The Icon and the Axe

For better or worse, the sense of sharing experience almost as members "I .1 common family was an Important element in forming the cultural tradi-1114i ol modern Russia. Intensified by common suffering and glorified memo-rlcit of Kievan times, this feeling was perhaps even deeper in the interior Hi.in in the more prosperous and cosmopolitan centers of Novgorod, Smolensk, and Polotskto ffie west.It was in this inner region that the cult of iln Mother of GolTwai~c!evSI6ped with the greatest intensity. Feasts like thai of the intercession (Pokrov) of the Virgin-unknown to Kiev-were liitioduced in this region; and a cathedral dedicated to the Assumption of iln Virgin (Uspensky Sobor) enjoyed in Vladimir and Moscow the central role played by the more purely Byzantine Santa Sophia in Kiev and Novgorod. Although this cult of the Virgin was also growing concurrently m Byzantium and even in the West, it appears to have generated a special primitive intensity and sense of familial intimacy in the Russian interior.

Within the family the mother seems to have been the binding force. in a society whose riclrandlmaginative epic literature contains few refer-1 in cs to romantic love and no idealized pair of lovers, the mother tended to

become an unusually important focus of reverence and affection.9 If the father's role in the family was likened in the household guide of the mid-sixteenth century (Domostroy) to that of the head of a monastery, the mother's role might well have been compared to that of its saint or spiritual "elder." She was a kind of living version of the omnipresent icons of the "Mother of God"-the "joy of all sorrows" and "lady of loving kindness," as the Russians were particularly prone to call Mary. Men monopolized the active conduct of war and affairs, whereas women cultivated the passive spiritual virtues of endurance and healing love. Women quietly encouraged the trend in Russian spirituality which glorified non-resistance to evil and voluntary suffering, as if in compensation for the militant official ethos of the men. Women played a decisive role in launching and keeping alive the last passionate effort to preserve the organic religious civilization of medieval Russia: the famed Old Believer movement of the seventeenth century.10 Even in later years great emphasis was placed on the strong mother figure, who bears up under suffering to hold the family together; and to the grandmother (babushka), who passes on to the next generation the mixture of faith and folklore, piety and proverb, that comprised Russian popular culture.11 Russia itself came to be thought of less as a geographical or political entity than as a common mother (matushka) and its ruler less as prince or lawmaker than a common father (batiushka). The term "Russian land" was feminine both in gender and allegorical significance, related to the older pagan cult of a "damp mother earth" among the pre-Christian Eastern Slavs.

Earth is_the_jtussian "Eternal Womanhood,'^notthe…celestial image

of it; mother, not virgin; fertile, not pure; and black, for the best Russian

soil4.is„.black.12)

Thejriver Volga also was referred to as "dear mother" in the first Russian folk.song ever recorded and "natal mother" in one of the most popular: the ballad of Stenka Razin.13

? The extension of Kievan civilization on to the_headwaters of thisthe.

/-largest river in Eurasia proved the means of its salvation. The very in-hospitability of this northern region offered a measure of protection'Tforn both east and west. The Volga provided an inland waterway for'future expansion to the east and south; and its tributaries in northwestern Russia reached almost to the headwaters of other rivers leading into the Baltic,

Black, and Arctic seas.??---

But the movement out to the sea and onto the steppe came later in Russian history. This was essentially a period of retreat into a region where the dominant natural feature was the forest.

i.. 1 ne ? uresi j-x.

In speaking of the region, Russian chroniclers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries depart from their usual tendency to use the name of a dominant city, referring instead to zaleskaia zemlia, "the wooded land": a pointed reminder that the virgin forest was the nursery of Great Russian ??????*?^??1????????1?????17^??1?? folklore taught "that the primeval forest had extended all the way up to heaven.15 In the formative early period, the forest represented a kind of evergreen curtain for the imagination, shielding it from the increasingly remote worlds of Byzantine and Western urbanity.