s nickname -iha .
The suffix -iha is generally very characteristic of the nicknames of females and female animals: an elephant is an elephant, a hedgehog is a hedgehog. The same suffix could be used to designate the name of the wife, nicknamed her husband.
If the husband of this woman was called Babar, then the nickname of the woman - Babarikha (by analogy, the wife of Danila - Danilikha) is quite understandable. But such a name is not found in any dictionary of proper names. It would be more logical to assume that the surname of the husband of the match was Babarin - hence Babarikh.
Svatya baba could become Babarikha if the husband of the svatya was a babar by profession. Let us turn to the sources: there were a grabber, a kobzar, a fisherman, but there was no babar. There is no such craft in the nineteenth century in Russia!
And if this is a vocation?
And in general, there is not a word about the husband of the bride in the book, so let's turn to the nature of the activity of our heroine, from here, perhaps, we will find out what was called the bride.
In the old days, babies were called the ability to take birth and help the puerpera in the early days to care for the newborn. It was believed that the girl, although elderly, could not be a midwife, as well as a childless woman. Only a woman giving birth could entrust this responsible matter, otherwise “how will she be dumb if she herself has not tried to labor”?
Here, an oil painting is already being drawn : the character of Babarikha appears in the text only after the birth of Tsarevich Gvidon. Consequently, she is really a midwife who took birth with the queen. Being part-time the former mother-in-law of the king, she, taking advantage of an approximate position, finds a way to slander the queen and get rid of the heir.
What is the conclusion?
Summing up our study, it is worth recognizing that we failed to answer the main question, what was the name of the match. We only approached and found out that the literary nickname of the holy was based on her specialization. Who was she really - maybe Varvara Ivanovna? ​​..