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4 “Broad Is My Motherland” THE MOTHER ARCHETYPE AND SPACE IN THE SOVIET MASS SONG HANS GÜNTHER Translated by Sonja Kerby The famous “Song of the Motherland” from Grigory Aleksandrov’s 1936 film Circus (Tsyrk) begins with the following words: Broad is my motherland, Many are her forests, fields, and rivers! I know no other such land, Where so freely does a man breathe. Such lines are uncharacteristic of the marches of the earlier period following the Russian Revolution of 1917; they call no one to join the class struggle or to rally the ranks around the Party banner. The key to understanding this song lies not in Marxist ideology but in earth mythology, which A. Afanas’ev described as follows: “Primitive tribes recognized Earth as a living being that functioned on its own; they equated expansive lands [shirokie sushi] with a gigantic body, saw its bones in solid cliffs and stones, its blood in water, its veins in tree roots, and finally its hair in grass and plants.”1 The 1936 Soviet song is unquestionably about the gigantic body of the motherland, the blood of her rivers, and the hair of her fields and forests. In this song, as in many other phenomena of 1930s culture, something new—the mother archetype— reaches beyond the bounds of the revolutionary epoch and finds expression. Jungian theory of the archetype provides an approach that combines psychology and mythology and makes it possible to elucidate certain aspects of the profound structure of Soviet culture. Most of all, it aids in analyzing the formation of a circle of basic personages—in Propp’s terminology, “dramatis personae”—of Soviet myth.2 The image of the hero plays the leading role, and much research has already been ded77 icated to it.3 The Soviet hero is in essence the man who takes heroic action; he displays outright his will and his ability to act in a great variety of ways: in the struggle, in labor, in construction, in self-sacrifice, in his ability to perfect himself, and so forth. His image is diametrically opposed to the image of the enemy,4 who acts behind various masks and to whom is ascribed demonic traits.5 Toward the end of the 1920s, the image of the “wise father,” who stands at the head of the mythological pyramid of Soviet culture, took shape. Stalin, as the father of the Great Family, relates to heroes as to his own sons, constantly looking after them, sending them on their way, and giving them valuable directions.6 The model of the Great Family as the basis of Soviet myth, however, has not yet been sufficiently examined, because the family trio has lacked one important family member—the mother. Certain cultural phenomena of the thirties in no way come under either the heroic or the father archetype but belong to a third, maternal pole. I have in mind the cult of the motherland and the earth, the flowering of new genres such as the lyrical mass song and the Soviet film comedy, and the emergence of a new image of woman in the fine arts and in the architecture of abundance and fertility at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition in Moscow. Where is the essence of the maternal archetype to be found? By what traits can it be distinguished? And how did it enter Soviet culture? The philosophers N. Berdiaev and G. Fedotov considered motherhood the spiritual nucleus of Russian folk belief.7 According to Fedotov, motherhood is incarnated in three hypostases: “In the circle of heavenly forces is the Mother of God, in the circle of the natural world is the earth, and in patrimonial social life the mother appears on various levels of the cosmic hierarchy of deities as the bearer of a single maternal principle.”8 The following spiritual verse points to the contiguity of a “similar, but not identical, phenomenon”: First mother is the Most Blessed Mother of God, Second mother is the Moist Earth, Third mother—this sorrow took.9 In studies of Russian religious thought, two lines of maternal principles can be distinguished: the original pagan cult of the mother moist earth (mat’ syraia zemlia), which is a variant of the Great Mother religion shared by many peoples,10 and Christian worship of the Mother 78 HANS GÜNTHER of God (bogoroditsa).11 When Rus’ accepted Christianity, the image of the Mother of God (bogomater’) began to transform the chthonic Mother Earth goddess, a...

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