The leshy

The forest spirit of Russian folk belief, who takes human or animal shape and grows or shrinks to match his surroundings. Ukrainian tradition has a forest demon called the lisovyk.

Jan Máchal, in his 1918 survey of Slavic mythology, says Russians call the forest spirit the leshy or lěsovik, from their word for forest, and that he appears as a man or an animal. As a man he is old, with long hair and a beard, flashing green eyes and a hairy body. His height follows whatever he lives in: among forest trees he can grow as tall as they are, while in the fields he stays level with the grass.

Wikipedia says the leshy leads travellers astray and carries off the young. It adds that these traits, which he shares with the Chort, the devil, lead some to see him as evil, though his mood depends on how people treat the forest. He is also said to take children abused by their parents away to the realm of the forest folk. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine lists the lisovyk, the forest demon, as an evil spirit that grazes the forest animals.

The spirit turns up in 19th-century books. In a tale in W. R. S. Ralston's 1873 Russian Fairy Tales, a hunter realises the peasant before him is a Leshy and shoots him in the belly. The wounded Leshy drags himself off into the thicket. The hunter follows his dog to a hill with a hut inside a cleft, and there finds the Leshy dead on a bench, with a young woman weeping beside him. In Bezhin Meadow, from Ivan Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches of 1852, a character named Ilyusha says the wood-spirit never shrieks: it is mute, and does nothing but clap its hands and rattle.