Introduction
The way anthropologists fits the Slavic history in context with the folklore culture and traditions, depicts the true picture of the Russian people and their interests. Weddings were used to be celebrated and were considered to be among one of the most vigorous and sophisticated phenomena of festive, ritual and everyday life of the Russia people.
Being a significant pagan festival, wedding was considered to be a social identity responsible for bringing turning point in life of the newlyweds from which the couples enter the first phase of Slavic life cycle event. On one hand wedding united Slavic people, while giving them an opportunity to attend and celebrate their ritual wholeheartedly while on the other the ancient wedding rituals of Russia served not more than an exam for the newly wed to leave their previous roles and enter into new responsibilities. Particularly the way Russian bride fits in the three phases of ‘separation’, ‘transition’ and ‘incorporation’ as suggested by anthropologists, is the best example how a Slavic life cycle event ‘Marriage’ depicts most of the major collections of oral literature and in numerous accounts of Russian village life and belief.
The Slavic marriage myth is associated with Greek saints named ‘Cosmas’ and ‘Damian’, who were brothers identified within the Church as healers. Anthropologist ‘Uspenskii’ suggests that Cosmas and Damian as sacred smiths, were important helpers of the god of thunder that was connected with marriage, and traditional wedding songs which often contain appeals asking the saints to ‘forge’ a wedding. Folklores depict that sometimes these appeals were addressed to a composite female personage ‘Mother Kuzmademiana’, which seemed to underscore the primacy of women’s concerns during this season (Ivanits, 1989, p. 32). That elucidates that this season the woman was separated from her family to be a part of a new family leaded by her husband – the first phase.
Marriage in context with the three phases
Anthropologists suggest that the separation phase deals with the phase when the individual who after getting familiar to his or her environment is subjected to leave or being taken away from her surroundings enters a very different and sometimes foreign environment that they are forced to adjust to and become familiar with. Russian brides used to confront a tough time by leaving their parents, siblings and family members behind their new socially assigned roles as ‘wives’. A common example of this is the birth phase when a child leaves her mother’s womb and enters into this world. Similarly death can also be perceived as such phase where a person leaves this world and enters into the next, depending on a person’s belief about what happens after someone dies. In the Slavic folklore, marriages are considered to be as the ‘separation’ phase where a female leaves her family to which she has belonged to the entire life until getting married and enters a unique world of being a wife.
Weddings in the Slavic folklore are being followed since Russian traditions of the earlier Czarist period. Russian folk dress was not until the twentieth century approached to Russian and English wedding dress. By the end of the nineteenth century, a Russian wedding consisted of two parts, one sad and one cheerful. The bride’s attire reflected these emotions in the various rites and rituals which comprised her wedding. The sad portion of the wedding reflected leaving her life of freedom and her fears of an uncertain future in the unfamiliar house of her husband. Weeping and singing songs that portray the potential gloomy life in a strange family dominated this segment of a wedding. Reflecting such a pensive and sombre mood, the sleeves of the bridal dress reached the hemline and were called weeping sleeves since the bride moaned, wept, and waved them as she left her natal home. Blue or black were the predominant and sombre colours of the sarafan (traditional women’s dress), worn over a shirt at these sombre events (Foster & Johnson, 2003, p. 142).
Slavic marriage ceremonies in early times secured the fertility of the union rather than solemnizing it. Though encouraged, the validation of a Christian marriage did not require an ecclesiastical act until the Council of Trent mandated it in 1563. A Christian ceremony was not, however, sufficient sanction among Slavs. An attachment to early agrarian beliefs required the performance of a ritual more important than the church ceremony. Not until after the bride was ‘capped’, an event that usually ended the week-long celebration, could the bridal couple have sexual relations (Foster & Johnson, 2003, p. 177). The bride or bridesmaids sing melancholy songs, mourning the loss of girlhood, while an older married woman removes the bridal headdress and places a matron’s cap on the bride’s head. Village matrons then accept her into the ranks of married women with songs of welcome. The removal of the bridal headdress symbolizes the impending loss of virginity, as alluded to in all forms of the ritual. After the wreath is removed, it is sometimes thrown into a river where it floats away, lost forever, as is the bride’s virginity (Foster & Johnson, 2003, p. 177).
Transition phase was the one in which the Slavic girl was engaged to be married. Folklores tell us that brides in transition phase used to sing love songs while expressing their concern for separating with their immediate family and fear of entering into an unknown strange family with whom they are supposed to lead their rest of the lives (RussiaIC). Anthropologists believe that transition phase served as a ‘threat’ for Slavic girls since they were unaware of the consequences. This is so because according to the famous Russian historian N. M. Karamzin, Slavic men were strict and wanted to see their wives as slaves (RussiaIC). The bride were supposed to prove their chastity by standing just like that of a slave and by obliging that she would take good of the household and husband without ever complaining to her husband. As soon as the husband dies, the widow was supposed to burn herself in a fire together along with her husband’s corpse since the Slavic society considered it a sin for a widow to live without her husband (RussiaIC). There she enters an ‘incorporation’ phase, or after marriage it is considered to live in incorporation.
