'The Canine Madonna': The Horrors of Serfdom in Cultural Mythology and Ethnography

• In Event: Literature and “Ethnographic Primitivism” in the Russian Empire/Early USSR

Abstract

One of the main, shock-inducing examples of the horrors of the serfdom era, which is frequently encountered in Russian and Soviet literature, is the story of the sadistic landowner who forced a serf woman to breastfeed purebred puppies instead of her own child (Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, N.A. Nekrasov, V.G. Korolenko, N.A. Kasatkin, Velimir Khlebnikov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, M.V. Nechkina, etc,). In this paper, I reconstruct the literary, social, historical, and ethnographic origins of the horrifying account, which, during the Civil War era, became an emotional justification for the real (i.e., historically documented) sadistic and brutal terror against the nobility and intelligentsia. I argue that the expressive “gallery” of politically engaged realism (and the ideological representations of reality that follow it, up to contemporary documentary filmmaking and the photo- and video-chronicles of social networks) turns out to be not only a construct that selects and arranges "horrible facts" within the appropriate genre frameworks based on the convictions of the authors, interested political groups, and the expectations of the audience. It is also a kind of verbal and visual "spiritual séance," calling up from the depths of the past the terrifying ghosts of literary-historical and mythological origin.

Author

• Ilya Vinitsky, Princeton U