Russians have to find their own way. Perhaps they will even figure out how to harness masochism for economic advancement. Some of the Old Believers and sectarians did become fabulously wealthy.
In his book on Dostoevsky Berdiaev says: “There is a hunger for self-destruction in the Russian soul, there is a danger of intoxication with ruin.”2 I confess that I have sometimes found it exhilarating to observe this danger—from afar.
For me, masochism is part of the very attractiveness and beauty of Russian culture. Where would Tatiana Larina or Dmitrii Karamazov or Anna Karenina be without their masochism? To “cure” them of their masochism would be to detract considerably from their aesthetic appeal. The beauty of masochism, however, like all beauty, resides in the mind of the beholder.
Notes
NOTES TO CHAPTER 1
1. For example: Dallin and Nicolaevsky 1947, 88-107; Hellie 1982, 711; Kiva 1990.
2. The phrase is from a famous passage in The Diary of a Writer (1873). See Dostoevskii 1972-88, vol. 21, 36.
3. Vakar 1961, 40.
4. Voznesenskii 1991, 12.
5. Grossman 1973, 176–80. For a historical overview of the term “Russian soul” (“russkaia dusha”) see Williams 1970. Wierzbicka (1992, 31–63) offers insightful remarks on the semantics of the Russian term “dusha.”
6. Ivanov 1909, 327. Cf. Merezhkovskii 1914, vol. 15, 169.
7. Ivanov 1909, 330.
8. Merezhkovskii 1914, vol. 15, 157.
9. Belkin 1991b, 14.
10. Some others have already applied this term to Russians, e.g., Hingley 1977, 195. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn declares that the idea of a “perennial Russian slave mentality” is a “persistent and tendentious generalization” concocted by people who do not really understand Russia (1977, 187). One of the purposes of this book is to prove Solzhenitsyn wrong.
By the English term “mentality” I do not mean to be translating French “mentalité”—as in the “histoire des mentalités” approach which has recently established itself in Russian studies (cf. Perrie 1989), and which, incidentally, I heartily endorse. In any case, English “mentality” suggests a more strictly psychological phenomenon, which is the concern of this book.
11. Gorskii 1977 (1969), 378.
12. As quoted in Golovanov 1992, 13.
13. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836–95), in his semi-pornographic Venus in Furs, describes a man who obtains sexual gratification from being whipped, trampled upon, or otherwise humiliated by a woman. For a discussion of Sacher-Masoch’s writing, see Lenzer 1975. The term “masochism” was coined by the pioneering sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) in his Psychopathia Sexualis (1866; English edition 1929, 132). Freud moved away from the erotogenic orientation of the term with his notion of “moral masochism” (see chap. 5 of this volume). As if it were an unprintable swear word, the Russian term “mazokhizm” is missing from many Russian dictionaries, including the authoritative seventeen-volume Academy dictionary (ANSSSR 1950–65). It has recently emerged, however, in the post-Soviet Russian press. For example, Freud’s essay on masochism (“Ekonomicheskaia problema mazokhizma”) has recently appeared in Russian, appended to a translation of Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (Zakher-Mazokh 1992, 349–64).
14. As defined by Katz 1990, 226.
15. Freud, SE, vol. 19, 165–70.
16. See, for example, Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in SE, vol. 18, 7–64. The death instinct is sometimes equated with a “primary masochism” by Freud (e.g., SE, vol. 18, 55). If such a species of masochism exists (and most psychoanalysts think not), it is in any case not the topic of this book. Incidentally, Freud’s notion of the death instinct supposedly has a “Russian” origin, namely, the idea of the “destruction instinct” advanced by the Russian psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein (see Rice 1982; Leibin 1990, 61).
As for Russian nonerotogenic sadism (“zhestokost’”), it too is a large and legitimate object of study, but it is not a topic that I can even begin to treat in this book.
17. For abundant examples, see Kohn 1960.
18. See Heller 1988 (1985). Heller would probably accept the idea that masochism became at least one of the traits of Homo sovieticus, although he does not use the psychoanalytic term. For example, speaking of the brutal collectivization of the peasantry in the early 1930s, Heller says: “The massacre of the peasantry allowed the state to turn the survivors into a submissive, inert mass of state citizens” (39). Or, paraphrasing a passage from Zamiatin’s novel We, Heller says individuals should “wish” to be “welded together into a collective” (6). At one point Heller agrees with Igor Shafarevich’s claim that socialism is “one of the aspects of the impulse of mankind’s yearning for self-destruction and nothingness” (as quoted by Heller, 9).
A current, derogatory term for Homo sovieticus is “Sovok,” acronym for “sovetskii chelovek,” but also homonym of “sovok” (dustpan). Russians who refer to themselves with this humiliating term are behaving masochistically.
19. Dicks 1952. See also Dicks 1960.
20. Dicks 1952, 153.
21. Ibid., 153–54.
22. The late Felix Dreizin says, for example: “Russian culture strongly encourages masochistic tendencies in individual psychology,” and he backs this up with some revealing quotations from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about the supposed moral superiority of prison life. See Dreizin 1990, 182–85.
In his essay on Maksim Gor’kii, Erik Erikson speaks of “that pattern of masochistic identification with authority which apparently has been a strong collective force in the history of Russia” (1963, 371).
Without using the term “masochism,” Nathan Leites adduces examples illustrating his thesis that Russian Bolsheviks operate on the principle that “Life is sacrifice” (Leites 1953, 132–41).
In his interesting quasi-psychoanalytic study of Russian culture, Le tsarévitch immolé, Alain Besançon is willing to grant that there is at least an “analogie d’expérience” between Russian religious asceticism and what Freud meant by moral masochism (1967, 75).
Others who have made passing references to Russian masochism—or who have treated it without necessarily using the term—will be quoted in the course of this book.
23. Dal’ 1955 (1880–82), vol. 4, 5.
24. ANSSSR 1950–65, vol. 12, 7.
25. Ibid.
26. As quoted by Berdiaev 1971 (1946), 151.
27. Gor’kii 1978 (1912), 306.
28. For historical and socioeconomic analyses of slavery in Russia, see Pipes 1974, 148 ff.; Kolchin 1987; Blum 1961; Hellie 1982; Hoch 1986. These and related works will occasionally yield interesting information about psychological matters, but their focus is elsewhere.
29. See, for example, Perrie 1989.
30. See especially Daniel Field’s book Rebels in the Name of the Tsar (1989 [1976]).
31. Kolchin 1987, 269. On some psychological aspects of serf rebelliousness, see Litvak 1971.
32. This is not to suggest that masochism was the only reason why serfs tended not to rebel. There were other (psychological, economic, political, etc.) reasons as well. For example, the economic interests of the serf owner and the patriarchal heads of serf households overlapped considerably, as Steven Hoch has shown (1986, chap. 3). Nonetheless, there has been little study in this area. Historians, for example, are more likely to be concerned with why peasants rebel than with why they do not.