The social meanings of swearing: workers and bad language in late imperial and early Soviet Russia

Past & Present, August, 1998 by S.A. Smith

It is unlikely that `conscious' workers would have chosen to interpret mat in any other way, given the pervasiveness of the ideal of kul'turnost' in late imperial Russia. None the less, it is worth pointing out that in principle revolutionary-minded workers could have adopted a less censorious attitude, since mat had an intimate connection in peasant society with carnivalesque challenges to social and cultural authority.

Historically, in the festivities of the Russian village, mat was used to satirize those in authority, operating connotatively through its sexual and bodily signifiers to challenge the subordination of ruler to ruled and `high' to `low' culture. According to Mikhail Bakhtin's classic account of carnival, the removal of linguistic taboos on words that denote reproductive and excretory functions promoted an ambience that was `frank and free, recognizing no distinctions between those involved, free from the usual (non-carnival) norms of etiquette and decency'.(44) Such carnivalesque use of language was associated in Russia with the skomorokhi, minstrels whose singing, dancing and bear-baiting were standard fare at festivities. In 1648, a time of intense popular unrest, tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich banned these minstrels, making specific reference to their singing `impious and foul songs'(bogomerzkie i skvernye pesni).(45) By the nineteenth century, of course, mat had lost much of its subversive charge, degenerating into what Bakhtin called `bare negation, pure cynicism and insult'.(46) Yet carnivalesque elements still thrived in many genres of folk art and entertainment, in the form of anti-clerical satire, bawdy tales and scatological humour. There was, for instance, a sub-genre of so-called `secret folk-tales' (zavetnye skazki) with a lecherous content, which were first collected by A. N. Afanas'ev (1826-71), the outstanding folklorist of the nineteenth century, as a supplement to his standard collection of folk-tales, published in 1855-64.(47) And his colleague, the eminent lexicographer and ethnographer, V. I. Dal', compiled in 1861 a collection of 368 obscene proverbs (poslovitsy).(48) In addition, there were hundreds of bawdy riddles (zagadki), chastushki and folk-songs still current in the nineteenth century.(49) As I. I. Zemtsovksii suggests, though these had a mainly sexual content, it was not the erotic as such that was at issue but rather `laughter and sin' (smekh i grekh), the exuberant cult of the `underneath'.(50) Given this tradition, one might have expected that `conscious' workers would take a more permissive attitude than the educated elites to the disrespectful vigour of mat, seeing in the exuberance of pupular speech a potentital weapon agaisnt authority. But this was not to be. `Conscious' workers adopted the same condemnatory attitude as the elites. While they might concede that it was excusable for a `backward' peasant to give vent to his rage against the political and social system by heaping curses on the tsar, for the worker only the complete rejection of swearing sufficed to demonstrate the existence of his lichnost', his determination not to be ground down by the prevailing ignorance and oppression, and his commitment to creating a just and civilized society.