CHRISTIE'S PROGRESS JOURNAL: NOVEMBER 13-16, 2004

11-13-04 I began reading a book called, Russian Folk Belief, by Linda J. Ivanits, published by M.E. Sharpe, Inc., in Armonk, NY, in 1992. Here are some fascinating things I read about the integration of Russian peasant (or folk) beliefs with Christianity:

-“Although Russia has just celebrated the millennium of her Christianization, pagan beliefs remained so deeply imbedded among the population that the Christian church could hardly gain a foothold. This is to a considerable degree due to the low standing and ineffectiveness of the teachers of Christianity--the village clergy. The Russian clergy was poorly educated and suffered under severe social and economic plight. (ix)” -Felix J. Oinas, Indiana University

-“Those scholars who stress paganism as prevailing among the Russians up to the end of the last century seem to come closer to the truth than the idealists who insist on the people’s religious essence. (x)” -Oinas

-“The devil (chert, bes) as the incarnation of evil was able to cause any harm imaginable. He lived everywhere and could change his shape at will, appearing as a human, a black cat, black dog, pig, magpie, etc., and even as a ball of thread or a pile of hay. The devil also changed his shape in folklore according to the genre, assuming different guises in creation myths, legends, folktales, fabulates, and memorates.

-A host of spirits inhabited the peasant’s immediate neighborhood. The house spirit, domovoi, was the benevolent protector of the family. (x)” -Oinas

-“The apprehension and fear that the people felt for forests and bodies of water were carried over to their supposed rulers--the forest and water spirits (leshii and vodianoi, respectively). As beings belonging to the out-group and inhabiting a hostile environment, they represented malevolent forces for the peasants. Both of them, but especially the water spirit, became identified with the devil. The field spirit (polevoi), residing closer to home, was least feared. Rusalka, the airy female of heterogeneous origin, was the most colorful of the spirits and gave wings to the fantasy of poets and writers.

-The influence of sorcery on the psyche of the Russian peasant was overwhelming…If something went wrong in a family, be it crop failure, drought, family, discord, infertility, epidemics, or illness--it was attributed to sorcerers and witches; likewise “spoiling” (porcha), klikushestvo, damage to livestock, etc. Sorcery was feared not only by the peasants, but also by the other classes--the clergy, the nobility, and even the household of the tsar. Fear for the tsar was especially strong because of the possible threat to the political order. (xi)” -Oinas     (*This section reminds me of Tolstoy’s  The Story of Ivan the Fool.)

-“Perhaps no period in the history of the search for folk traditions has yielded such wealth as that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Russia…one can only be astonished at the degree to which the Russian peasant succeeded in preserving his ancient, pre-Christian customs and worldview. Indeed, almost every ethnographic study of village life from this period made this point. In his classic work on the village of Budogoshcha, V. N. Peretts noted that a thousand years of Christianity had penetrated the peasant’s imagination only superficially and had not displaced his ancient beliefs in all sorts of  “fantastic” spirits of nature…there is no doubt that remoteness from centers of culture and trade fostered the preservation of ancient customs and beliefs. ..V. Bondarenko, for example, writing about Tambov Province, noted that ‘under the cover of Christianity, still understood only in its external form, many remnants of paganism have been retained.’  (3-4)”

-“The term most often used for the interweaving of pre-Christian and Christian elements in the belief and practice of the Russian peasant is dvoeverie, or ‘double faith’. (4)”

-Ivanits makes it clear that such an interweaving of pre-Christian and Christian elements is not limited to Russian history. It is a cross-cultural phenomenon. She emphasizes Russia as an extreme case, adding: “Moreover, Russia experienced neither the intellectual upheaval of the Renaissance nor the purging of ancient superstitions of the Reformation. (4)”

-She speaks of a lower mythology of Russian folk, which is about “sorcerers, witches, and other persons thought to possess supernatural powers. Even on the verge of the Soviet era the Russian peasant retained his belief in spirits of the house and farmstead and of various aspects of nature. (4)”

-“Popular Christianity, however, was often a far cry from official Orthodoxy, for, as we shall see, many of its personages seem to be thinly disguised reworkings of pagan deities. (4)”

-“Early vegetation played a significant part in Palm, or “Pussy willow,” Sunday celebrations. Pussy willows were blessed in church and then kept above the icon for use in certain rites. The significance of the pussy willows was not just that they carried a church blessing, much as palms do in this country, but that they were one of the earliest forms of spring vegetation; hence, they were perceived to contain special productive and protective powers. (8)”

