Foolishness has historical roots deep in medieval Russia.6 Synchronically speaking, the Russian idea of the fool is a peasant idea. In every village there was supposed to be a “derevenskii durachok”7 (cf. English “village idiot”). Russian peasant lore is rich with the imagery of stupidity. To select just a few items from the folktale motif-index compiled by Barag et al. in 1979:
They attempt to milk chickens.
He cuts the branch out from underneath himself and falls.
They pull on a log in order to make it longer.
A simpleton kills his own horse.
A fool is afraid of his own shadow, throws things at it.
A fool traps and accidentally kills his mother.
Foma and Erema do everything wrong—they ruin a house they are building, fail to plow a field, catch no fish, and eventually both drown.8
These ideas, however gruesome some of them may seem, elicit laughter in the appreciative Russian listener. The Russian peasant laughs at the fool, that is, permits a momentary and merely symbolic outburst of violence directed against him. The fool may do something actually violent against himself (or sometimes against someone else as well), but the listener remains in effective control while the fool does his thing. The listener’s laughter is violence contained. In psychoanalytic terms, the laughing listener expresses sadistic feelings when confronted with the fool’s masochistic behavior. The interaction of fool and listener is thus sadomasochistic in essence.
Sadistic attitudes toward the fool are very common in Russia. In general, it is assumed that a fool is someone who is beaten often, or who ought to be beaten or otherwise abused: “Beat a fool, do not spare the fist!”; “You can’t save up enough fists for all the fools”; “They’ll beat a fool even in church.”9 Although the fool cannot be taught anything by beatings (“Teaching a fool is like curing the dead”),10 there is nonetheless a powerful contradictory assumption as well, that is, that the fool (or anyone else, for that matter) needs to be “taught” by violent means:
In order to teach fools, do not spare fists (Uchit’ durakov—ne zhalet’ kulakov).
He’s grown to the size of the devil, but he hasn’t been beaten with a knout (i.e., he is stupid) (S cherta vyros, a knutom ne bit [t. e., glup]).
I’ll smarten you up. Let’s be humbly thankful for brains (said after punishment) (Ia tebe dam uma. Blagodarim pokorno za um [govoriat posle nakazaniia]).11
The knout is not torture, but knowledge in advance (Knut ne muka, a vpred’ nauka).
The rod is dumb, but it will give intelligence (Palka nema, a dast uma).12
Violence is thus an essential “pedagogical” technique in the peasant imagination (and in social reality as well, to judge from the abundant evidence for corporal punishment in traditional Russia).13
There is a strong temptation to beat the fool (sadism), while at the same time there is an urge to get the foolishness beaten out of oneself (masochism). In both processes there seems to be a fear of actually being a fool, that is, of crossing some dangerous boundary separating the self from the fool. The fact that there are so many proverbs advising one not to get involved with fools suggests that there was a real possibility that one might regard oneself as a fool (I quote just a few here from the many in the Dahl collection):
God forbid that you get mixed up with a fool (Ne dai Bog s durakom sviazat’sia).
Get mixed up with a fool, and may your soul rest in peace (S durakom sviazat’sia—vechnaia pamiat’).
You can ward off the devil with a cross and a bear with a pestle, but there is no way to get rid of a fool (Ot cherta krestom, ot medvedia pestom, a ot duraka—nichem).14
The fool is such a threat that one is in danger of becoming one just by having some relationship with one. To observe two fools fighting, for example, means that you are a fool. To accuse someone of being a fool is to risk being called a fool in return (“Ty durak” can provoke “Ot duraka slyshu”).15 The danger is generaclass="underline" “He who gets mixed up with a fool is a fool” (“Durak, kto s durakom sviazhetsia”).16
Among Soviet intellectuals the issue of whether one was a “smart” person or a fool was still important. Bulat Okudzhava wrote a famous song on this subject, titled “Song about Fools.” It seems that one day the fools (read: stupid bureaucrats, plodding hacks, neanderthal police agents, etc.) began to get embarrassed about being fools, so they had special tags attached to them which read “smart.” The song ends with the following quatrain:
One hesitates here, because for a moment it is not clear what Okudzhava now means by “smart” and by “fool.” But that is precisely the message. It is easy to confuse a “smart” person with a “fool.” The boundary is not clear. As with the nineteenth-century peasant, the twentieth-century intellectual is very concerned about how to distinguish the two. There is always a danger that the “smart” person will be mistaken for a fool, or vice versa.
For the “smart” person a fool is someone who endangers the boundary between self and other. A fool is a self who threatens fusion with other selves. The ridiculed object just might be a subject, especially if the subject is (as most Russians are) in the habit of fighting off masochistic impulses. There, but for resistance to masochism, go I.
It is easier to live with the idea that fools exist if one thinks they do not really mind their situation in life. The fool is a masochist, after all. One should not feel guilty about mistreating the fool because he likes or enjoys abuse:
Spit/piss in the eyes of a fool, and he’ll think it’s heavenly dew (Duraku khot’ pliui/stsy v glaza, a on: bozh’ia rosa).
A fool is pleased at the hole in his side (Liubo duraku, chto chirii [dyra] na boku).18
Were it not for the fool’s apparent “stupidity,” these latter proverbs would be a straightforward characterization of the fool’s masochism. As for those who are inclined to beat on fools, they have no need for a “stupidity” to conceal their sadism. Apparently concealment is not necessary in the case of sadism. This suggests that masochism is psychologically more disturbing to Russians than is sadism.
Ivan the Fool
All Russians know about the folktale (“skazka”) character Ivan the fool (“Ivan durak” or “Ivanushka durachok,” sometimes just “Ivan” or just “durak” or “duren’”).19 As Andrei Siniavskii has recently pointed out, Ivan the fool is the favorite of all Russian folktale heroes.20 He is a “low” hero who is always getting into scrapes for doing something that appears foolish or stupid. Folklorist Eleazar Meletinskii asserted that Ivan the fool is remarkably deep, psychologically, and that the humor of this fool’s actions is much more developed than in corresponding Western tales (e.g., German, Norwegian) or Eastern tales (e.g., Turkic).21 Already at the beginning of our century A. M. Smirnov argued that the great appeal of Ivan the fool throughout Russia over many generations indicates that a profound psychological truth is tapped by this figure.22