Reading Russian Fortunes: Print Culture, Gender and Divination in Russia from 1765

Folklore, Oct, 2001 by Diarmuid O Giollain

Reading Russian Fortunes: Print Culture, Gender and Divination in Russia from 1765. By Faith Wigzell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 250 pp. Illus. 40.00 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-521-58123-0

This book is a study of Russian fortunetelling, looking at fortunetelling books and fortunetellers before the Revolution and in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. The main sources used are published editions of fortunetelling texts from 1765 to 1918, particularly the "dreambook," "the quintessential Russian fortunetelling text," but the author also uses evidence from contemporary elite culture, recent popular publications and her own ethnographic interviews.

Nineteenth-century Russian ethnographers saw popular culture either as a debased form of elite culture or as a "vulgar upstart." Rural popular culture was always preferred to urban because it was considered to be age-old and to express national character. Wigzell argues that the study of Russian popular culture is still neglected, with ethnographers, ethnolinguists and folklorists prioritising rural culture "and the degree to which folk belief reflects ancient mythological thinking or ritual." Fortunetelling, as female and urban, was particularly disfavoured in a series of oppositions which favoured the rural over the urban, the elite over the popular, and the male over the female. The association of fortunetelling with women led both to "a paucity of comment" and to "jaundiced observation."

In peasant society, women dominated personal and household divination, interpreting domestic omens and family members' dreams. They also dominated where the curing/ caring role was involved, as folk healers and midwives. Since "fortunetelling books were generally concerned with offering answers to the major questions about an individual's future (both personal and economic), they exactly replicated the areas of women's concern in traditional rural life." Domestic fortunetelling thus continued to flourish because it fulfilled the functions of "social bonding, entertainment and power over fate, all very important in a culture where women were associated with the private sphere and credited with roles as possessors of intuitive (rather than acquired) knowledge."

Fortunetelling straddles the culture of pre-modern and modernising society, maintaining continuity with the folk divination of the traditional world. Faith Wigzell argues that the transition from a traditional to a modern society was particularly rapid in Russia, with the adoption of western European cultural attitudes telescoped into a period of 150 years. This led to the acquisition of fortunetelling books from the West at the same time as the Enlightenment ideals which denied their validity. Dream interpretation was usually ascribed to foreign sages, foreignness bearing "the imprint of respectability and sophistication." The best example is the probably fictitious 106 year-old Swiss political prophet Zadeck, who became the dream interpreter Zadeka, whose name became attached to one of the standard dreambooks. His fame as a political prophet in sixteenth-to eighteenth-century Europe conditioned his acceptance among newly Westernised Russians. Moreover, political prophecy "is the only type of prophecy that falls clearly outside the female sphere of influence" and hence was more respectable.

Publishing and literacy were very slow to develop in Russia. After 1860, fortunetelling literature greatly increased for a variety of social and technical reasons. Before the Revolution, a high proportion of the literate and semi-literate probably owned a fortunetelling book. Most eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century fortunetelling books were bought by men, but after the flurry of Romantic interest in them among young men in the 1820s and 1830s, they were left to women and the lower classes, losing social respectability. Wigzell notes that the supposed passiveness of the reader of popular literature has gender implications, "especially in the case of fortunetelling, which is generally considered part of women's culture." In fact the "purchaser of a fortunetelling manual was much more active than a conventional reader, in that he, or more likely she, was a co-interpreter of the material."

The nineteenth-century intelligentsia saw its role as defending the values of high culture and promoting the enlightenment of the common people. Increased popular literacy and the dissemination of fortunetelling literature threatened to undermine these efforts. By the time of the Revolution, fortunetelling books were an object of contempt. To the Soviet regime, fortunetelling books "did not simply propagate false values, but also encouraged irrationality and superstition." No more Russian fortunetelling books (outside of the occasional emigre edition) appeared until 1987. Fortunetelling in Soviet times was mainly an oral tradition, but could operate openly in trivial guise, as light entertainment for social gatherings (a place it had previously found for itself among Peter the Great's Westernised nobility).