The Icon and the Axe

It is probably not too much to say that the wooded plain shaped the life of Christian Muscovy as profoundly as the desert plain that of Moslem Arabia. In both areas food and friendship were often hard to find, and the Slavic like the Semitic peoples developed warm compensating traditions of hospitality. At the lowest level, peasants presented the ritual bread and salt to all arrivals; at the highest level, princes welcomed visitors with the elaborate banquets and toasts that have remained characteristic of official Russian hospitality.

If life in the scorching desert was built around the dwelling in the oasis and its source of water, life in the frozen forest was built around the dwelling in the clearing and its source of heat. From the many words used for "dwelling place" in Kievan Russia, only izba, meaning "heated building," came into general use in Muscovy.10 Being permitted to sit on or over the -earthenware stove in a Russian dw^llmgjw^iJhe_uJtimate in peasant hos-pitaUty^heequi^aJratj^^iying a man somstinngjo drink in the desert. The hot communal bath had a semi-religious significance^ still evidenFIoday ia some RusslSn~pTiblic~,b^tn^^MnFuTm^h~^mTas and analogous in some ways to the ritual ablutions of desert religions.17

Unlike the desert nomad, however, thejygical Muscovite was sedentary, for he was surrounded not by barren sand but ?????^??????????? forest he could extract notjmly logs for his^hut but wax for his candles, bark for his shoes and primitive records, fur for his clothing, moss for his floors, and pine boughs for his bed. For those who knew its secret hiding places, the forest could also provide meat, mushrooms, wild berries, and-as its greatest culinary prize--sweetjioney.

Man's rival in the pursuit of honey through the forests was the mighty bear, who acquired a special place in the folklore, heraldic symbolism, and decorative wood carvings of Great Russia. Legend had it that the bear was originally a man who had been denied the traditional bread and salt of human friendship, and had in revenge assumed an awesome new shape and retreated to the forest to guard it against the intrusions of his former species. The age-old northern Russian customs of training and wrestling

with bears carried in the popular imagination certain overtones of a primeval struggle for the forest and its wealth, and of ultimately re-establishing a lost harmony among the creatures of the forest.18

The fears and fascinations of Great Russia during these early years were Jo a large extent the universal ones of war and famine. The former was made vivid by the internecine warfare of Russian princes as well as periodic combat with Tatars and Teutons. Famine was also never far away in the north where the growing season was short and the soil thin; and where grain could not even be planted until trees were arduously uprooted and soil upturned with fragile wooden plows.

But the forest also gave rise to special fears: of insects and rodents gnawing from below amToTfireHsweeping in from without. Though common to most societies, fear of these primitive forces was particularly intense in GreatRussia. In the iHiRfalyTanguage of "our own times, they could be said to represent the guerrilla warriors and thermonuclear weapons of an adversary bent on frustrating the peasants' efforts to combat the cold and dark with the "conventional" defenses of food, clothing, and shelter. Even when he had cleared and planted a field and built a hut, the muzhik of the north was plagued by an invisible army of insects and rodents burrowing up through the floorboards and gnawing at his crops. During the brief summer months of warmth and light, he was harassed by swarms of mosquitoes; and when he put on his crude furs and fabrics for the winter, he exposed his body to an even deadlier insect: the omnipresent typhus-bearing louse. The very process by which the body generated warmth within its clothing attracted the louse to venture forth from the clothing to feast upon its human prey; and the__yery_communal bathsjby which Russians sought to cleanse themselves provided a unique"opportunity for the louse to migrate from one garment to another.19 ????????? the ????????????? bring Russia epidemics of the black plague in the fourteenth and seventeenth centuxies_thii--were.,probably even worse thm_„tllQS£_jQlLffie_stern Europe.20 The ^e^sjinfj_wooded„hut, which provided^xudjmentary^rpJretioB against the, larger .beasts of the forest, served more as a lure to its insects and rodents. They hungrily sought entrance to his jdwdhngplace, his food supply, and-eventually-his still warmbody.