Solovyovo: The Story of Memory in a Russian Village

4 Radiance

4 Paxson.086-119 8/16/05 10:44 AM Page 86 Paxson.086-119 8/16/05 10:44 AM Page 87 88 INTRODUCTION: NARRATIVE LANDSCAPES * * * Iuliia said with a sigh, “It is good here in the forest.” She and I had sneaked off to look for mushrooms one July day. The air was cool and fresh and quiet. Work was kilometers away in the village. We would let it wait. “Breathe in the air,” Iuliia told me, “it’s good for your health and good for the soul.” You go into the forest with prayers and incantations on your lips. Protect me, you ask the host of the forest or God, “from roaring thunder , from searing fire, from running beasts, from creeping snakes, from evil people, from the leshii’s eyes.”1 The space of the forest has the 4 Radiance 1. “Ot groma gremuchego, ot ognia goriuchego, ot zveria begushchego; ot gada polzuchego; ot zlykh liudei, ot leshikh ochei . . .” Paxson.086-119 8/16/05 10:44 AM Page 88 power to grant you blessings or to confuse and bewilder you—or to take your life. In a similar way, the narrative imagination has its own forests, that is, places of affinity which can also be places of danger. The interviews I conducted with the people of Solovyovo and nearby locales yielded a tremendous wealth of symbolic and social data. When the necessary thresholds were crossed and conversations began, it was clear that my interlocutors had entered into symbolic worlds that were defined by their own boundaries , dominant metaphors, and affective associations. These narrative spaces were elaborate (and favored) pathways in memory’s landscape. In the next two chapters, I focus my discussion on two such narrative landscapes. The first I call the “radiant past” (svetloe proshloe), named to resonate with the “radiant future,” promised for the day when communism would fully flourish for the Soviet world. The radiant past, however , finds its brightness and brilliance not in the days to come, but in days gone by; it harkens—in tones of lament and tones of fairy tale awe—to a better, earlier time. The second narrative space that will be featured in Chapter 5 is the world of the miraculous or chudesnoe (a chudo is a miracle or a wonder; chudesnoe is “miraculous, wondrous”). This world is narrated through stories of confrontations with otherworldly forces and powers. In it, the rules and logics of the everyday can be confronted with forces that have the power to transform—forces that can be violent or whimsical, absurd or deadly. Tracing the symbolic pathway grounded by this narrative landscape provides a first sketch of how confrontations with otherworldly forces occur in the village. Later, this discussion will provide the basis for a broader look at the (society-stabilizing, societytransforming ) numinous forms and practices in Solovyovo. In the telling of stories such as these, there is social memory. In the patterning , positioning, and reproducing of these stories, there is social memory that carries with it social purposes. Talk is a social action. Narrative, which is a particularly rich form of talk, has features that carry cultural patterning and conventions. As Ries argues in Russian Talk (1997), generic stories (and their performances) such as the ones offered here in fact have a great deal to say about crucial matters such as the construction of group identity and of the reproduction of and resistance to official ideology. In showing us the shape of radiant, miraculous worlds, they offer a template for how society has managed its brushes with catastrophe and will continue to do so, both from within and without its social circles. RADIANCE 89 Paxson.086-119 8/16/05 10:44 AM Page 89 Crucial here is the point that language, metaphor, and narrative are powerful (and omnipresent, and unavoidable) carriers of social memory. To recast social memory is to recast them, and this, it appears, is no simple task. SVETLOE PROSHLOE (THE RADIANT PAST)2 * * * When Was It Radiant? I had heard the record play so often that I could repeat it in my sleep: “Things were better before.” Sometimes “before” meant “in the time of Brezhnev or Stalin.” Often it meant “before perestroika.” But mostly it referred to a region in symbolic space, a locale in the past where people lived in social harmony. “Back then, we lived as friends. We worked together in harmony. People...