The matrifocality of Russian experience is what makes women such a threat to men in Russia. There is a whole series of proverbs which indicate that the peasant male felt inescapably tied down or restricted by his wife, yet at the same time he fatalistically accepted such restriction:
A wife is not a boot (not a bast shoe), for she cannot be kicked off (Zhena ne sapog [ne lapot’], s nogi ne skinesh’).
A wife is not a mitten, for she cannot be thrown off (Zhena ne rukavitsa, s ruki ne sbrosish’).
A wife is not a gusli: having played, you cannot hang her up on the wall (Zhena ne gusli: poigrav, na stenku ne povesish’).
A wife is not a saddle, for she cannot be taken off your back (Zhena ne sedlo: so spiny ne symesh’).37
A wife is not this, a wife is not that, but most important a wife is not your mother:
A wife is not a mother, whose body should not be beaten (Zhena ne mat’, ne bit’ ei stat’).38
The wife and mother thus form a kind of equivalence class, with the wife functioning as a stand-in for the more forbidding and dangerous mother. Semiotically speaking, a man’s wife is a maternal icon.39 One may wish (have wished) to beat the mother, but in fact one is only allowed to beat the iconic signifier of the mother.
Here we are dealing with phenomena which are familiar to the psychoanalytic anthropologist. Mother-cursing, wife-beating, heavy drinking, and generally hypermasculine behavior are characteristic of men in matrifocal cultures everywhere.40 Referring specifically to the Russian culture, psychiatrist Henry Dicks says that Russian men repress the “mother’s boy” inside themselves in favor of “rugged, swaggering, ‘masculine’ behavior.”41
The traditional Russian patriarch may from time to time exercise abusive force over his wife (especially when under the influence of alcohol), but he tends to slip back into a submissiveness and passivity that characterized his early experience with his mother.42 His wife is then in a position to run his life for him, as if she owned him along with their children. In these periods she will seem a “matriarch” to the outside observer. But in reality she is enslaved by her husband, for taking care of both his physical and psychological needs is a considerable burden. She pays for her imagined control with labor, and besides, the illusion of control is itself shattered every time he flies into a rage and beats her up, or steps in to make an important family decision, or any time she tries to exercise power outside of the family.
Suffering Women
Whether the Russian mother is loved or hated, worshipped or beaten (or both), controls or is controlled by her spouse, she suffers. It is important that she suffer. The Russian mother is almost by definition a sufferer, whereas there is no notion of a suffering father.43 Mothers sacrifice themselves with their enduring patience, they redeem themselves and others with their misery. Sometimes—not always—their suffering is masochistic in nature. Sometimes also the representation of their suffering seems exaggerated, as though the suffering of their children were being projected upon them.
Mother Russia herself suffers, as in these lines from Nikolai Nekrasov:
Similarly, writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn utilizes in his novels what Ewa Thompson terms the “topos of Russia-as-victim.”45 In Boris Pasternak’s Doktor Zhivago Mother Russia is characterized as a martyr (“muchenitsa”).46 Ordinary Russians, too, perceive Russia as suffering. In his psychoanalytic study Dicks says: “It was remarkable how often my interviewees expressed the postwar state of Russia in terms of their ‘starving, neglected mother.’”47
Mother Russia’s suffering is so great that she needs to be “saved”—especially if one is a Russian nationalist. Hence the anti-Semitic commonplace: “Beat the Jews and save Russia!” (“Bei zhidov, spasai Rossiiu!”). The conservative tsarist censor Aleksandr Nikitenko lamented: “Poor Russia, they insult you so cruelly! God save us from revolution!”48 Even the liberal newspapers in today’s poverty-ridden post-Soviet Russia constantly speak of “saving” Russia. Because her customary epithet actually is “Mother,” Russia offers a particularly direct example of Richard Koenigsberg’s thesis that “the wish to ‘save the nation’ is the projective equivalent of the wish to restore the omnipotence of the mother.”49
Billington says of ancient Russia: “Women quietly encouraged the trend in Russian spirituality which glorified non-resistance to evil and voluntary suffering.”50 In his Diary of a Writer Dostoevsky heaped praise upon the Russian woman, “that self-renouncing martyr for the Russian man.”51 Nikolai Nekrasov praises suffering mothers throughout his poetry, for example, the “martyr mother” (“muchenitsa-mat’”) in a poem titled “Mother.”52 Contemporary fashion designer Viacheslav Zaitsev attributes part of his success to his “sainted mother,” to her “heroic patience, and a saintly capacity for self-sacrifice.”53
The Russian mother does not necessarily suffer for her child. The important thing is to suffer. An overworked Soviet mother interviewed by Hansson and Lidén said: “She [a mother] has to suffer the sorrows of her people. Then her child will turn out well. I’m quite convinced of that.”54
In the religious folklore the maternal image is a suffering image. The Russian Madonna tends to be very somber. She is, as Siniavskii says, “suffering incarnate.”55 Icons of her are said to shed tears or blood. Mary’s chief sorrow is of course the suffering and death of her son, Jesus. This is not a particularly Russian idea, but there are some associated ideas which might seem odd to Western Christians.
For example, Christ’s own suffering tends to be viewed primarily through the prism of his mother’s suffering.56 Indeed, as Strotmann points out, it is icons of the Mother of God that are the most venerated in Russia.57 Icons of Christ do not get as much attention as those of his mother. Yet icons of the Holy Mother tend to include Christ anyway, in the form of a child. The divine child is, in effect, inseparable from his mother, is practically implied by the mother: “il ne faut pas oublier que l’icone de la Vierge est toujours celle de la Mère et du Fils, unis par un lien indestructible.”58
In Russian Orthodox theology Jesus and his mother are extremely close. They are close in the sense that they are very often together, with Mary showing special sympathy for everything that her son undergoes. They are also close in the sense that they are similar. Father Isaiia of the Troitse-Sergieva Lavra says, for example: