Other Animals: Beyond the Human in Russian Culture and History

Part I. Traditional Worlds and Everyday Life

17 we begin with the traditional worlds of everyday life. Olga Glagoleva, on the one hand, traces a tale of eighteenth-century provincial life, in which a pig thrown through a window becomes a revealing event for our understanding of animals, women, honor, and law. Her sources are archival : legal documents, letters, maps, family records. On the other hand, Mikhail Alekseevsky describes beliefs and practices related to animal disease and the Russian village, culled from historical and contemporary ethnographers’ accounts. Both chapters are situated in rural Russia—an agrarian world in which “animals” were primarily livestock, and livestock were essential to human well-being. Peasant life was in some sense incomprehensible and impossible without animals, but those with pretensions to nobility (or modernity) banked on being able to put a fence between themselves and the barnyard. Notions of class, of community, of gender, and of individual identity might well hinge on just how (and where) animals figured in a person’s life. In establishing particular understandings of “other animals,” these chapters reach into realms that are in some measure rather elusive: the traditional culture of Russia’s peasants and the daily life of provincial gentry F Part i traditionalworlds andeverydaylife costlow nelson text4.indd 17 6/23/10 8:40 AM 18————ii H trAditiOnAl wOrlds And everydAy life in the eighteenth century. What were the sensibilities and practices that shaped how Russian peasants—or the lower and middle provincial gentry— interacted with and understood animals? How do we get at the habitual lives and associations of those who have left virtually no written records? How do we read the metaphors of peasant expression, or the oblique references in a family court case that dragged on for decades? What can these fragments tell us about a larger, longer history? Well into the twentieth century, Russia was a country of “two cultures”: the Europeanized, educated elite who held positions of economic and cultural (if not political) power represented a tiny fraction of the population. While they might live on an estate in provincial Russia for part (or most) of the year, their cultural identity derived in large part from the capital cities of Moscow and Petersburg. The vast majority of Russians, however, were peasants, their lives shaped by systems of land tenure and agrarian tradition that had changed little over the centuries. Their lives were embedded in place, and under serfdom—abolished only in 1861—peasants were largely bound to lands that (like them) were owned by a gentry landlord. The world of the Russian peasantry, as Alekseevsky suggests, was a world of traditional rituals and cosmologies that endured well into the twentieth century—intertwining and coexisting in complex ways with official ideologies , either Orthodox Christian or Soviet Marxist. Educated elites tended to regard these traditional cultures with skepticism and disdain (although they could also become the objects of poeticized, politicized idealization), as a world of ignorance, superstition, and violence. Peter the Great was but one in a long series of reformers who sought to modernize and rationalize this world, by force if need be. But for a variety of reasons—isolation, geographic distance, resistance, economic necessity, the bureaucratic inertia of the state (whether Imperial or Soviet)—this world has changed slowly if at all, and Alekseevsky documents centuries-old beliefs and practices that have endured into the post-Soviet era. Many aspects of these worlds are suggestive for a history of humananimal relationships. The peasant’s was a world in which the line between human and animal seems to have been drawn less rigidly than in our own. Alekseevsky notes the various parallels between understanding of and treatments for animal and human ailments. Animals and humans shared many of the same spaces in the peasants’ world. Indeed, traditional peasant homes anticipated that animals would come into the izba—the central domestic space with its enormous, essential stove—during the coldest months of the Russian winter. As Glagoleva suggests, fencing off the animals was a sign of ascending social stature, and in the provinces she describes even “nobles” might have pigs and cows right under their noses. costlow nelson text4.indd 18 6/23/10 8:40 AM i H trAditiOnAl wOrlds And everydAy life————19 Nineteenth-century Russian writers often described the Russian countryside as a place where little if anything ever happened. Working with very different sources, and with very different time frames, these two authors help...