Here we should note the traditional sexist attitude which portrays women as not too bright: “Long on hair, but short on brains” (“Volos dolog, da um korotok”).47 There are quite a few such proverbs, and Russia is indeed a male chauvinist nation in the extreme (as will become clear in the discussion below on the slave soul of Russia as a gendered object). But the quintessential Russian fool is nonetheless a man, not a woman, a “durak,” not a “dura.” There is many an “Ivan durak,” but no “Tatiana dura.” If in the folkloric imagination there is some foolishness in women (including mothers), nonetheless it is men who go to extremes in this matter.48
Laughter is essential to the fool’s appeal, but this laughter can become rather gruesome by Western standards. The grown-up fool’s closeness to his mother is mildly funny, but non-Russians are likely to be shocked when the fool insists on keeping his mother’s corpse nearby because he cannot part with it.49 Russians laugh when the fool mistakenly takes his mother for a thief and kills her with a club.50 They laugh when the fool (in several variants) uses his mother’s corpse to force various people to pay him for allegedly murdering her.51 They are delighted when the fool throws the mother-figure of Iaga-Baba into an oven and cooks her.52
It is difficult to avoid the impression that the fool feels hostile toward his mother in many of the tales (despite, or perhaps because of his dependence on her), and that sympathetic (laughing) Russians are finding an outlet for archaic, childish hostility they once felt toward their own mothers. Their laughter at the fool implies approval of what the fool is doing to his mother.53
Consider an example of the very abundant motif-type known as the “arrant fool,”54 who tests his mother’s patience rather severely:
In a certain family there was an arrant fool. Not a day passed on which people did not complain about him; every day he would either insult someone or injure someone. The fool’s mother pitied him and looked after him as if he were a little child; whenever the fool made ready to go somewhere, she would explain to him for half an hour what he should do and how he should do it. One day the fool went by the threshing barn and saw the peasants threshing peas, and cried to them: “May you thresh peas for three days and get three peas threshed!” Because he said this the peasants belabored him with their flails. The fool came back to his mother and cried out: “Mother, mother, they have beaten up a fellow!” “Was it you, my child?” “Yes.” “What for?” “Because I went by Dormidoshkin’s barn and his people were threshing peas there.” “And then, my child?” “And I said to them: ‘May you thresh peas for three days and get three peas threshed.’ That’s why they beat me up.” “Oh, my child, you should have said: ‘May you have such an abundance that you have to be hauling it for ever and ever.’”
The fool was overjoyed. The next day he went to walk in the village and met some people carrying a coffin with a dead man in it. Remembering yesterday’s advice, he roared in a loud voice: “May you have to haul this for ever and ever!” Again he was soundly thrashed. The fool returned to his mother and told her why he had been beaten up. “Ah, my child,” she said, “you should have said: ‘May he rest in peace eternal!’” These words sank deep into the fool’s mind.
Next day he went wandering again in the village and he met a gay wedding procession. The fool cleared his throat, and as soon as he came up to the procession, he cried: “May you rest in peace eternal!” The drunken peasants jumped down from the cart and beat him up cruelly. The fool went home and cried: “Oh my dear mother.”55
This goes on for two more identically silly episodes. Finally the mother gets fed up and forbids her fool to go to the village any more, and the tale ends. In other variants there is either no resolution (the tale ends in medias res), or the fool eventually dies from his many wounds.
What is the point of such a narrative? What is funny about it, and why does it strike home for Russians?
The two chief players are mother and child. Their back-and-forth interaction is what is important (the ending varies, and is largely irrelevant). The mother seems normal, while the grown-up son is a fool that she looks after “as if he were a little child” (“kak za malym rebenkom”). Indeed the fool’s behavior is childlike—comparable to that of a two-year-old, to be precise. Mothers in all cultures know about the “terrible twos,” an age when the child is first asserting its independence from her by constantly getting into scrapes, always saying “no,” often ending an adventure in tears. This is an important stage in the formation of the self. Often the child knows perfectly well when something is wrong or harmful, but pretends not to and gets into trouble anyway. Of a child that is behaving in this obstreperous fashion Russians will use the same expression as they use for characterizing a fooclass="underline" “He is on his mind to himself” (“On sebe na ume”).56 Mothers do not necessarily love their children any less as a result of such behavior, however. The narrating mother in Natal’ia Baranskaia’s A Week Like Any Other declares of her children: “I love our little fools so much.”57 This is generally in keeping with the affectionate attitude Russians have toward the fool figure (“Akh ty moi glupen’kii,” or “Akh ty moi durachok”).58
What is going on in the Afanas’ev tale is very much like a misbehaving toddler’s interaction with the mother. Just as the rebelling child repeatedly runs off and hurts itself, the fool here keeps going into town and doing something that elicits abuse from others. And just as the little child always runs back to its mommy for comfort, the fool here runs back repeatedly to his “matushka.”
From the viewpoint of the tale’s addressee, as I observed above, the fool appears to be inviting abuse, that is, he appears to be behaving masochistically. This impression is difficult to shake in this particular tale because the fool is thrashed so many times—not just the magical number three, but five times. In another variant, the mistreatment occurs nine times in a row.59 In a literary variant by Lev Tolstoi the beatings occur seven times, with the fool being beaten to death the last time.60 Note also the fool’s epithet, “nabityi durak,” translated as “arrant fool” by Guterman, but etymologically better rendered as “very beaten fool,” or more colloquially as “stuffed full,” as in “nabityi meshok” (“a bag stuffed full”).61 Another way to convey this fool’s foolishness is to say that, no matter how much he gets beaten, the foolishness does not get beaten out of him.
The repetitiveness of the beatings is suggestive. The fool is being particularly rebellious. He is not only punishing himself, he seems to be punishing his mother as well (she becomes quite frustrated). If he cannot do anything to please her, he will punish her. His willfulness is directed at her as well as at himself—or would be if he were not so “stupid.” His foolishness is a cover that permits the Russian addressee to indulge in both self-destructive and mother-destructive fantasies. Punishing the self and punishing the mother are not very different when there is a lingering boundary problem between mother and child.
And the attempt may fail. At the deepest level, the Russian folkloric fool invites the addressee to indulge in a disturbing fantasy of remaining merged or fused with the mother. When the fool does try to make the break, his mother usually encourages him. But his efforts are in vain, at least initially, and in many variants the fool never does succeed. He must remain with his mother till the end of his days. Nothing could be more humiliating. The unseparated self is the lowest form of self. It deserves all the punishment it gets from funny storytellers and laughing listeners.