-It seems that there were “centuries of struggle that the Russian Orthodox Church waged to keep its greatest feast [Easter] free of pagan elements. Still, certain ancient motifs remained, perhaps because the seasonal emphasis on rebirth and new life was compatible with the sense of the Church celebration. The coloring, exchanging, and rolling of eggs was one of the central features of this holiday, as was the preparing of certain foods--kulich, a ritual sweet bread, and paskha, a pyramid-shaped cake made largely of dry cottage cheese. Although these foods were blessed in Church on Easter morning and then used to break the Lenten fast, their pre-Christian significance as productive fertility magic is still evident. Eggs (like seeds) are a standard symbol of new life, and the act of rolling them on the ground can be viewed as an attempt to transfer their power to the earth. (9)”

-“Particular attention during this holiday [Green Yuletide] was devoted to the birch tree as the symbol of vegetative power. Peasants decorated their houses inside and out with branches, and they selected one particular tree for garlanding and embellishing with ribbons, beads, etc. Usually this tree was left in the forest; in some areas it was cut and brought into the village. In either case it served as a focal point for the girls’ songs, circle dances (khorovody), and vows of eternal friendship. Here and there the tip of the tree was bent to the ground, an act evidently intended to transfer the vegetative power from the tree to the earth. (9-10)”

-“An important part of the celebration of Trinity Week was the welcoming and then “sending off” or “banishing” of the rusalka, a female spirit who, it was believed, left the water for the fields and forests at this time. These rites often involved making a doll that, at the end of the festivities, was ritually torn apart in the grain fields. The rusalka is an important personage of Russian lower mythology, and the only one connected with a ritual holiday…(10)”

-“Particularly interesting rituals surrounded the little patch of grain left uncut and standing in the field. Peasants decorated it with a ribbon, bent the heads to the ground in a rite known as ‘the curling of the beard,’ and offered it bread and salt, the traditional symbols of hospitality. According to widespread belief, the invisible spirit of the harvest preceded the reapers and hid in the uncut grain. Thus, the curling of the beard was a symbolic return of the power of vegetation to the earth in order to ensure fertility for the coming year. (12)”

-“'Mokosh’ is the one female deity mentioned among [Prince] Vladimir’s idols…her name means ‘moist’ and…she may be nothing more than another designation for the slightly personified ‘Mother Damp Earth’ of popular tradition. (14)”

-“Belief in the absolute sanctity of ‘Mother Damp Earth’ (Mat’ syra zemlia) has been central to folk belief throughout the centuries. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, peasants practiced rituals connecting them with this sanctity: they ratified oaths by swallowing a mouthful of earth; they measured boundary lines by walking them with a clump of earth on their heads; and they protected villages from cattle plague and other epidemics by plowing a furrow around them and thus releasing the life-giving properties of the earth. In addition, we have reports that peasants confessed their sins to the earth in the absence of a priest; in remote areas of Vladimir Province, old people observed a ritual of asking the earth’s forgiveness prior to death into the twentieth century. (15)”

-“…Divine Motherhood became so central to Russian popular Christianity: ‘At every step in studying Russian popular religion one meets the constant longing for a great divine female power, be it embodied in the image of Mary or someone else. Is it too daring to hypothesize, on the basis of this religious propensity, the scattered elements of the cult of a Great Goddess who once…reigned upon the immense Russian plains? (Fedotov)’ (15-6)”

-“For Rybakov, Mokosh’ is the great mother goddess of the East Slavs, whose image was preserved in Russian embroidery to the end of the nineteenth century as a woman with uplifted hands flanked by two horsemen. She is a goddess of fertility, bounty, and moisture, and the protectress of women’s work and the fate of maidens. (16)”

-There were also two other goddesses of spring: Lada and her daughter Lelia. (17)

-“[W]hile the Orthodox Church was largely successful in its attempts to obliterate gods and festivals of ancient Rus’, it was unable to prevent the inclusion of ancient personages and rites under new names in the peasant’s particular understandings of Christianity. (18)"

11-16-04 I read an article called, Turner, Solov’ev, and the ‘Frontier Hypothesis’: The Nationalist Signification of Open Spaces, by Mark Bassin, from the Journal of Modern History, September 1993. Here are some interesting things I learned from his article:

-“[T]here is nothing exclusively American about the ‘frontier.’ (473)”

- “Sergei Mikhailovich Solov’ev (1820-79)…espoused a sophisticated environmental perspective even more multifaceted than [Frederick Jackson] Turner’s, one that featured as a central element a fully recognizable frontier thesis. (476)”

-“Turner’s scholarly thought, like that of most of his contemporaries, was animated at its most basic level by this nationalist impulse. (477)”

-“[P]hysical sciences…study the organic and inorganic phenomena of the universe. The work of generations of social scientists rested upon this confident conviction, and Turner gave way to none in his eagerness to appropriate ideas and theories from the natural sciences—in particular from Darwinian teachings on organic evolution—for the purposes of his own historical analysis. (477-8)” (*Turner believed that society is an evolving organism.)

