What about the children who survived the high childhood mortality rates? They, as they became old enough to understand, must have been deeply disturbed by the deaths of siblings and other children around them. They must have realized that they too were potential victims, and that their parents were somehow responsible. They also must have sensed that their parents were trying not to become too attached to them, or wishing for their death outright. As we will see in the clinical discussion below (chap. 5), a child who perceives a parent (especially the mother) as hostile, withdrawn, or otherwise inadequate may develop in a masochistic direction. Certainly a child whose mother openly expresses a death wish against the child will be adversely affected. One can easily imagine a masochistic fantasy arising out of this situation, and perhaps persisting into adulthood, in effect: “very well, then, my mother wants me to die, so I will die—or commit some self-destructive act.” Such a person might needlessly get into dangerous, suicidal situations. But when something bad actually happened, sud’ba would be blamed. It would be too painful to think badly of one’s own mother.
The peasant child who died left its natal mother and went back to “mother earth.” Everyone who lives must die. Everyone’s fate is death. But it is not immediately obvious why death should be imaged by the survivors as a return to the mother. Why not the father—or a second cousin for that matter? Why any person at all? One’s lifeless body goes into the earth, but why personify the earth in this context?
That Russians did (and still do) personify the earth as a mother is well known. The peasant topos “mother moist earth” (“mat’ syra zemlia”) refers to the mother specifically as a place one goes to after dying, or in order to die (as opposed to a fertile place which gives birth to a harvest—for which there are other topoi). Ransel speaks of peasant beliefs about the earth pulling the child back to itself, inviting death. A child born face down was expected to die soon.39 There are several proverbs of the type “We are born not for life, but for death [Ne na zhivot rozhdaemsia, a na smert’].”40
To resist death too much is to resist “mother moist earth.” Jesus Christ was the only one to succeed at this, for he underwent a resurrection (“voskresenie”) which is celebrated on Easter Sunday, the most important holiday in the Russian Orthodox Church. In view of this, is it surprising that Merezhkovskii heard mother-cursing mixed in with the happier utterances of an Easter celebration? (see above, 50). An eloquent religious proverb captures the contrast: “For some it’s ‘Christ has arisen!,’ but for us it’s ‘Do not weep for me, mother!’” (“Komu: ‘Khristos voskrese!’, a nam: ‘Ne rydai mene, mati!’”).41 The words in the first half of the proverb are traditionally spoken by Orthodox Russians to one another on Easter Sunday. They signify great joy. The words in the second half, which derive from portions of the Russian Orthodox liturgy and from the folkloric spiritual songs, were spoken by Christ to his Blessed Mother as he was dying on the cross.42 They mean utter misery. The alternatives expressed by the proverb are thus: arise and live versus die in the presence of the mother. Resurrection is not only opposed to death, but is in some sense contrasted with the mother. In rising from the dead one emerges from the mother, in dying one reenters the mother. In the spiritual songs, for example, the Mother of God experiences a quickening of her womb (“Utroboiu svoei razgoraiuchi”)43 as she sees her son dying on the cross.
Psychoanalyst Theodor Reik offers, I think, the clearest explanation for the fateful association of death with the mother, although he is not speaking specifically about Russians:
For all of us the mother is the woman of destiny. She is the femme fatale in its most literal sense, because she brought us into the world, she taught us to love, and it is she upon whom we call in our last hour. The mother as a death-dealing figure became alien to our conscious thinking. But she may become comprehensible in this function when death appears as the only release from suffering, as the one aim desired, the final peace. It is in this sense that dying soldiers call for their mothers. I can never forget a little boy who, in the agonies of a painful illness, cried: “Mother, you have brought me into the world, why can’t you make me dead now?”44
Mothers bring children into the world. Therefore the possibility of leaving the world, of death, ought also to be associated with the mother. One’s inescapable fate is personified as a mother everywhere, not just in Russia. A mother who is neglectful, or outright infanticidal,45 only intensifies a personification which already exists in the minds of those who observe her. Some Russian peasants no doubt understood that children were dying all around them in part because of maternal neglect. But, as children themselves, they had already understood that their mothers had given them life, and that they therefore “owed Mother Nature a death” (to use Freud’s expression).
When people die in droves, or for no apparent reason, life does not seem to be worth much. That is, when sud’ba is behaving in “stupid” fashion, an individual’s life holds little value, as in the proverb: “Sud’ba is a turkey, and life is a kopek” (“Sud’ba—indeika, zhizn’—kopeika”).46 When one feels mistreated generally, fate may be represented as a bad mother, that is, a stepmother, as in songs about “sud’ba-stepmother, bitter lot” (“sud’ba-machekha, gor’kaia doliushka”).47
Nikolai Nekrasov’s poem “Mother” features a “martyr-mother” who says to her children:
It is as if this poor mother were predetermining the sud’ba of her poor children by her very utterance. The lines have a distinctly performative ring.
Nadezhda Durova (1783–1866), the famous noblewoman who dressed as a man and fought in the Russian army against the Napoleonic invaders, also heard about the unhappy sud’ba in store for her specifically from her mother: “She spoke to me in the most horrible terms about the sud’ba of this [i.e., female] sex [o sud’be etogo pola]: a woman, in her opinion, is obliged to be born, to live, and to die in slavery [v rabstve]; eternal bondage [nevolia], burdensome dependence, and all sorts of oppression are her lot [dolia] from the cradle to the grave.”49 Only Durova, unlike most Russian women of her day, rebelled. She was one of the notable Russian antimasochists. Slavery was no sud’ba for her.
Soviet social psychologist V. V. Boiko says that the immense burden on modern mothers consists, in part, of “a large moral responsibility for the sud’ba of her children.”50
I hope these diverse examples sufficiently indicate that the idea of sud’ba is very often associated with the mother. In the clinical discussion of masochism below (chap. 5) I hope to show that this association is not an accident.