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178 In her classic book on the Soviet novel, Katerina Clark notes the intimate relationship between the “new Bolshevik hero” and his horse. According to Clark, in the thirties, “[o]ne of the symbols used to link [the traditional warrior-bogatyr’ and his Soviet reincarnation] was a close relationship to horses. In thirties biographies of Civil War generals, writers stressed that even in childhood the hero had had a way with horses, an early sign of his heroic mettle.”1 The bond with horses became an important sign of the hero ’s positive “spontaneity”: “The close relationship was usually with a wild horse. In fact, the hero’s childhood affinity with wild horses seems to have been an early sign of the ‘surging initiative’ that will lead him in adulthood to abjure the tame and make his leap forward.”2 This human-horse relationship is interpreted by Clark as part of the mythic confrontation between nature and culture. It serves as an ideological background for other dichotomies, including the tension between spontaneity and revolutionary consciousness, which becomes a classic myth of Soviet ideology. Clark’s observations serve as a starting point in a search for answers for how that intimate relationship between the “new man” and his horse developed. Through exemplary literary case studies, we uncover various changes in male cultural self-understanding—from the early years of the Soviet utopia with its hero-warrior, up to late and post-socialist times—that are coded through the symbolic totem of a horse. The symbol is not static. 10H OfmenAndhOrses Animal Imagery and the Construction of Russian Masculinities arja rosenholm costlow nelson text4.indd 178 6/23/10 8:40 AM Of men And hOrses————179 The man-horse relationship is reproduced within varying social, political, and cultural contexts that give different meanings to that particular relationship and the aspects of being a man. Maleness is in this sense a discursive construction in a “ritual drama”; masculinity is performed through referring to the symbols and rituals that privilege the image of a horse as the cultural self-representation of a Russian man. That animals and horses are of substantial symbolic importance in Russian and Soviet literature and culture is common knowledge.3 A brief look at the literature and the genre of animalistika4 in the history of painting confirms the existence of a large number and variety of horses standing in for human beings and constructing meanings in Russian cultural narratives . Horse topoi are strongly present in nineteenth-century literature, and the twentieth-century traditions take up the allusions from there. According to Mikhail Epshtein, “in the Russian poetic system of animalistic images the stallion occupies, without doubt, the most important place.”5 There are the romantic images of horses in “The Bronze Horseman” or in “Ruslan and Liudmila” by Alexander Pushkin, in Taras Bul’ba and Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol’, “Borodino” and Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov ; there is the horse as representative of the “little man,” forgotten and oppressed, as portrayed by such writers as Nikolai Nekrasov in his poem “Rednose Frost,” by Leo Tolstoy in his “Kholstomer,” and in “Sorrow ” by Anton Chekhov. Nineteenth-century literature made use of Russian folklore and its mythological horse as the emblem of the bogatyr’ in bylinas like Il’ia Muromet and in popular fairy tales like “Sivka-Burka” and “The Humpbacked Horse.”6 Athletic horses gallop in literature and in paintings, including popular handcrafts showing mythological figures from Russian folklore. The horse is a symbol of power, force, and freedom; it is a combination of human wisdom and irrational animal impulse, of culture, passion, and destructive spontaneity. The intimate relationship between human and horse, as represented by the mythic Scythians, the wild horsemen of Russia’s past, and the equestrian Cossack warriors who display a mental and physical unity between man and animal, survives in collective Russian memory. Various popular national characteristics, such as being antirational, instinctive, and elemental, are linked with this nationally specific animal “megatext.”7 The “leap forward” in the country ’s history is a moment of great national significance, a transition “on horseback,” like a skachok,8 to be understood symbolically. Thus on 13 May 1991, the news program Vesti on the Second Channel of Russian Television assumed the troika as its logo, using an old symbol to point toward a “new” Russian way. costlow nelson text4.indd 179 6/23/10 8:40 AM [18.116.118.198] Project MUSE (2024-04-25...

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