If, in addition, the infant is regularly “steamed” by its mother in a bathhouse (including whipping with birch switches—see below, chap. 8), then it is difficult to imagine how the child could avoid rage at its mother. Also, if the child is later (as a toddler) tied for several hours with a rope to a table or a shelf for misbehavior—as was known to happen among the peasantry97—then again it seems very likely that the child must become enraged at its mother. Finally, in times and places where there were high childhood mortality rates, surviving children may have developed ambivalent and problematical attitudes toward their mothers (see above discussion of sud’ba, 74).
While mothers in all cultures exercise considerable control over the movement and actions of their infants, mothers who in addition swaddle their infants exercise considerably more control. Initially this control may seem rather impersonal, both because the infant has little idea of what a person is, and because the control is exercised “at a distance” from the mother. The mother does not directly hinder the child’s movements, the swaddling bands do. The bands are inexorable. Perhaps at first the child is incapable of making a mental connection between the bands and the mother. But the repeated experience of being unbound and bound up by the mother, especially if this extends well beyond the commencement of the separation-individuation process (i.e., around four months), must eventually make it evident to the child that the mother is the one who does the hateful restraining.
With swaddling, then, there is an enhanced potential for the mother-child relationship to become problematical, and a problematical relationship with the pre-Oedipal mother itself offers an opportunity for the development of masochistic feelings and behaviors, as we saw above. From the child’s viewpoint, there is pain and anger (as if there weren’t already enough pain and anger when swaddling is absent!). The mother’s control and authority must seem utterly absolute. At the same time the child must feel abandoned by the mother, all alone with powerful emotions that, initially directed against the mother, may then be directed against mother-substitutes (e.g., defiant rebellion against Mother Russia), or turned around against the self (giving rise to guilt, as Gorer argued). Here it is rage turned against the self which is of primary interest.
Swaddling may be said to encourage masochism in the sense that it stimulates the child to “give up” any resistance to constraint by the swaddling bands (this is in fact the physiological response in very young infants—they tend to go limp). But swaddling also fosters masochistic feelings. Tolstoy says that he felt extremely sorry for himself, that he let out a scream that was repellent even to himself (yet he kept screaming). He did not blame those who swaddled him (possibly his mother and nurse together)—which was already a first step toward blaming himself. But even if he did not blame himself, he blamed sud’ba—that is, a mental construct which, as we saw earlier, is ripe with masochistic possibilities.
It appears, then, that swaddling—especially when severe (“tugo”) and prolonged—contributes to masochism in Russia. Whether it contributes to other adult psychological characteristics is another question which I will not deal with here.
According to psychoanalytic theory, masochism has its roots in the pre-Oedipal period of early childhood. This is probably true cross-culturally, although there is great sociocultural variation in the quantity and quality of opportunities for adults to behave or to fantasize in masochistic fashion. In Russia there are opportunities galore. In addition, there is a climate of guilt which pushes adult individuals toward masochistic solutions to life’s problems. Add to this the traditional Russian abuse of infants by swaddling and associated practices, and it becomes difficult to imagine how masochism can be avoided in Russia.
SIX
The Russian Fool and His Mother
The fool (masculine “durak,” feminine “dura”) is a species of masochist. He or she deliberately does things which do not seem to make good sense, at least from the viewpoint of an outside observer. In particular, the “stupid” things a fool does are harmful to the fool. Observers laugh—sometimes even the fool laughs—because the fool’s acts are self-destructive, self-defeating, and humiliating. What the fool does thus fits the clinical definition of masochism given at the beginning of this book.
A Surplus of Fools
Foolishness is a universal phenomenon. Many Russians claim, however, that Russia has more than her share of fools. Russia has so many fools, according to an old proverb, that the supply should last for the next one hundred years (“Na Rusi, slava Bogu, durakov let na sto pripaseno”).1 Although this proverb is itself more than a hundred years old, there is no indication that the attitude reflected in it has changed. In the late Soviet press, for example, the phrase “country of fools” (“strana durakov”) was very often encountered, and no one but extreme right-wingers (e.g., Igor’ Shafarevich)2 seemed to mind it. Consider the following item from a 1991 issue of Moscow News:
An organizing committee for the formation of the Russian Foolish Party [Orgkomitet po formirovaniiu Duratskoi partii Rossii] has been created in Tiumen. Its chair, Iu. Alekseev, declared that only his party can count on success in this “country of fools.” In the upcoming mayoral election he is challenging the current head of the city soviet.3
There was some hope that things would change after the coup of August 1991 was foiled by democratically minded forces. On the front page of an issue of Literaturnaia gazeta published on 21 August of that year, poet Evgenii Evtushenko declared:
Finally, it seemed, Russians were not being submissive, self-destructive fools, but were resisting harmful orders handed down from above.
One year later, however, in an issue of Moskovskie novosti, we find Russian journalist-playwright Aleksandr Gel’man asserting that foolishness is alive and well in Russia. Engaging in a playful masochism of his own, Gel’man calls himself a “fool” and declares: “Stupidity [glupost’] is a large social force which has been neglected for a long time. We stupid ones, after all, are in the majority.” Gel’man goes on to say:
Oh, that stupidity of ours! It is not huge or measureless, but it is inescapable. Once in a while it seems like we might just be saved from it, we might just shake it out of our heads after all—but then we wake up the next day (next year, next century) and there it is, the little mother is right there in her place [matushka na svoem meste].5
There is no escape, for “we are in love with our stupidity, and love is blind,” says Gel’man. Stupidity is thus personified, she is a beloved “matushka,” and no other “dama” can possibly substitute for her. This “matushka,” to judge from our earlier discussion of the important role of the mother in the ontogeny of masochism, is an utterly appropriate personification.