Cholera damn you: how peasants were treated by Balmont's poems
In his new book, science popularizer Anton Nelikhov draws on a fair amount of publications in the pre-revolutionary press to illustrate the attitude to diseases and ways to combat them in the Russian countryside. The researcher also uses other sources — unpublished materials from the archives of the Ethnographic Bureau of Prince V.N. Tenishev, which studied peasant life at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as scientific publications on folklore and ethnography, including modern researchers. Critic Lidia Maslova presents the book of the week specifically for Izvestia.
Anton Nelikhov
"Folk demonology and medicine in Russia. The fever sisters, Mother Smallpox, and the bug in the boots"
Moscow: MIF, 2026. 224 p.
If you immediately look at the bibliography provided in the notes, you can see how popular the word "darkness" and its derivatives are in the titles of publications on folk medical practices, customs and superstitions. The title of Tolstoy's terrible play "The Power of Darkness," plunging into the dark recesses of the peasant soul, was used by journalists in the headlines as many as twice, albeit with a distance of almost 20 years: in the Samara Gazette of 1891 and in the Tsaritsyn Bulletin of 1909, and a note signed with the pseudonym Phoenix in Birzhevye Vedomosti The year 1910 is succinctly called "In the Dark." It is quoted in the sixth chapter of "Cholera" and reflects popular ideas about where and why cholera, which appears for no reason and disappears just as suddenly, comes from: "Look, they took away the land, but they ordered us to poison: there are too many people divorced." Nearby are equally pessimistic statements from other newspaper publications about a conscious strategy to reduce the population, in the existence of which the peasants have no doubt: "Life has become cramped, that's why the people are being starved... So that it becomes more "peaceful" on earth."
The newspaper headlines "Dark people and cholera" or "National darkness and cholera" also speak for themselves: the village people are dark and dense, therefore they are often naive and cruel in their bizarre struggle with the spirits responsible for the diseases of people and livestock. A whole abyss of superstitious absurdity opens up in Nelikhov's book — it is he who surprisingly often serves as the main ritual tool that a peasant who does not trust the lord's medicine is ready to counter deadly diseases. As an example of one of the most absurd popular rituals, Nelikhov cites plowing, when peasants, harnessed to a plow, plowed a magic circle around their village, beyond which the disease, according to their concepts, had no right to get through.: "When plowing, they built a whole system of demonstrative absurdity: they plowed in front of people, sowed sand. The same desire for "formulas of the impossible" as an effective remedy against evil spirits can explain the predominant participation of women in the pollination, which was men's work."
Nelikhov notes that "there are few special spirits of diseases in Russian culture, about a dozen," and cholera, fever, smallpox and cow pestilence have the clearest visual embodiments. The chapter "Mother Smallpox" is dedicated to smallpox, a title that reflects a particularly respectful attitude towards this disease among the peasants. Considering smallpox as a Divine punishment (which, by definition, is never undeserved), the villagers tried not to resist it in any way, but to appease and butter it up by persistently treating smallpox patients with pies and thereby contributing to the rapid spread of the infection throughout the village: "If the child could not get infected in any way, the mother was nervous, baked pies and again she went to bow to the smallpox patient in the firm belief that if smallpox was persuaded to come to visit, she would be friendly, but if she came herself uninvited, she would be angry and angry, and would ruin the child."
Before turning to smallpox itself, Nelikhov outlines the specifics of the peasant mentality with its tendency to see the machinations of the Antichrist in many unusual things (the international Satanism movement is recognized as extremist and banned in the territory of the Russian Federation). So, in the Vologda province, a young officer riding a bicycle was mistaken for the Antichrist — when the peasants saw him, they locked themselves in huts, and one peasant, encountering him in the forest, fainted. A.S. Pushkin also appears in this context, who in 1833 interviewed Cossacks about the Pugachev rebellion, and then became the hero of a report to the head of the region: "... we had a man of unknown rank, companions, of medium height, swarthy complexion, black and curly hair, claws on his fingers for the place of nails, he beat Pugachev and gave in gold: there must be the Antichrist, so instead of nails on the fingers there are claws."
The "Antichristomania" or, more precisely, Antichristophobia that permeates Russian culture has long prevented smallpox vaccination, because the scar from vaccination was perceived as the seal of the Antichrist.: "According to the conviction of many peasants, a person with such a seal of the Antichrist will not be allowed into the Kingdom of Heaven, and vice versa: the pockmarked go straight to paradise, where their skin is covered with flowers, and in each pockmark grows a beautiful flower or a shiny pearl." Before that, in the depressing chapter "The Spirits of childhood Diseases" (about how difficult it was for an infant to survive in a Russian village, both from improper nutrition and care, and from brutal methods of treatment), Nelikhov talked about the philosophical attitude of peasants towards child deaths, which, of course, did little to help the fight against smallpox, which was perceived as a divine tool natural selection: "God gave joy to parents to caress their children and then sends a "mistress" (smallpox), hurries to remove the superfluous ones at the appointed time so that the rest would not become crowded," they said in the villages."
In the chapter "Tremors", which deals with diseases collectively called "fever", there is a case of toothache that is not alien to slight absurdity. One rural teacher stayed at school after school to enjoy reading aloud Balmont's collection "The Calls of Antiquity" alone, and what was her surprise when an old watchwoman suddenly appeared from the next room with her teeth, joyfully announcing to the teacher that the "Calls of Antiquity" had taken the pain away. And the next day, two more old ladies came to school, offering them something to read from their teeth, too, and promising to thank them with "chicken and eggs." But it is unlikely that the teacher decided to put her random witch doctor's luck on the stream, unlike the numerous sorcerers, without whom no decent village could do, and among whom there were many scammers, talented actors and manipulators who, for the sake of certain social prospects, specifically earned themselves a witchcraft reputation.: "She was created by strange actions, an angry expression on her face and the classic phrase: "Well, you'll remember me!" or "Remember this and don't forget!" — which was said at every opportunity."
The various "witchcraft ailments" that surrounded peasants everywhere are discussed in the last chapter of "Spoilage," which, among other things, analyzes the mental illness expressed in the phenomenon of clichery that affected mainly women (although, as the peasants of the Penza province joked, "what a soul a woman has; she has a balalaika inserted, not a soul"). Nelikhov considers the disenfranchised position of women, whose psyche could not withstand everyday domestic violence, to be the main cause of this disease. And the main positive character of this chapter, and, perhaps, of the whole book, turns out to be the Slavophile I.S. Aksakov, who in 1854, standing in the crowd waiting for the procession in Kursk, accidentally healed several clerics by literally laying hands, starting with a 45-year-old woman whom he took by the head, began stroking, "to caress with all kinds of words, to soothe and baptize."
It is on this humanistic episode that Nelikhov suggests ending the book ("I would like, reader, for the book to be remembered for this particular story: about kindness and compassion"), but in the afterword he does not hold back and throws an ironic bridge into modern times, where superstitions still remain firmly embedded in the human brain: "For sure, and in cabins spaceships that will fly to other stars, there will be people who read spells at night from the spirits of diseases, by that time they had probably already lost all appearance and become simply sinister names: Mother Fever, Mother Smallpox, Mother Measles, father Coronavirus."
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
