The Lake Beetle as Groom

The Lake Beetle as Groom (Russian: Озерный жук — жених, romanized: Ozernyy zhuk - zhenikh) is a Russian fairy tale (skazka) collected by Russian philologist Dimitry M. Balashov [ru]. It deals with the marriage between a human maiden and a lake beetle that changes into a human named Osip. The heroine's mother murders her husband and the maiden curses her children to become birds at the end of the tale.

The tale is classified in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as type ATU 425M, "The Snake as Bridegroom", a subtype related to the international cycle of the Animal as Bridegroom, in that a human maiden marries a man that can assume animal shape due to a curse or his enchanted nature. The tale is also connected to the Lithuanian and Baltic story of Eglė, the Queen of Serpents, with variants collected in other Slavic languages, like Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian (East Slavic) and Polish.