“The Shrewish Wife." The falcon under the hat: Russian merry tales and fairy tales, Selected and translated by Guy Daniels, New York: Funk & Wagnalls; 1969, pp. 52-55.

Tale Summary

There was once a man who was made miserable by his wife, who was constantly nagging him and who felt he was always wrong. If he said one thing, she would say or do the other. One day, they were out picking green raspberries (they were picking them green because when the man said they wouldn’t be ripe for another week, she demanded that they be picked immediately), when the man saw a very deep hole in the middle of the berry patch. Seeing his wife get closer to it, he warned her not to go any farther because of it. She said it was nonsense and then fell right in. The man could see no sign of her, and so he went back home, where he enjoyed the most peaceful few days of his life. Late one night, he found a scared-looking imp on his doorstep. The devil asked if it was his wife down in the pit, because she was making life miserable for all of the demons there. The man said yes, she was his wife, and the imp offered him anything to take her back. The man asked for a full bag of gold and the imp agreed, when just then the wife showed up at the porch. The imp fled immediately, but the next morning, the man found a bag of gold on the porch. He wondered why the imp did this, because the wife had come back all by herself without his help, but the answer was because the imp feared that if he did not give him the gold, the wife herself would come back to retrieve it.