Snegurochka
Nov. 13th, 2010 12:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fulseldenBook one: The Bathhouse at Midnight: Magic in Russia, W. F. Ryan (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999). This just does what it says on the tin: it's a clear-eyed, well-written, and rather charming general survey of Russian magical practices. I can't speak at all to its accuracy, though it looks solid and has good reviews from those in the know. Ryan wisely refrains, in general, from analysis and theorising, and gives proper weight to the oral as well as the written tradition, though there's particular emphasis on divinatory texts (his area of expertise). He mostly concentrates on 'the Orthodox East Slavs of Kiev Rus' and their descendants [...] wth a heavy emphasis on Muscovite and Imperial Russia', though there's material from further afield. Do I have to say that this book is COMPLETELY FASCINATING? It doesn't have to devote time to wrestling with past anglophone witchcraft studies, because they largely ignored Russia, and it really is just an excellent overview.
The title comes from the idea that the village bathhouse, a liminal place used for pre-marriage ritual baths, for delivering babies, and of course for gettin' naked (and hence removing items of magical protection such as cross and belt), was pretty much the archetypal setting for popular magic. And also the haunt of a particularly hostile domestic sprite, the bannik or baennik, 'variously envisaged as a naked dwarf or a little old man', and thus likely to be dangerous if visited alone or after sundown. Cross-reference with Gregory the Great talking about bathhouse attendants who turn out to be penetential spirits, and with the shower scene in Psycho, I guess.
Book two: Harvest of the Cold Months: the Social History of Ice and Ices, Elizabeth David (London: Penguin, 1994). Elizabeth David was pretty much solely responsible for dragging England out of the doldrums of post war spam-n-eggs cookery with her bold new knowledge of mediterranean food and endorsement of stuff like 'pasta' and 'olive oil'. She was also an excellent writer and keen food historian who amassed a library of ye olde cookery books and produced, as her last work, this book on the human fondness for coldness out of season, which stands as an early manifestation of the kind of cultural history which keeps giving us books on spices and cod. It's less rigorous than some of these works, and bears the marks of David's age and ill-health: she never really finished it. But despite its gaps and Eurocentricity (although there are chapters on India (largely on the British in India), the Middle East, and China (people in China were using ice to transport goods like fresh fish long before Francis Bacon had his experiment with snow-stuffed chicken - a direct influence on the technique's eventual adoption in the West)), it's unfailingly, yes, COMPLETELY FASCINATING, smart and sensible and wry.
Book three: Petersburg in Bildern und Skizzen, Johann Georg Kohl (Dresden and Leipzig, 1841). This is used heavily by David in her account of ices in Russia, and the 1842 English translation, Russia and the Russians, is mostly online. Kohl was a German historian and geographer who lived for some years in Russia, and his account is lively and rather heavily picturesque, with a good eye for detail and no eye at all for social criticism (or, well, this is unfair. But he's no Henry Mayhew). He's fairly broad-minded, if often howlingly patronising, and compulsively readable.
Oh yes, fic:
The judge’s daughter has skin like the snow and hair like wet honey. They bring her to their town house at the beginning of winter, and they say she was a cousin before they took her in. People look at the judge in the tight black curls of his Astrakhan coat and say they never knew he had it in him.
The judge is a plump man with stiff hair and round thin red lips. He enjoys sweetmeats and vodka, the little water, and his offices have tall greenish walls with swags of plaster fruit near the ceiling. It is obvious from the start that he dotes on his beautiful daughter: she wears silk dresses with heavy loops of silk, thick as white moulded plaster.
What is more remarkable is that the judge’s wife seems to love his daughter every bit as much as he does. She is a tall grey-jawed woman with thick flat nails and a collection of bobbly little cameos she wears high up under her chin or pinned to her chest like medals for bravery. She brushes her daughter’s thick hair herself, says her maid, and is forever telling her neighbours of her daughter’s accomplishments, with a nod at the end of the sentence as if to say ‘and that’s that!’
They say that their daughter has lived a very retired life, up till now. Visitors imagine her in a dry little town where there are wooden houses with reed roofs and flocks of geese under tall lindens. Perhaps one old lady with sharp elbows, in the house with her; perhaps a family of poor little cousins, running round under her feet until it is all too much for their mother.
