Tag Archives: Mythologising

The False Search for Love

Alexander Pushkin’s “Ruslan and Liudmila” continues and adds to the recurring theme of false love and the corrupting search for amorous connection in Russian culture. The The Snow Maiden presents a kind of twisted utopia that values love as a sacrificial means to provide the sustenance that society needs to function; it centers on the search for false love. In contrast, “Ruslan and Liudmila” focuses on the superficial quest from both a male and female perspective; it centers on the false search for love.

A Finnish sorcerer presents the story of his own quest for love to Ruslan, who has had his wife Liudmila taken away from him by mysterious means. The old sorcerer laments his years lost trying to prove himself worthy of the maiden Naina’s love. His attempts as a shepherd, warrior, and finally sorcerer exemplify the futility in searching for love, for none of these endeavors can help forge a connection. Naina’s love, or the force of time, is always a barrier. The old man relays this story to Ruslan, who seeks to cement his legitimacy as Liudmila’s husband by finding her. The sorcerer, however, tells Ruslan that fate will take care of his concerns. Furthermore, through his tale, the old man implicitly cautions Ruslan not to try to make the acquisition of love and marriage a matter arrived upon by free will. By the end of the excerpt, one message about love rings clear: love can only come about by fate, not by free will.

Scratch a Russian, Find a Paradox

When we began this class, Fyodor Tyutchev’s question confronted us- “What is Russia [?]” Questions of national origin and national ‘character’ (a term that, while reductive, proves useful when examining how an idea is expressed in cultural productions) pertaining to Russia take on a multiplicity of complicated and oft contradictory forms. Is Russia the ‘Europe of Peter the Great’, or is it an ‘Asiatic’ anomaly, stamped with the legacy of Tataro-Mongol occupation? While both of these definitions are problematic, I will narrow in on the second, and examine how the notion of the ‘Asiatic’ is engaged with in two works-Alexander Blok’s 1918 poem The Scythians, and Sergei Eistenstein’s 1938 epic Aleksander Nevsky.

In the first stanza of the poem, Blok appears to be making an unambiguous statement on Russian identity- “Yes, we are Scythians! Yes, Asiatics, with greedy eyes slanting!” Russia is explicitly positioned as a crossroads of cultures, and given a world-historical mission as a “shield” dividing the ‘hordes’ of Asia from Europe. The nature of the synthesis between the ‘Scythian’ and the ‘shield’ is obscured and, to the ‘Oedipus’ of the European tradition, inscrutable. Russia is a “Sphinx”, a sensuous and bloody dualism, the bearer of a “love as sets our hot blood churning” for the fruits of European culture, yet with a capacity for the violence of the steppe. Europe’s rib-cages burst beneath the “impulsive ardor” of Russian adulation, a legacy of the ‘Mongolic’ stamp left by “breaking in wild horses to the rein, and taming slave-girls to our grip.” Blok acknowledges the Petrine tradition of borrowing, yet ‘others’ Russia as an entity capable of receding before Europe, presenting an ‘asiatic mask’ when betrayed. She does not leave without first offering an olive branch, an invitation to “hammer [your] swords into ploughshares”, to accept Russia’s call “To peace and brotherhood and labour”. Here, perhaps, is an echo of the Slavophiles, of Nikolai Danilevsky’s ‘Slav Role’ as distinct from the West, yet capable of serving as a guiding light.

Eisenstein’s film offers a radically different engagement with concepts of the ‘Asiatic’ and ‘Russianness’. Much of what is said (and left unsaid) in the film can, of course, be attributed to the exigencies of producing a film about beating back the Germans in 1938-priests are occult and cruel, the rich are incapable of leadership, and many of the Teutonic helmets bear a curious resemblance to stahlhelms. Putting all that aside, I want to draw attention to a scene towards the beginning of the film, when Prince Alexander rejects the offer to join the Golden Horde. To the entreaty of the Mongol dignitary Alexander responds with a proverb (containing the folksy da nye of the peasant idiom, but the role of the peasants in Alexander Nevsky is a topic for another blog post)- “It’s better to die than to leave your homeland.” The Tatar is rejected, and Russianness, through connection to native land, is affirmed. As the Mongols march off, an old man suggests that Prince Alexander fight them. In the face of the German onslaught, the Prince cautions patience- “with the Mongols we can wait.” In Blok’s poem, the confrontation and contradiction of the Russian with the ‘Asiatic’ is foregrounded, reveled in. Alexander Nevsky brings a very different notion of Russianness to the table-the Mongol will remain unconfronted, the asiatic mask tucked away.