Who is the East Slavic Karachun? (Word, Name, Character)

The paper explores the origin and semantics of the word karachun (korochun) having a vast specter of meanings in East Slavic languages (including Russian). It could mean ‘death’ (especially sudden and violent); serious illness’, ‘the end as a negative result, cessation, exhaustion of something’, ‘evil eye’, ‘evil spirit’; something that carries the idea of “crookedness, bentness” (‘crooked leg, stoop’ in Belarusian dialects, ‘hunched posture, crawling’ in Russian); ‘miser’ and material meanings — ‘crooked tree’, ‘old broom’ (Belarusian dialects). Apart from that, karachun and its phonetic variants have calendar semantics (‘day of the winter solstice’, ‘Christmas holidays (in general)’, ‘Christmas bread’, ‘Christmas tree’, etc.), however, these are mostly spread in the Carpathian-Balkan area and seldom occur in Russian. The authors hypothesize that Karachun1 ‘death, etc.’ and Karahun2 ‘calendar term’ go back to two heterogeneous homonyms: Karachun1 < Proto-Slavic *kъrčiti ‘to bend, to writh’ < *kъrčь / *kъrča ‘convulsions, spasm’; karachun2 < ? Albanian kёrcun (< *karcun) ‘block, stump of a tree’. In addition, the article examines the word karachun from the onomastic perspective — as a name of the mythological character that occurs both in scientific and popular literature and is believed to be an ancient Slavic deity. However, the authors argue that this one is a product of “armchair” mythologists (researchers of the 19th–21st centuries) and the result of an uncritical attitude to sources. In fact, this name belongs to the antagonist of the novel by Mikhail Popov (1770), that was replicated in the popular tales of the 18th century, from which it then migrated to the oral folk tradition (but did not become “active” there).