The “submission” Freud speaks of here would very well render the Russian smirenie. And the “lesser minds” Freud refers to might well be ordinary Russian peasants who have at their fingertips so many proverbs about the virtues of smirenie.
One does not have to actually mention God or the tsar to get into the spirit of smirenie. For example, Slavophile philosopher Aleksei Khomiakov says:
The reverence felt by the Russian who passes through Europe is quite understandable. Humbly [smirenno] and with bowed head he visits the Western sanctuaries of everything beautiful, in full awareness of his personal—and our general—impotence. I would even say that there is a kind of joyful feeling in this voluntary humility [v etom dobrovol’nom smirenii].7
The one before whom one feels smirenie does not even have to be male. Khomiakov’s great reverence for his powerful mother is apparent in these words he wrote shortly after her death:
As far as I am concerned, I know that, however useful I may be, I owe to her both my direction and my steadfastness in this direction, although she did not intend this. Happy is he who had such a mother and such a mentor in childhood, and at the same time what a lesson in smirenie is given by this conviction! How little of what is good in a person belongs to that person!8
As we saw earlier, Khomiakov advocated smirenie of the individual primarily in relation to the collective, be that collective religious or secular (the extended notion of sobornost’). However, the collective, I will argue below, is itself an icon of the mother.
A curious thing about smirenie is that the one who achieves it is often proud of it, or is at least not deprived of self-esteem because of it. One submits, yet one is not lowered in one’s own eyes. On the contrary, one may be elevated, one may be narcissistically gratified. Khomiakov even speaks of an undesirable “proud smirenie” (“gordoe smirenie”).9 In his book on Dostoevsky Berdiaev says that “often Russians take pride in their special smirenie[gordiatsia svoim iskliuchitel’nym smireniem].”10 Dostoevsky’s personifying statement about Russia’s greatness (in The Brothers Karamazov) is a perfect example: “Russia is great in her smirenie” (“velika Rossiia smireniem svoim”).11 But a peasant proverb admonishes: “Self-abasement (excessive smirenie) is worse than pride” (“Unichizhenie [izlishnee smirenie] pache gordosti”).12
The apparent logical anomaly indicates that a reactive psychological process of some kind is taking place. Custine, too, noticed this: “Conforming to this social devotion, he [the typical Russian peasant] lives without joy, but not without pride; for pride is the moral element essential to the life of the intelligent being. It takes every kind of form, even the form of humility,—that religious modesty discovered by Christians.”13 The French word which Custine uses here is “humilité,”14 which in context seems to be a reasonable translation of smirenie.
The process is familiar to psychoanalysis. Otto Fenichel speaks of the “pride in suffering” and “ascetic pride” which accompany certain masochistic practices.15 The extreme form is what Charles Sarnoff calls “masochistic braggadocio.”16
Not all Russians take pride in their smirenie. But it is clear that smirenie itself is a psychological state widespread in Russia, and that this state offers abundant opportunities for masochistic enactment.
Sud’ba
The most total form of resignation to events in the universe is fatalism. Such an attitude was endemic among the peasant masses of Russia. This is recognized by very different kinds of scholars. Historian Richard Pipes says, for example: “The true religion of the Russian peasantry was fatalism. The peasant rarely credited any event, especially a misfortune, to his own volition. It was ‘God’s will,’ even where responsibility could clearly be laid at his own doorstep, e.g. when carelessness caused a fire or the death of an animal.”17 Compare K. D. Kavelin who, in his 1882 polemic titled The Peasant Question, declared: “The peasant may be happy, or sad, he may complain about his fate [sud’bu], or he may thank God for it, but he accepts good and evil without so much as a thought that one might be able to attract the former or fight against and defeat the latter. Everything in his life is given, predetermined, preestablished.”18
It is easy to see the relevance of such attitudes to masochism. A peasant who failed to act on his or her own behalf because of fatalistic ideas was more likely to be victimized than the peasant who did not. The fatalistic peasant was more likely to be behaving self-destructively than the realistic peasant.
The relevant lexical item here is sud’ba. Most dictionaries render this word as “fate” or “destiny,” but Wierzbicka shows that the Russian concept is holistic, referring to a person’s entire life which seems utterly predetermined, while the English words refer to more limited situations and occupy a fairly minor place in English-speaking cultures. Wierzbicka found that, in comparable corpora of Russian and English, sud’ba occurs much more frequently than fate and destiny combined.19
Sud’ba is taken for granted. The philosopher Vladimir Solov’ev described it as a “fact” that is “beyond question.”20 It is also unavoidable. One’s sud’ba is something one must accept with total resignation and passivity. “You can’t walk away from sud’ba” (“Ot sud’by ne uidesh’”), says the proverb.21 It is a proverb all Russians know, not just peasants.
A person is, in a sense, sentenced forever to a specific sud’ba. There is no choice. There can never be two of them, there can be only one: “Dvum sud’bam ne byvat’, a odnoi ne minovat’” (“There is no such thing as two sud’bas, and one there is no escaping”).22 The same can be said of death, as in Count Rostopchin’s words to Muscovites about to be invaded by Napoleon: “Dvum smertiam ne byvat’. Chemu byt’ togo ne minovat’” (“One cannot die twice. What is to be cannot be escaped”).23
Wierzbicka makes a good argument for her thesis that the phraseology of sud’ba stresses “an attitude of acceptance and resignation.”24 Here are some of the phrases and expressions she culls from Aleksandr Zholkovskii’s extensive entry in the Mel’chuk-Zholkovskii combinatorial dictionary25 and from Dahl’s dictionary26 of peasant Russian:
Chto sud’ba skazhet, khot’ pravosud, khot’ krivosud, a tak i byt’ (“Whatever sud’ba decrees, be it just or unjust, will come to pass”).
Sud’ba ruki sviazhet (“Sud’ba will tie your hands/arms”).
neumolimaia sud’ba (“inexorable sud’ba”).
v rukakh sud’by (“in the hands of sud’ba”).
ruka/perst sud’by (“the hand/finger of sud’ba”).
voleiu sudeb/sud’by (“by the will of sud’ba”).
slepaia sud’ba (“blind sud’ba”).