Why Russian Slavophiles were mistaken for Persian merchants, how did they come up with alternative myths and what good was left to us

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

"By the side of the sea, a green oak …" Pushkin's lines appeared not just like that, but on the wave of fashion that grew out of the philosophical course of his time - Slavophilia. By the early nineteenth century, the educated stratum of society had become so European in all respects that the idea of loving something Slavic, from food and songs to history, was almost revolutionary. But sometimes it took grotesque forms.

Slavophilia is usually opposed to Westernism, ideology and philosophy, which at that time were aimed at, as they say now, globalization based on the culture of Europe. However, these names are very arbitrary. Slavophilia was widespread in Western countries, where the Czechs, Slovaks and related national minorities lived; many Slavophiles believed that the culture of the Slavs is one of the main European cultures and should be perceived as equivalent to the dominant Gallic (French), British and Germanic (Spanish and Italian cultures were considered outlying). Many Slavs were at the same time Pan-Slavists - they advocated a great Slavic union and cultural borrowing from each other.

Russian Slavophiles differed from their Czech counterparts in that they considered Orthodoxy as the basis of an alternative European culture. However, at first they did not call themselves Slavophiles either - it was a nickname given to them by Westerners, a nickname that should have been offensive.

In any case, the Slavophils tried to fight globalization by their own example, actively resurrecting the original culture, native language, way of life, clothes and even mythology. And sometimes they tried a little too hard.

Alternative fashion

Very often the Slavophiles attracted attention by their clothes. Elements of Serbian or Polish costume were often popular among them. True, the second was looked upon with suspicion: “Pole” was a constant synonym for “rebel,” and some elements of the Polish costume were later banned altogether. However, in the first half of the nineteenth century it was possible to find men in confederate (Polish hats) and jackets with paws.

The subtlety of the situation is that both the confederacy and the pattern on the jackets were borrowings in Polish culture, moreover, from completely non-Slavic peoples. Confederates were originally worn by the Polish Tatars (quite a few Tatars, when the Golden Horde fell, deserted to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and went to Poland by inheritance). Jackets "with paws" came into fashion in Poland under Stefan Bathory, aka Istvan Bathory, a king originally from Hungary (and therefore was usually called Hungarian), and in Hungary they appeared as an imitation of Turkish fashion (despite the fact that the Hungarians fought with the Turks, they willingly adopted a lot from them). However, jackets and caftans "with paws" came to Turkey from the future Abkhazia.

Other Slavophiles tried to walk in dug out pre-Petrine styles - long, richly decorated caftans, boots with curved noses, boyar and streltsy hats. Alas, to their offense, in these suits they were constantly mistaken not for patriots, but for employees of the Persian embassy or merchants from Persia.

However, it must be said that the pre-Petrine fashion in the highest circles had a truly oriental origin. Eastern styles began to penetrate into the ancient Russian principalities even after the adoption of Christianity by Vladimir Saint and his marriage to a Byzantine princess; along with the expansion of the princes of Kiev to the east, fashion also came.

But the main stream of borrowings from the east happened later, when the Mongols united in the Golden Horde and organized the Great Silk Road, a large, safe, regularly traveled caravan trail. Oriental fashions, fabrics and decorations poured westward. Russian peasants, moreover, retained their original fashion, but the Slavophiles did not even think about it - until some of them turned into the so-called populists, a new ideological trend.

Alternative mythology

The entire eighteenth century was traditionally remembered in different contexts, purely as symbols and allegories, of ancient gods. For example, Catherine was constantly compared with Minerva (Athena), about lovers it was said that they submitted to the power of Venus (Aphrodite) or Cupid (Eros), the messenger could be called Mercury (Hermes).

The Slavophils preferred to use as allegories not the "general" ones, popular throughout Europe, the gods of Rome and Greece, but their own, native, primordial ones. They looked for their traces, wrote essays about them, dedicated poems to them. True, since they continued to think by inertia exclusively within the framework and templates of the common European culture, it seemed to them. that the Slavic pantheon is obliged to coincide one hundred percent with the antique, repeat its hierarchy and plots, duplicate its gods.

As a result, in search of this cloned hierarchy and counterparts of the ancient gods, many deities were literally invented out of the blue - and then became so popular that even now not everyone knows that these gods and goddesses refer to remakes concocted to imitate the Roman pantheon as the only correct one sample.

So, the "gods of love" Lel and Lada were invented - so that there were their own, Slavic Cupid and Venus. Perun was appointed the supreme god, since there was a supreme god in the ancient pantheons, and the Slavophiles brought up on Zeus and Jupiter could not even imagine that for the Slavs there could be equally important deities and that if there was a supreme god, then not necessarily one that looks like Zeus.

In the wake of interest in Old Russian and Common Slavic, Pushkin wrote such works as Ruslan and Lyudmila and The Tale of the Golden Cockerel. Characteristically, both poetic stories feature characters of clearly Turkic origin (the same Ruslan). And some fairy tales from Pushkin are the transfer of plots from German folklore to Slavic soil, since in his time it was assumed that the myths and fairy tales of peoples completely duplicate each other and could not be otherwise.

Alternative Russian language and Russian names

Among other things, many Slavophiles fought against borrowings from European languages, suggesting either borrowing from other Slavic languages, or using obsolete words in a new way, or forming neologisms exclusively from Slavic roots.

This approach is not entirely strange. It led to what we call an airplane an airplane, although initially this designation is a type of ferry, or a steam locomotive was called a steam locomotive, connecting two native roots. But at times he went to such extremes that they joked about Slavophilism in the language: "Goodness is coming from the lists to disgrace through gulbis in wet steps and with a splatter." This meant - "The dandy goes from the circus to the theater along the boulevard in galoshes and with an umbrella", with the replacement of all non-Russian (and even one Russian) roots.

But it was the Slavophiles who gave us names that will become popular in the twentieth century. Pushkin introduced Lyudmila - a Czech name that was not in use in the Russian Empire. Vostokov, nee Alexander-Voldemar Ostenek, a German Slavophile, composed the name Svetlana, which then made Zhukovsky very popular.

Some tried to translate the names of Greek origin given to them at baptism, but among the nobility such names were popular, the translations of which did not fit into the Russian ear. For example, Alexandra tried to introduce themselves as Ludobors, but this did not take root.

The struggle was not only for individual roots, but also for prefixes and suffixes! For example, it was believed that “counter” and “anti” should be replaced by “against” - that is, not counterproductive, but counterproductive. Even the suffix "sh" got it, which came from German and originally meant someone's wife, and by the end of the nineteenth century - already a woman in some profession (doctor, for example). One of the first female proofreaders recalls that the Slavophiles persistently pronounced her profession with the primordial Slavic suffix "k": proofreader, while everyone else called it proofreader.

How, when and why the Russian language changed and absorbed foreign wordsdespite the constant struggle for its purity, it is generally a separate and very interesting topic.