Among the enduring theories in Russian ethnology is one advanced by D. K. Zelenin, according to which East Slavic peasant culture distinguishes more or less strictly between “two categories of the dead”: roditeli (“ancestors who died of old age,” “the honoured and respected dead”) and zalozhnye (“those who died before the natural end of their lives,” “the unclean dead … often even harmful and dangerous”).

Zelenin did, in fact, accurately describe peasant beliefs and customs concerning “those who died unnatural deaths,” as well as sorcerers and witches. His attempt to interpret such beliefs in terms of a supposedly existing category of zalozhnye dead in peasant culture, however, appears to have been mistaken.

First and foremost, the scholar misinterpreted the dialect term zalozhnye. Zelenin believed that this word from the Vyatka region derived from the verb zalozhit’ (“to cover over”), and that an older designation for these dead was the participle zalozhennye (“covered over”), since their bodies were not buried in the earth but covered with boards or stakes.

I believe that this peasant term derives from one of the dialect meanings of the verb zalozhit’: “to forget” or “to abandon.” It thus refers to the “forgotten” dead—those left without ritual commemoration.

Alexander A. Panchenko, “The Dead: ‘Good’, ‘Evil’, and Something In Between” (Otechestvennye zapiski, no. 5, 2013).