Slavic folklores mention the name of ‘Paraskeva-Friday’ as ‘woman’s saint’ who is remembered within the marriage season and the period of women’s winter work, especially spinning. But the cult of Friday went beyond the celebration of this important feast as during the course of the year peasants venerated twelve personified ‘Fridays’, occurring prior to major church feasts, by fasting and abstaining from such tasks as spinning, cleaning house, and washing linen. An ‘Instruction’ about these twelve ‘Fridays’, was issued by Pope Clement which in the words of Maksimov suggests that, like the ‘Dream of the Mother of God’, it was copied and recopied by the segment of the population that was marginally literate and kept in great secrecy from the clergy and curious ethnographers alike. This ‘Instruction’ was essentially a list specifying that peasants would reap rewards such as protection from sudden death, murder, drowning, grievous sin, and extreme poverty for keeping the twelve Fridays (Ivanits, 1989, p. 33).
Paganism – as related to Slavic folklore
The significance of Paganism to the study of Slavic folklore could be evaluated by analysing the notion that no period in the history of the search for folk traditions has yielded such wealth as that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Russia. The feverish activity of this era resulted in most of the major collections of oral literature and in numerous accounts of Russian village life and belief. The term that combines pre-Christian and Christian paganism with Russian believes and practice is the Russian peasant dvoeverie, or ‘double faith’ (Ivanits, 1989, p. 4). It is through this ‘double faith’ of Christians addicted to pagan rites and superstitions that the impact of the criticism of many sermons of the first centuries of Russian Christianity, and the condition to which materials collected in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are attested.
In many general and particular investigations of Eastern Slavic religious beliefs, including the Russian, ethnographers’ main interest is focused on ‘pagan survivals’, their interpretation and the reconstruction of archaic forms, usually directly traceable to a proto-Slavic mythological source. Such an approach is often determined by the conception that ‘paganism’ comprises the greater and essential component of a folk system of beliefs, poorly and transparently covered over by Christianity, which has only to be ‘stripped away’ to reveal pre-Christian archaism in almost ‘pure’ form (Balzer, 1992, p. 35). On occasions like Christmas and New Year, folklores tells us that the images of the pagan ancestor-protectors, inhabitants of the deified Cosmos, transformed into demons, devils, witches, and spirits over the course of the history of the Christian era. Various forms of acts like ‘burning a demon’, ‘burying a witch’, and similar customs among European peoples reveal rudiments of the ritual of sending mediators to the deified forefathers.
Christmas tradition in Slavic folklores reveals that the mummers were dressed as old women with every kind of rag and scrap, a rag-covered pot on the head, to resemble as much as possible witches (Balzer, 1992, p. 63). This form of mummery represents one of the symbolic forms of the archaic ritual of sending mediators to the forefathers, in which the ritual is actually transformed into embarrassment. The symbolic meaning of the transformation of ancestral cult forms in this kind of mummery is extremely vivid, the thick strand on the long staff signifies a long and secure life, while the blows with the staff rain down on the maidens for their mockery; these elements, plus the leg-grabbing (signifying, ostensibly, futile efforts to throw the old woman out of the house) indicate a complete transformation and rethinking of pagan custom through dislocations of the actions of the former ritual targets. The older generation, formerly dispatched to deified ancestors for the sake of the young generation, who have not yet lived their allotted time on earth, by their resolute actions nip in the bud the efforts of the young to perform the physical action. Such dislocations, transforming the object of a pagan ritual to the subject, or officiate, constitute a typological phenomenon in the history of folk traditions, they have taken on their most vivid embodiment in the carnival, essentially a synthesis of various transformed pagan rituals for sending to the ‘other world’.
After the conversion of Russian and the monopolization by the church of the right to consecrate marriage, Slavic wedding rituals came into being that corresponded to norms of an emerging matrimonial law, which included numerous changes in both the family status and the rights of the various classes of women. This process unfolded in two ways, the ancient family and wedding customs, i.e., common law norms, were transformed into formal laws and legal custom; on the other hand, the decisions of church administrative bodies, relying in their activities on the Byzantine code of matrimonial law, were recognized as law, leading to the creation of new traditions. The influence of pre-Christian Russian rituals on tenth to fifteenth century betrothal and wedding ceremonies is witnessed by the earliest documents of the tenth and eleventh centuries, which mention the preliminary wedding agreement, accompanied by a kind of engagement.
While tradition and common law did not regulate the number of marriages that a woman could enter into during her life, Christian mores allowed not more than two. Permission to contract a third marriage was given in the form of an exception like no children from neither the first marriage nor the second.