Their daughter sits with her hands in her lap and leans against her mother when they think no-one is looking. She is very patient with youngsters, although girls her own age are inclined to be jealous. Her father buys her a German doll with a rosy bisque face and lively glass eyes, although she is a little too old for such things. The one time she gets involved in any mischief is when the two little blonde sisters from across the square roll in the snow in their garden to see what kind of man they will marry. The judge’s daughter tries it too and ends up under the twiggy tall birches; the two sisters tell her it means she would die an old maid.
“Unlikely,” she says, brushing herself down. Their governess comes running out, shouting in German.
The judge’s outer offices are full of petitioners in shabby coats with cat-fur collars and shiny cuffs. Further in there are bony young men sitting at desks and spitting into their hankerchiefs. The chief clerk has a scabby little red carpet under his desk; there is a permanent ruck in it from where he burrows his feet in wintertime. The whole place smells of boiled egg and ink and carbolic.
When the judge’s daughter comes through the offices with her father, back from a trip through the streets to the foreign confectioners, half the clerks and a fair few of the petitioners fall in love with her at once. She is wearing a fur trimmed coat and her face shows above the collar white and dull like icing sugar. Her eyes are as green as ice cut from the Neva. Snow is caked and matted on their coats and hats. She walks behind her father with her maid and disappears behind his tall double doors with the greasy brass handles. Sound rises again in the outer offices.
One evening the judge’s wife holds out her hands to the tall stove, painted in pale green and white with the air shimmering around it like syllabub, and tells her daughter to do as she does. Her daughter looks at her and holds out her hands to the heat. The judge’s wife watches as her daughter’s hands seep soft pearls of clear water, and knocks her hands away from the stove.
“Well!” she says, as if to say, ‘that’s that!’
“That’s how it is,” says her daughter.
--
In the St Petersburg winter men carve ice from the Neva in great clear blocks of emerald. The judge buys so much that people say his cellar must be pushing his house out of the ground like a milk-tooth.
Men run between doorways hugging their coats around them, snow creaking and seething under their feet. Sound hangs in the air over the great streets, the white houses. Women bend over holes cut in the ice of the Neva, their arms sheeted with ice like plate armour. Snow shuffles up slowly around still sleeping drunkards.
The judge drinks quince vodka, sweet and musty, and watches men drag in the ice with baggy eyes from behind his salt-stuffed double windows. The men have straw-stuffed boots and splintery crusts of snow on their clothes and eyebrows, and they breathe out long plumes of dull white air. The judge’s daughter stands beside him and pats his short round hand.
“People have tried this sort of thing before,” she says.
The judge puffs out his chest and tells her about the marvels of modern preservation.
--
Spring comes and the ice on the Neva slits into little rods under the snow: a river of ice-sticks. Mud blossoms up through the snow and the paving in tight bulging rills. Oranges and lace come in ships from the south, and the judge’s wife leads her daughter down into their ice house.
In earlier years the ice had been thrown down willy-nilly, the shards congealing into one close-packed greenish-black mass before spring came. Now there was a rough couch of ice and niches in the walls for their daughter’s belongings.
“We will just have to skimp when it comes to keeping food down here,” says the judge’s wife.
She sits down beside her daughter in the ice-room and combs out her long golden hair.
“It’s cold down here, true enough,” says her daughter. She looks around her and taps the hard walls with her nails. “Perhaps,” she says, “it’s cold enough.”
The streets of the city fill up with water-carts. Easter comes and stalls are piled high with lemons and oranges. Young men in black velvet trousers and red flowered blouses sell ices in the streets, pink and white and coffee-coloured. They wear long red and white embroidered clothes across their chests like the ribbon of an order, and serve swirls of red and white ice to sweet girls, rose and vanilla. The judge’s daughter walks out down the Nevskoi Prospekt with her mother in the evening and opens her little red mouth for the taste of sweet ice on a spoon. The ice-seller winks at her and polishes a glass with his sash.
“Blooming flower, poppy bloom, vanilla blossom, coffee blossom,” he cries. “Who will take my most delicious ice? See here my sweet young lady, red, red as a rose, and yellow as gold.”
The judge’s daughter smiles and licks her lips. Her teeth are very white, almost as if the a light might shine through them.
“I’m trying something new, this year,” she tells the ice-seller.
