Vlilhority in most areas was naturally invested in "elders" and exercised through extended family relationships. Within.,Jhe Christian name of each Kiissiiiu is included even today the name of his father. The prevailing 1 1 i;tu worJsToF^cSnfifry" andwpeoplevr*have the~same root as "birth"; native land" and "land ownership," the same as "father."7 The individual h id in subordinate himself to group interests to accomplish his daily tasks: tin* communal clearing of land, building of fortifications and churches, and • hunting of group prayers and offices. Later attempts to find in the "Russian »uiil" an innate strtving""toward communality {sobornost') and "family happiness" may often represent little more than romantic flights from l'ir i-iil realities. But the practical necessity for communal action is hard to deny for the early period; and already in the fourteenth century the word "communal" (sobornaid) apparently began to be substituted for the word "1 ntholic" (kafolicheskaia) in the Slavic version of the Nicene Creed.s
For better or worse, the sense of sharing experience almost as members "I .1 common family was an Important element in forming the cultural tradi-1114i ol modern Russia. Intensified by common suffering and glorified memo-rlcit of Kievan times, this feeling was perhaps even deeper in the interior Hi.in in the more prosperous and cosmopolitan centers of Novgorod, Smolensk, and Polotskto ffie west.It was in this inner region that the cult of iln Mother of GolTwai~c!evSI6ped with the greatest intensity. Feasts like thai of the intercession (Pokrov) of the Virgin-unknown to Kiev-were liitioduced in this region; and a cathedral dedicated to the Assumption of iln Virgin (Uspensky Sobor) enjoyed in Vladimir and Moscow the central role played by the more purely Byzantine Santa Sophia in Kiev and Novgorod. Although this cult of the Virgin was also growing concurrently m Byzantium and even in the West, it appears to have generated a special primitive intensity and sense of familial intimacy in the Russian interior.
Within the family the mother seems to have been the binding force. in a society whose riclrandlmaginative epic literature contains few refer-1 in cs to romantic love and no idealized pair of lovers, the mother tended to
become an unusually important focus of reverence and affection.9 If the father's role in the family was likened in the household guide of the mid-sixteenth century (Domostroy) to that of the head of a monastery, the mother's role might well have been compared to that of its saint or spiritual "elder." She was a kind of living version of the omnipresent icons of the "Mother of God"-the "joy of all sorrows" and "lady of loving kindness," as the Russians were particularly prone to call Mary. Men monopolized the active conduct of war and affairs, whereas women cultivated the passive spiritual virtues of endurance and healing love. Women quietly encouraged the trend in Russian spirituality which glorified non-resistance to evil and voluntary suffering, as if in compensation for the militant official ethos of the men. Women played a decisive role in launching and keeping alive the last passionate effort to preserve the organic religious civilization of medieval Russia: the famed Old Believer movement of the seventeenth century.10 Even in later years great emphasis was placed on the strong mother figure, who bears up under suffering to hold the family together; and to the grandmother (babushka), who passes on to the next generation the mixture of faith and folklore, piety and proverb, that comprised Russian popular culture.11 Russia itself came to be thought of less as a geographical or political entity than as a common mother (matushka) and its ruler less as prince or lawmaker than a common father (batiushka). The term "Russian land" was feminine both in gender and allegorical significance, related to the older pagan cult of a "damp mother earth" among the pre-Christian Eastern Slavs.
Earth is_the_jtussian "Eternal Womanhood,'^notthe…celestial image
of it; mother, not virgin; fertile, not pure; and black, for the best Russian
soil4.is„.black.12)
Thejriver Volga also was referred to as "dear mother" in the first Russian folk.song ever recorded and "natal mother" in one of the most popular: the ballad of Stenka Razin.13
? The extension of Kievan civilization on to the_headwaters of thisthe.
/-largest river in Eurasia proved the means of its salvation. The very in-hospitability of this northern region offered a measure of protection'Tforn both east and west. The Volga provided an inland waterway for'future expansion to the east and south; and its tributaries in northwestern Russia reached almost to the headwaters of other rivers leading into the Baltic,
Black, and Arctic seas.??---
But the movement out to the sea and onto the steppe came later in Russian history. This was essentially a period of retreat into a region where the dominant natural feature was the forest.
i.. 1 ne ? uresi j-x.
In speaking of the region, Russian chroniclers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries depart from their usual tendency to use the name of a dominant city, referring instead to zaleskaia zemlia, "the wooded land": a pointed reminder that the virgin forest was the nursery of Great Russian ??????*?^??1????????1?????17^??1?? folklore taught "that the primeval forest had extended all the way up to heaven.15 In the formative early period, the forest represented a kind of evergreen curtain for the imagination, shielding it from the increasingly remote worlds of Byzantine and Western urbanity.
It is probably not too much to say that the wooded plain shaped the life of Christian Muscovy as profoundly as the desert plain that of Moslem Arabia. In both areas food and friendship were often hard to find, and the Slavic like the Semitic peoples developed warm compensating traditions of hospitality. At the lowest level, peasants presented the ritual bread and salt to all arrivals; at the highest level, princes welcomed visitors with the elaborate banquets and toasts that have remained characteristic of official Russian hospitality.
If life in the scorching desert was built around the dwelling in the oasis and its source of water, life in the frozen forest was built around the dwelling in the clearing and its source of heat. From the many words used for "dwelling place" in Kievan Russia, only izba, meaning "heated building," came into general use in Muscovy.10 Being permitted to sit on or over the -earthenware stove in a Russian dw^llmgjw^iJhe_uJtimate in peasant hos-pitaUty^heequi^aJratj^^iying a man somstinngjo drink in the desert. The hot communal bath had a semi-religious significance^ still evidenFIoday ia some RusslSn~pTiblic~,b^tn^^MnFuTm^h~^mTas and analogous in some ways to the ritual ablutions of desert religions.17
Unlike the desert nomad, however, thejygical Muscovite was sedentary, for he was surrounded not by barren sand but ?????^??????????? forest he could extract notjmly logs for his^hut but wax for his candles, bark for his shoes and primitive records, fur for his clothing, moss for his floors, and pine boughs for his bed. For those who knew its secret hiding places, the forest could also provide meat, mushrooms, wild berries, and-as its greatest culinary prize--sweetjioney.
Man's rival in the pursuit of honey through the forests was the mighty bear, who acquired a special place in the folklore, heraldic symbolism, and decorative wood carvings of Great Russia. Legend had it that the bear was originally a man who had been denied the traditional bread and salt of human friendship, and had in revenge assumed an awesome new shape and retreated to the forest to guard it against the intrusions of his former species. The age-old northern Russian customs of training and wrestling
with bears carried in the popular imagination certain overtones of a primeval struggle for the forest and its wealth, and of ultimately re-establishing a lost harmony among the creatures of the forest.18