-“Discernable already in later editions of Origin of Species itself, the notion that the environment exerted a determining influence was propagated in the work of the so-called neo-Lamarckians, an assemblage of late nineteenth-century European and American scholars from the natural as well as the social sciences. This perspective was further stimulated by the emergence at this time of the novel discipline of Anthropogeographie or human geography. Developing largely under the inspiration of the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel, this new science was devoted to a purportedly natural-scientific examination of the manifold interactions between the natural milieu and human society, a sort of social ecology with a strong emphasis on the determining influence of the environment. (479)”

-“[Turner] was entirely receptive to the suggestion of a direct causal relationship between the development of organic phenomena and the conditions of the natural environment. (480)”

-“He [Turner] left no doubt that American society was ultimately to be understood as a product of its environmental context, for as he wrote in one of his most famous passages, ‘The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the [resulting] advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.’ In America’s frontier environment the nationalist Turner located the source of the country’s great national virtues: its egalitarianism and rugged individualism, its elemental energy, and, above all, its democratic inclinations. (480-1)”

-“[Solov’ev’s] original Romantic-Hegelian conception of ‘organic development’ was easily transformed into the view of human societies as biological organisms which he, like Turner, believed to be comparable to all other organisms of the natural world. ‘The fact that the laws governing natural organisms are identical to those governing the social organism has long been recognized,’ he wrote at the end of the 1850s: ‘It is easy to compare a [natural] organism with a social organism—indeed, the similarity is striking, [for] the laws are the same in both cases.’…[H]e repeatedly described Russian historical development as the growth of an embryo through childhood and adolescence into eventual maturity. (482)”

-“[Turner] was prepared to acknowledge national deficiencies and even entertained a vague pessimism in regard to the nation’s future development. Nevertheless, on balance these were but footnotes to an unshakable conviction that America was the loftiest accomplishment to date of world civilization, in a variety of important respects…he managed to cast an aura of grandeur over even his country’s shortcomings. (486)”

-“The spiritually invigorating influence of the western frontier had acted moreover as a protective agent at those moments when American society threatened to revert to European norms and patterns: ‘And ever as society on [America’s] eastern border grew to resemble the Old World in its social forms and its industry, ever, as it began to lose faith in the ideal of democracy, [the western frontier] opened new provinces, and dowered new democracies in her most distant domains with her material treasures and with the ennobling influence that the fierce love of freedom, the strength that came from hewing out a home, making a school and a church, and creating a higher future for his family, furnished to the pioneer.’ (486-7)”

-“For Solov’ev, as for most educated Russians, the problem of nationalism and Russia’s relation to Europe was far less simple and straightforward…Slavophiles…chose to extol—the soulful spirituality of the Russians and the uniquely sobornyi or voluntaristic-communal nature of their society—the Slavophile doctrine could not have been further from Turner’s own idealization of the Americans’ assertive individualism, their ‘masterful grasp of material things,’ and their hardhearted native practicality. (487)”

-“These opponents—the zapadniki, variously translated as ‘Westerners’ or, more accurately, ‘Westernizers’—shared with the Slavophiles a passionate devotion to the Russian motherland…Russia’s original roots, the Westernizers claimed, were European, and the country therefore possessed by birthright an incontestable entitlement to membership in the European fraternity…At some point in the country’s development, it was assumed, something very serious had gone wrong, with the result that Russia either had become derailed from the course of development followed by the rest of Europe or, at the very least, had been held back at a preliminary stage. (488)”

-“[T]he zapadnik Solov’ev had to explain at once why Russia was and why it was not European. As we will see, he proceeded to accomplish both tasks by reference to the determining influences of the geographical milieu.

-The notion that the physical size of a state had a direct effect on its political and social constitution was a popular one in Solov’ev’s day…(490)”

-“…Solov’ev, who objected that the simple factor of size was an inadequate criterion upon which to draw conclusions about the character of a state. Instead, the critical point was the manner in which the state had attained its dimensions historically. Rather than simply contrasting large and small states, he suggested, one should distinguish states that are ‘organic’ from those that are ‘inorganic.’ Inorganic states were political formations that had grown from minuscule origins to attain great size through a process of aggressive expansion and conquest. Such states were physically massive, but insofar as they were founded upon coercion they remained artificial and unwieldy conglomerates. (491)”