Her mother takes her arm and hurries her home.
--
The judge’s pantry smells a little of copper: a slab of cold salted meat is being squeezed in a cast-iron patent meat press in one corner. A clear pinkish liquid beads slowly from one seam of the press. Jars of pickled mushrooms stand on the shelves, white and grey and brown and orange, ragged and round, resting gently among snips of blackened herbs and fat pale cloves of garlic.
The judge’s daughter points at the tall bottles of syrup, red and gold and dark as treacle, at the white block of sugar. She licks her lips.
“It didn’t look so hard,” she tells her mother. She orders the maid to bring down some shaved ice.
“You should try not to exert yourself,” says her father, bringing her ice to his lips on a long silver spoon.
--
Summer comes and the gilt spire of the Admiralty looks wet with the heat and the haze. Mosquitoes slam into the faces of ladies and gentlemen bowling down the wooden planking at the centre of the wide streets. The judge sits in court where the drone of the prosecutor is like butter melting. He jerks awake and smacks his lips.
In his ice house he watches the walls wick and dwindle. His daughter’s skin is clammy to the touch. They eat cold red soup, Botvinya, grainy with lumps of ice and chopped toasted black bread. The judge’s teeth hurt as though it is once again winter, as though he is rushing on a sleigh along the frozen length of the river, warmth shrinking away to the back of his mouth.
“Are you sure?” he asks his daughter.
“It’s cold down here, true enough,” she says.
The judge dabs at his lips with his napkin and nods his head slowly, as if he is in court.
“We made you under the trees in the forest,” he says. “The snow was very white and the trees were very black.” He shuffles his hands together. “We had just seen off the last of our guests. All the best people, and still trays of sweets out in the hallway. You were just like a pillar of salt, then a little snow doll.”
“I remember,” says his daughter. She takes a sip of cold water and syrup; ice tinks against her glass. “More often it is a poor woodcutter.”
“What about next year?” asks her father.
His daughter looks down into her glass, at the thin threads of pink syrup and the white-bubbled ice.
“I don’t know,” she says. She takes up her comb and tugs it through the damp knots of her loose green-gold hair. She looks up at her mother, leaning still in the doorway. “I want to try adding orange-flower syrup to tomorrow’s ices,” she says.
A chunk of her hair breaks away like wet sugar.
--
Autumn comes. Vast teams of men take down the pontoon bridges across the Neva, and the judge’s house grows cool and damp. The ice house has sad nubbly slabs of old ice and a floor that weeps swamp-water: it is a hollow shucked out of the flesh of the marsh.
The judge’s daughter lies on her back with her mouth open and her hair in scrags and tatters round her on the ice.
Her mother leans over her and sniffs like a sergeant major who has seen a scuff on a boot-toe.
“You can leave if you want to,” she says. She rubs the cameo at her throat with one spatulate thumb. “We never thought,” she says.
“I want to try chestnut ices,” says her daughter. Her voice is soft and sloppy. “I can feel the dark ice come down the Neva,” she says. “I should never have come to the city.” Her head lolls over and she stares at her father in the doorway. “But,” she says, “I’m here now.” Her mouth levers open and she breathes out a long plume of dull white.
--
In the St Petersburg winter men carve ice from the Neva in great clear blocks of emerald. The judge’s daughter comes up from the ice cellar with skin white as milk teeth.
Men run between doorways hugging their coats around them, snow creaking and seething under their feet. Sound hangs in the air over the great streets, the white houses. Women bend over holes cut in the ice of the Neva, their arms sheeted with ice like plate armour. Snow shuffles up slowly around still sleeping drunkards.
The judge’s daughter raps her knuckles on the side of the stove, feeling the heat afterwards like a shock from dry fur, like a flash of white mica in granite. She has become solid without really noticing it, she realises, or perhaps frozen right through, as irrevocably as cooked egg-white. Behind her, white snow stretches under dark trees, winter forever. Spring needs sacrifices, she knows. It will take them, one way or the other.
She thumbs the bubble rising on her ring-finger’s knuckle, white and tight as the ice in a goatish round footprint.
“My sweet snow girl,” says her father. Her mother strokes her short hair.
She cracks her knuckles and resolves to add less syrup to her next batch of ices.
White spreads through the city.
