Clearly the birch was and still is an important cultural object for Russians, especially for women. Its importance in women’s agricultural rituals of growth was established by Soviet folklorist Vladimir Propp. To this day the birch is regarded as something like the Russian national tree. When in 1992 Bulat Okudzhava opened an article with the words “There is no peace under the birches” (“Net mira pod berezami”), his readers automatically understood that he was referring to unrest going on specifically in Russia.24
The fact that the birch was traditionally personified in some way is what is of psychoanalytic interest. It was dressed in a woman’s clothing, for example. During the Semik-Troitsa rituals girls would sing loud songs to it. They would address their wishes and requests to it. It would be dragged into peasant huts and offered food. In some wedding songs it was forced to submit to the wind by “bowing down” in the direction the wind blows.25 In the lyric songs generally it was associated with the sadness, suffering, and overall miserable lot of women.26 But precisely which person, which woman might she (“bereza” is a feminine noun) have represented?
Here Propp unknowingly lends the analyst a hand when he interprets the belief that a birch tree thrown into a pond insures adequate rainfall for the summer: “The harvest [urozhai] depended on earth and water, and on their union. The same little birch that was supposed to provide the fields with the earth’s birthing strength [rozhdaiushchei siloi zemli] was obliged to provide them with the moisture, without which the earth will not give birth [rodit’ ne budet].”27
Who, if not a mother, could this imagery possibly refer to? If the birch was not a mother herself, then at least she was a midwife who, by some contagious fertility, assisted “mother earth” in producing a crop (“urozhai”) of rye (“rozh’”), itself often imaged as a mother (“matushka rozh’,” “rzhitsa-matushka”).
Before the Soviet period women prayed to birch trees in the area of Svetloiar (near Nizhnii-Novgorod), addressing the trees as “birch mother” (“bereza matushka”).28 A topos in some of the Russian spells placed the Mother of God beside a birch tree: “U beloi berezy sidit mat’ presviataia bogoroditsa.”29 The maternal suggestiveness of the birch is also more recent. Tat’iana Tolstaia quotes a Soviet popular song from the 1970s: “And the motherland generously fed me birch juice, birch juice” (“I rodina shchedro poila menia berezovym sokom, berezovym sokom”).30
On the other hand, the birch in the girls’ songs could also refer to the girls themselves who participated in the spring rituals, for it bore such names as “devushka” (girl), “krasota” (beauty), “nevesta” (bride), and “kuma” (girlfriend). According to folklorist Tat’iana Bernshtam the decorated birch is a “maidenly symbol” (“devichii simvol”).31 Philologist Paul Friedrich speculates that the birch is an ancient symbol of “young, virginal femininity” that goes back to the Proto-Indo-Europeans of five thousand years ago.32
The psychoanalytic consequence of this double semantic potential of the birch is most interesting. During the Semik-Troitsa rituals the girls treated the birch totem in a rather violent fashion. They twisted and tied the birch branches in various ways, they ripped branches off the tree (“zalomad”), they cut the tree down, sometimes they stripped off the bark (“obdiraia kak belochku”), and they chopped it up into little pieces, or set it afire, or they hurled it into a body of water to the accompaniment of funeral-like songs (“otpevanie berezki”).33
If the birch is, indeed, a maternal icon, then is this any way to treat a mother? If, on the other hand, the birch is a maidenly symbol, as Bernshtam says it is, then is this any way for a girl to treat herself? Is it sadism or is it masochism that is being signified?
True, the girls would sing sad songs to the little birch as they conducted it to its place of destruction. But such behavior does seem to be a ritualized form of anger and rejection. Each girl who actively participated in the Semik-Troitsa destruction ritual was either acting out a sadistic fantasy against her mother, or she was playing a masochistic fantasy against herself. Possibly she was doing both, given the task of breaking with the mother that adolescent girls normally have to work through.
The participants in the rituals apparently did feel some guilt over what they did to the birch tree. Shein reports that, in the village of Kornilovka in Muromsk uyezd, the “curling” (“zavivanie”) of the birch was considered to be a sin (“grekh”), and that the girls tried to hide this ceremony from the older members of the collective.34 It is worth noting that, in many areas of Russia, during most times of the year there was a taboo on felling trees or cutting off tree branches.35
In the village of Mstera, according to Shein, girls shouted “Toni, semik, topi serditykh muzhei” (“Sink, Semik, drown angry husbands!”) as they threw the little birch into a river. This would seem to indicate anxiety about the way that their future husbands were going to treat them, or the way their fathers were treating their mothers. A song they sang earlier around the birch reveals rather strong emotions about wife beating:
The rather sudden transition in line five suggests that the birch tree was an object on which the girls would vent their frustration concerning the violent relationship of spouses. If the spouses in question were their parents, then the girls seemed to be blaming mothers who allowed themselves to be mistreated by their husbands. In effect: if you allow your husband to ruin you, we will ruin you too, so you ruin him instead.
If, on the other hand, the husband to be ruined was their own, that is, if they were thinking about the future, then the girls seemed to be directing their anger both at themselves and their abusive husbands: we will ruin any husbands who ruin us.
Whatever the meaning of the ritualized birch-abuse, the song does indicate a high degree of sadomasochistic ideation. If the birch is a mother, then the fantasy basis of the abuse is sadistic. If the birch is the singer herself (e.g., as future, married woman), then the fantasy basis is masochistic.