-“His models for organic states were the modern Christian nations of Europe, among which he included Russia…On the one had was the implicit assumption that the natural milieu exercised a formative and determining influence upon the political entity. The physical qualities or a geographical region, Ritter had argued, actively worked to mold and condition the development of the political state, an insight that led him to observe that the science of geography was among other things a ‘school of political science.’ From this standpoint, Solov’ev explained, the organic state was legitimate and entirely natural in the sense that it occupied an area naturally designated for it. ‘Nature itself indicated at the outset [what] the broad borders of the state [were to be].’ (492)”

-“Environmental influences represented nothing more than God’s chosen mechanism for effecting his terrestrial designs, and these designs could not but be worthy and desirable. Solov’ev although like Ritter a deeply pious man, left divine intent out of his own schema. Nonetheless, he fully shared the notion that the molding influence of Nature worked toward positive ends, for which the formation of Russia as an organic European state was the first and most compelling demonstration. (493)”

-“ ‘The physical enormity of the Russian state is conditioned by the nature of the country itself. All of the most important European part of Russia, from the White to the Black Seas and from the Caspian to the Baltic, represents one gigantic plain—the dried-out bottom of a sea.’ It was in the virtually uninterrupted flatness of this undifferentiated landform, in what he referred to as its physiographic regularity or monotony (odnoobrazie), that Solov’ev located the effective agent in shaping Russia’s emergence as a political and social entity.

-Unlike mountainous regions that divide peoples and engender differences and hostility, uninterrupted lowlands foster cohesion and fusion: ‘Here thanks to the openness of the country and the convenience of communications and intercourse, different nationalities naturally and necessarily strive toward a common level and to merge with each other. Sharp national differences are quickly muted, and soon the entire lowland represents a single nation with a single language, a single faith, a single code of morals, and a single civic order.’ (493-4)”

-“ ‘For the rapid mingling and merging of peoples which the flatness of the country made possible, convenient transportation routes are necessary—[in other words] navigable rivers—and in this respect Nature blessed our fatherland in high measure.’ Solov’ev was referring here to the intricate network of rivers draining that East European plain, which emanate almost symmetrically from a region of common origin near the geographical center around Moscow and branch off into the drainage basins of the Arctic to the north, the Baltic to the west, the Black Sea to the south, and the Caspian to the southeast…’In Russia, as everywhere, rivers served as conduits for the earliest population of the region. Peoples settled along them, the first cities appeared on their banks, and the fact that the very largest of them flow to the east or the southeast determined that these would be the main directions of expansion for the Russian state.’ Moreover, the fact that these different systems all originated in the center of the East European plain determined that this central region was ‘prepared by Nature’ eventually to dominate the political entity. (494)”

-“Thus Solov’ev rested the first part of his Westernizer-nationalist argument on the environmental contention that Russia was European because, like the other states of Europe, it was a natural and organic creation of the natural world…’The [Russia] state possessed enormous dimensions at the very moment that it came into being and…these enormous dimensions were conditioned by Nature: the expansive East European plain was designated [opredelena]( to be the region for the new state, and because it was a broad plain crossed in various directions by large and rapid rivers which all originate in a common region, this plain was necessarily obliged to serve as the region of a unified state.’ (495)”

-“Movement in this particular direction was facilitated, again at every stage, by the convenient network of waterways. ‘The fate of these tribes,’ Solov’ev concluded, ‘was determined by the direction of movement, it was determined by the nature of the respective countries they occupied.’ (496)”

-Solov’ev: “We all know how advantageous for the rapid development of social life are close proximity to the ocean, an extensive coastline, a moderately proportioned and sharply delimited state area, convenient natural networks for internal movement, the diversity of [physiographic] forms, the absence of enormous oppressive dimensions, and a beneficent climate with neither the enervating heat of Africa nor the Asian frost. Such advantages distinguish [western] Europe from the other parts of the earth, and they can be seen as reasons for the brilliant development of the peoples of Europe and for their domination over the peoples in other parts of the earth.”  Bassin followed this saying: “If in the western half, Europe was thus blessed with favorable natural endowments, however, its eastern reaches were not so fortunate. (496-7)”

-Solov’ev: “For Western Europe and its peoples, Nature has been a mother; for Eastern Europe, and for the peoples who were destined to develop here, she has been an evil stepmother.” Bassin responds to this, saying: “This characterization of the natural world as an evil stepmother is notable, for it marked a significant break with the tradition of Ritterian environmentalism. Any notion that environmental influences could have an effect that was less than desirable for the proper and appropriate development of the society in question contravened quite directly the teleological underpinnings of Ritter’s teachings about the natural world as God’s carefully designed Erziehungsanstalt for the human race. (497)”

-“Had other aspects of Russia’s environmental situation been different, Solov’ev speculated— had the climate been more moderate, the soils more fertile, or population densities greater— then the problem of remoteness and all-pervading isolation might have been ameliorated. ..Nature exerted its most fateful influence on Russian national development. (498)”