If the bania is indeed a “second mother,” as Dahl’s informant says, then it is also possible to view the prenuptial bath as a “second birth,” that is, a rebirth. The bride might in fact have been born in the very bania where her prenuptial ritual was taking place.87 One song in the Propp collection makes an explicit reference to birth:
This girl has been to the bania many times since she was born (“otrodu”), but this time is special, for it is her last time as a maiden. All subsequent times will be in a new, married life. By bathing ritually the girl becomes a new person, the old person being taken away in metonymized form—the “krasota”—and hung up on a birch tree (but the birch will be chopped down), or thrown into a field among flowers (but the flowers will be mown down).89 Or, the old person might be dried from the skin of the newly-washed, newly-born person and wrapped in a towel—rather like an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes:
In some cases water wrung out of the towel used to wash the bride was utilized to bake dumplings (“pirogi”), which the groom would later eat. In some areas, milk was poured on the bride, then dried from her body with dough to be used in the dumplings. The milk poured over the bride’s body might even be fed directly to the groom.91 These practices were supposed to increase the groom’s love for the bride. Van Gennep would term these rites of union.92 Psychoanalytically viewed, they represent an oral destruction of the “old” person, so that the “new,” reborn masochist can function.
Despite a few indications, the idea of rebirth does not play a very important role in the bridal rites. The life a bride could look forward to was not bright enough. If anything, indeed, her new life might better be characterized as death. In one song the bride describes herself as having died during the prenuptial bath (“…umerla-de krasna devushka / Vo toi, vo bane zharkoi”).93 Scholars have in fact noticed the considerable similarity between bridal rites and funeral practices in Russia.94 As Natalie Moyle says, “In many senses, Russian women are considered to die at marriage.”95 Moyle notes, for example, that the ritual washing in the bania resembles the washing of a corpse. In some areas the bride is removed from her home the way a corpse is removed, that is, through a window rather than through a door.
The symbolism here is important, but the bride did in fact remain alive after the wedding. Without her no family could form, no children could come into the world. She may have been “dead” in some sense, but she was very much alive and would become the central masochist around which her family would grow.
The bania, then, is not just a physical facility where one may wash oneself. It is a cultural practice permeating many aspects of Russian life, it is an archaic institution of pain distributed over a diverse geographic space. For any individual Russian it extends (or extended) across the entire life span, from birth to death.96
The masochism of the bania is both physical and moral. On the one hand there is the welcomed heat and flagellation. This intense physical stimulation is apparently pleasurable for most Russians, and for some it may even be erotically gratifying (although it would be a mistake, despite Vasil’eva’s paintings, to claim that the bania is normally a theater of erotogenic masochism, properly speaking).
On the other hand, the bania offers a scene for playing out moral masochism. This is especially evident in the bride’s prenuptial bath, where freedom (“volia”) is definitively relinquished, and future bondage to a parental substitute is implied. The prenuptial bath was an opportunity to master anxiety about future abnegation. It was itself an anticipatory abnegation of self.
The bania is a particularly clear instance of the psychoanalytic notion that masochism originates in painful interaction with the early (pre-Oedipal) mother. Not only was the bania traditionally referred to as a “second mother,” it was one place where early interaction with the mother was painful, for the child must initially have experienced the “steaming” and flagellation by the midwife, and later by the mother herself, as painful. As the child developed, this manner of abusing the child was incorporated into the child’s own repertoire of activities, that is, the child learned to abuse himself or herself within the body of that famous maternal icon, the Russian bania.
NINE
Masochism and the Collective
In Russia, as in most other large cultures outside of the Western world (Japan, China, India, etc.), emphasis is placed on the collective. What cross-cultural social psychologists call collectivism predominates over individualism. To oversimplify somewhat: the beliefs, needs, and goals of the “in-group” are accepted as being more important than those of the private self, and to some extent are not distinguished from those of the self; mutual cooperation is expected within the collective; the interests of others come before one’s own interests.1
What It Means to Be a Zero
Masochism, as has been observed more than once in this book, is a phenomenon of the individual. Individuals do exist in collectivist cultures, even if their interests are de-emphasized. Indeed, such de-emphasis serves to encourage masochism.