Shortly before the wedding, it was common to arrange a ritual ‘bath’ in order to preserve the pre-Christian customs associated with ‘charmed water’ in tenth- to fifteenth-century Slavic wedding rituals and as explained by the desire of the bride to win the love and affection of her future spouse by means of magical rituals. This ‘charmed water’ was later drunk by the husband after the wedding (Balzer, 1992, p. 110). After the church ceremonies came the traditional customs, the reception of the young woman into the husband’s home. The custom of the wife removing the husband’s shoes after the wedding is the example of gender inequality in the Slavic rituals and is mentioned as Nestor in the earliest Russian chronicle as “the Princess Rogneda of Polotsk refuses to ‘unshoe the indentured servant’s son’ (Balzer, 1992, p. 110)”
The custom of receiving a young woman in the husband’s home invariably included giving of gifts to the young family and to the bride from the groom. Among the gifts were many symbolic ones, in particular, needles and a whip. In the Slavic folklores such symbolic presents were associated with old magical meaning, not involving a woman’s humiliation and subservience, since the needles protected against the ‘evil eye’, while blows with the whip that were thought to bring about fertility.
Hence from descriptions of old Russian wedding customs it is evident that both the domestic status of woman and the development of family and marital relations in the tenth to fifteenth centuries took place under the influence of not only common law and folkways, but also the increasingly prevalent paganism.
Fairy tales genre in folklores
Slavic fairy tales serve as enduring genre in folklores for the reason they are being told by some of the best-known tellers of the traditional folktale who created Soviet folktales-pseudo folk and prose narratives in which they praised Lenin and Stalin and celebrated Soviet workers, collective farmers, border guards, aviators, and Arctic explorers (Miller, 1990, p. 75). The myth of fairy tales reveals one thing that in fact such ‘fairy tales’ contains no fairies at all, therefore the remaining ‘tale’ has been composed in form of works elements from the three major types of Russian folktales: the magical tale or fairy tale (volshebnaia skazka), the animal tale (skazka o zhivotnykh), and the tale of everyday life (bytovaia skazka) (Miller, 1990, p. 75).
Many newer versions of ‘tales’ have been composed in an attempt to depict twentieth-century reality through the world of fantasy and specific style of narration of the magical tale. The most significant thing about tales is that though magical tales make up only 20 percent of the entire Russian repertory of tales, they are perhaps the oldest and are distinguished by their particular subject matter and style of narration. For example in a tale, the hero may rescue a fair maiden from her captor (a dragon, the witch Baba-Iaga, or Koshchei the Deathless) and be helped by animals (a gray wolf, a goldfish), objects (a self-striking cudgel, seven-league boots), or a person (a little man the size of a finger, or even Baba-laga) (Miller, 1990, p. 75). The characteristic personages of the magical tale are the virtuous, the heroes or heroines who perform the exploits, the persons who are liberated or rescued by the heroes, and their miraculous benevolent helpers and the evil: the villains or villainesses and their malevolent helpers.
Russian tales are based upon folklores in which, not only are people who come into the village from outside suspect; anyone who has left home and travelled, thus crossing boundaries in space, seems to be incapable of returning to the village except as one of the unquiet dead. An example is the story of a young wife who pines for her husband away from home. She grieves so much that he starts appearing to her at night, therefore she is delighted, but her neighbours notice her growing paler and weaker day by day. Needless to say, the husband turns out to be dead and returned as a vampire, draining his wife of her vital essence in typical vampire fashion. The dead that return home are harmful even if they are not inherently evil and there is no indication of their connection to evil while they were alive. The mere fact of return seems to make the person destructive to the living. This is clear in stories of the dead who return to do good, such as tales of mothers who come back from the grave to suckle their infants. Anyone who sees such a woman kneeling by her baby’s crib at midnight is doomed to sicken and die (Oring, 1989, p. 90).
Slavic folklores and tales had a greater impact on their marriages on which brides left their households of birth to travel and join the households of their husbands with great sadness, rather than one of great joy. The death symbolism in the rites for Russian brides goes far beyond the death and rebirth motifs common to all rites of passage. In fact, there is little rebirth symbolism, while the funerary aspects are extensive, including the bride’s abstaining from food and work during the period between betrothal and marriage and behaving as a non-functioning member of the household, as if she were dead. On the night before the wedding, there is ritual washing and dressing of the bride, as of a corpse. In fact, a woman wears her wedding dress twice, at her marriage and at her funeral. There are extensive laments by and for the bride. The bride was even taken from the house the same way that a corpse was removed through an unusual aperture such as a window. The door, which was used for normal human passage, could not be used for brides and corpses (Oring, 1989, p. 90). All these rituals have been responsible in creating ‘fairy tales’ devoid of fairies and full of legendary folklores.
Works Cited
Balzer Marjorie Mandelstam, (1992) Russian Traditional Culture: Religion, Gender, and Customary Law: M.E. Sharpe: Armonk, NY.
Foster Bradley Helen & Johnson Clay Donald, (2003) Wedding Dress across Cultures: Berg: New York.
Ivanits J. Linda, (1989) Russian Folk Belief: M. E. Sharpe, Inc.: Armonk, NY.
Miller J. Frank, (1990) Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudo folklore of the Stalin Era: M.E. Sharpe: Armonk, NY.
Oring Elliot, (1989) Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: A Reader: Utah State University Press: Logan, UT.
RussiaIC, Web.