These lexical collocations (and many others like them) have the effect of personifying or anthropomorphizing sud’ba. Typically one is resigned not to some impersonal force, but to a quasi-human being.
By personifying sud’ba it is easier to lay credit or blame at its—her—door. Personification is here a setup for psychological displacement and potential masochism. To blame some event harmful to the self on “blind sud’ba” is a way of not having to take responsibility for it. In effect, “I am not the cause, blind sud’ba is the cause.” In some cases “I” may in fact not be the cause; in others, however, “I” may be responsible, but also unconsciously unwilling—for whatever reasons—to admit responsibility. It is in the latter situation that the individual is behaving masochistically.
Wierzbicka presents an impressive array of evidence to support her thesis that “Russian grammar is quite unusually rich in constructions referring to things that happen to people against their will or irrespective of their will.” Some of the grammatical constructions in question reflect, in her opinion, “a folk philosophy at the heart of which appear to lie a kind of ‘fatalism’ and a kind of resignation.”27 I will not repeat Wierzbicka’s lengthy linguistic analyses here, but it is worth noting that the infinitive form of a verb is often involved in such constructions, as in the sequence type negation + infinitive + dative (person):
Ne vidat’ tebe etikh podarkov (“Alas, you’ll never see these presents”).
Ne raskryt’ tebe svoi ochen’ki iasnye (“Alas, you’ll never open those bright little eyes”—folkloric).
Ne vidat’ Egoriu ottsa-materi (“Egor wasn’t fated ever to see his father or mother again”).
Ne byt’ tebe burzhuem/Ne byt’ tebe Frantsuzom (“You are not fated to be a bourgeois/You are not fated to be a Frenchman”—Marina Tsvetaeva).
The infinitive of the verb “byt’” (“to be,” as in the last example) can participate in a variety of “fatalistic” constructions. Sometimes the words suzhdeno or sud’ba (or both) are brought in, as when Tat’iana surrenders herself to Evgenii Onegin in Pushkin’s famous poem: “No tak i byt’! Sud’bu moiu/Otnyne ia tebe vruchaiu.” (“But so be it! My sud’ba/ Henceforth I place in your hands.”).28
There is something childlike about Russian fatalism. Or, to put it another way, there is something motherly about fate itself. Joanna Hubbs says: “Among the Russian peasantry, there was a firm belief that a mother controlled a child’s development and growth by conferring a particular fate upon it.”29 The fatalistic expression “na rodu napisano,” literally “it was inscribed at birth” is ancient and widespread in Russia.30 The lullabies a mother sang to her child were believed capable of casting a spell upon the child (“baiukat’,” “to sing lullabies to,” is related to “baiat’,” “to charm,” “to cast a spell”).31
Usually what the mother wished for the child was positive—that it grow up to be big and strong, for example. But Russian peasant mothers sometimes wished a much worse sud’ba upon their child, namely, death. Folklorist Antonina Martynova found that, out of a corpus of 1,800 lullabies collected, 80 expressed the mother’s wish that the child should die.32 An example may be taken from a recently published collection of folklore about children:
It is probably safe to say that the majority of peasant mothers did not feel this way, at least consciously, and that they regarded their little children instead as a precious blessing.34 But one should keep in mind that mothers, like anyone else, are capable of feeling conscious or unconscious ambivalence toward those whom they love: “Children are a joy, children are also a sorrow,” says a proverb.35 In any case, there is substantial evidence that many Russian peasant mothers, under certain very trying conditions, actually wished their children would die. But what were these conditions?
One of the prominent demographic features of tsarist Russia was the extraordinarily high childhood mortality rates among the peasantry. In the eighteenth century Mikhail Lomonosov estimated that half of the 500,000 infants born annually died before the age of three.36 David L. Ransel has gathered statistics demonstrating that nearly half of the children born in late nineteenth-century Russia died before the age of five. To explain this appalling figure, Ransel points to the unsanitary conditions and cruel practices surrounding childbirth (see below, 190–93). He also observes that infants were often put on solid foods from the first days of life, that is, at a time when their bodies could not possibly handle the pathogens thereby introduced. Infants were often fed by means of a “soska,” an unsanitary rag containing food that had been partially chewed by another member of the family. With time the “soska” would putrefy, and even larger quantities of pathogenic bacteria would enter the child’s gastrointestinal tract.
One reason why this was happening was that mothers were absent all day during the summer work season. Having an infant to care for—even a very sick infant—was no excuse to stop working in the fields (here a mother submitted to pressure from the family and commune), so someone else in the family had to look after the child. The child was breast-fed only early in the morning and late at night—if it was breastfed at all. In the daytime the deadly “soska” was in the child’s mouth almost continuously. Even when the mother was more often available for breast feeding, the “soska” was still used as a source of food and as a pacifier.
The sud’ba of very many of these children was early death. In some areas during the summer months up to 80 percent of children born failed to survive. They died largely from the extreme dehydration produced by “summer diarrhea.”37
Ransel notes the understandable guilt which some mothers felt about their neglect. He also discusses the resigned, fatalistic attitude which parents developed as a result of the “carnage” that was going on around them. Some proverbs expressed the psychical distance that parents tried to gain from their horrible experiences, for instance, “It’s a good day when a child dies,” or “The death of a child is a mere chip off your knife blade, but that of a mom or dad leaves a gaping hole.”38 The death-wish lullabies would have to be included with this kind of lore.