The mother and newborn child, while recovering from the trauma of parturition, were treated to more than one round of steaming and flagellation with veniki in the bania. Various lullabies sung to the newborn infant (by the midwife or the mother), and various spells pronounced by the midwife, refer to “steaming” (“parit’”) the infant.58 According to T. A. Listova, one of the main reasons for the midwife to stay on a few days after the birth took place (second half of the nineteenth century) was to administer steam baths to mother and child. She quotes the “widespread” rule that “the midwife may leave only after three baths” (“povitukha dolzhna uiti tol’ko posle trekh ban’”).59 Again, the use of the word “bania” here suggests the usual application of both steam and veniki. Listova also quotes Zelenin to the effect that the village midwife would “steam” (“poparit”) mother and child.60
An illustration in Pokrovskii’s book shows an exhausted young mother lying on a bed of straw in a bathhouse. Several women are shown entering the doorway of the bathhouse, bringing food with them. Barely visible in the steamy upper left corner is the midwife. She is beating a naked newborn child with veniki.61
From day one, then, the Russian peasant child was subjected to the intense thermal and tactual stimulation of the bania. This postpartum treatment was repeated on an almost daily basis for several weeks.62 When the midwife left, the (by definition pre-Oedipal) mother was the one who would “steam” her child. As the child grew, it became quite accustomed to the bania experience. Images of the bania must have been among the early memories of every adult peasant.
Typically the peasant would go to the bania once a week, on Saturday. This was often a family affair. Not only was there often a mixing of the sexes in both the peasant and commercial baths of tsarist times, there was also a mixing of the generations. Several of the illustrations provided by Professor Cross in his excellent article bear this out. A drawing by Jean-Baptiste Le Prince, who had spent some years in Russia in the second half of the eighteenth century, depicts a bania full of children and adults, including a woman pouring water over a child. A drawing done by one P. Iw (Ivanov?) in the mid-nineteenth century shows a woman with a child on her lap. An etching by Mikhail Kozlovskii (late eighteenth century) shows an assortment of children and adults, including an infant at its mother’s breast. All of the mothers and children in these works are of course naked.63 An eighteenth-century popular print (“lubok”) shows several naked women in a bathhouse, including one holding a naked child.64 A more recent work by A. A. Plastov shows a naked mother adjusting her young daughter’s scarf just outside a bathhouse.65
Charles Masson, in his somewhat hostile memoir of Russia under Catherine, says:
In the country, the baths are still on the old footing; that is to say, persons of all ages and both sexes use them together, and a family consisting of a father of forty, a mother of thirty-five, a son of twenty, and a daughter of fifteen, appear together in a state of innocence, and mutually rub down each other.66
According to Masson, the Russian peasant is not excited at the sight of others unclad, for “from his infancy he has seen and examined everything.”67
The two occasions where mixing of the sexes did not occur were postpartum bathing (discussed above) and the prenuptial bath. The latter is nearly as important as the former for understanding the Russian bathhouse culture.
The Prenuptial Bath
The bania played an essential role in the traditional peasant marriage ceremonials (“svad’ba”) in rural areas. The bride underwent an emotionally charged prenuptial bath with her girlfriends. Sometimes the groom would bathe with his male friends too. Typically the bride and groom bathed together after consummation of the marriage.
Of these various wedding baths the bride’s prenuptial bath was of particular significance. An anthropologist would classify it as a rite of passage, or more specifically, a rite of separation.68 Not the wedding itself, but the prenuptial bath severed the bride from her family. At some point, usually the day before the actual wedding took place, the bride was accompanied by her girlfriends to the bania. Males were usually not allowed.69 Ethnographic descriptions of the prenuptial bath vary enormously, in part because there was considerable regional variation, and in part because some scholars are more willing than others to go into detail. Most authorities on this subject agree that the girlfriends in fact washed the bride and rearranged her hair in some way.70 They also agree that this bath symbolized a washing away of maidenly “beauty” (“krasota”) and/or “freedom” (“volia”). The “krasota” was not just an abstract idea, but was normally represented by some concrete physical object worn on the head, such as a ribbon set in beads and plaited in with the braid, or a headband. This headgear might reluctantly be cast off and entrusted to a girlfriend or sister during the prenuptial bath, or before or after it at a gathering termed the “devichnik.” At some point the bride’s braid would be unplaited and then replaited into a single braid for the last time (later it would be split into the double braid traditionally worn by married women).71
The loss of the “krasota” or the “volia” could conceivably be interpreted as loss of virginity. A bride was “officially” expected to be a virgin, as is clear from the ritualized examination of her shift for traces of blood after consummation of the marriage. The groom was regarded as “the one who drove away maidenly beauty” (“otgonitel’ dev’ei krasoty”).72
However, there is evidence for premarital sexual activity among Russian peasant girls, particularly at those traditional mixed-sex gatherings termed “posidelki,”73 so the virginity test must often have been faked. Also, female virginity became less of an issue as rural Russia became industrialized and young women gained some degree of freedom from their families by going off to work in factories.74 Certainly the value of premarital virginity declined among rural women in the Soviet period.
In addition, there are other, more iconic signifiers of the loss of virginity, such as the various fruits and berries which pervade the love songs and wedding songs,75 or the traditional splitting of the tightly woven, hairy braid (“kosa”) into two parts. The literal meaning of the loss of “krasota” and “volia” is actually more suggestive of bondage than of sexuality. True, the bride was now supposed to have sex with her husband, and he supposedly “drove away” her virginity. But after that she no longer had sexual choice. For her to lose her “krasota” and “volia” suggests that she literally gained their opposites, that is, “nekrasota” and “nevolia” (ugliness and slavery).76
A girl of course did not literally lose her beauty just because she took a ritual bath and got married, and she did not literally don a set of chains. But the cultural expectations were such that it was as if the bride were now ugly and enslaved. Her beauty was no longer relevant, it no longer empowered her, for she was not supposed to be attracting males the way she had been during her premarital romps with the local village boys. She no longer was in charge of her beauty for the purpose of exercising sexual choice. There was no choice if she was sexually bonded with, and thereby bound by her husband.
As pointed out earlier, the bride had to emit signs of submission to her husband at the wedding itself, such as bowing down to him and pulling off his boots. Later the husband would be free to discipline her with beatings. Naturally, she hoped her husband would not do such a thing. In Luzhskoi uezd, for example, the girls would not bring a venik to the prenuptial bath, for otherwise “The husband will beat you.”77 In many areas, however, not only was a decorated venik brought along to the prenuptial bath, but the road taken by the girls to the bania was itself marked with veniki. The bride had to endure what might be called stations of the venik. In Vetluzhskii krai the girls would flagellate the bride with veniki and would not let her down from an upper shelf of the bania until she uttered the first name and patronymic of her husband-to-be. The longer a bride could bear this punishment without uttering the name, the more highly respected she was among her girlfriends.78