There are a lot of ways to respond to our current Russian crisis. Mine, as it usually is, has been a little esoteric and intense. Simply put: I'm teaching myself to speak Russian and immersing myself in the culture in a real effort to figure out who these people are that attacked us and what they want. I think we've been very naive because the Russians appear nominally white so we assume that they are about as much like us as the French or the Italians. They are still kind of foreign but in a way we recognize.
No. The Russians are just as foreign to us as the Japanese or Chinese. They are driven by totally different cultural histories and psychological forces than we are. The last few months have been an experience.
Part of my process has been to get very familiar with the cultural myths that all Russian children are taught. This means I'm reading their fairy tales and there's one figure that I am continually fascinated by: the Baba Yaga. She has a lot of different variations, but she's uniformly old, powerful, and lives in a hut that stands on Chicken legs in the forest. She flies around in a mortar, steers with a pestle and covers her trail with a broom.
A lot of the Baba Yaga's behavior is difficult to totally explain. She's not necessarily evil, but she does eat people who cross her, and she does appear to play by some set of moral rules that are only known to her. I have a lot of theories about the Baba Yaga as a figure in the Russian psyche. She embraces a specific kind of ambiguity that is unacceptable to Westerners. A consistent moral of Baba Yaga stories is that asking too many questions is gonna get one got; which is a pretty non-Western lesson to take away from literature. There's also a specific story about Baba Yaga and a nimble youth that has elements of Hansel and Gretel in it that I think explains a lot of the way Putin interacts with the concept of truth. The Yaga can teach us much about the Russian.
But there's one thing I want to know that is a total mystery: Why does the Baba Yaga break into people's houses and count their spoons? This comes up A LOT. She's always breaking in and molesting the silverware. See for example this first place entry in a Baba Yaga art contest.
Post your theories below: What's up with all the spoon counting?
As always, bringing you the most important content of the day: Sirkickyass
No. The Russians are just as foreign to us as the Japanese or Chinese. They are driven by totally different cultural histories and psychological forces than we are. The last few months have been an experience.
Part of my process has been to get very familiar with the cultural myths that all Russian children are taught. This means I'm reading their fairy tales and there's one figure that I am continually fascinated by: the Baba Yaga. She has a lot of different variations, but she's uniformly old, powerful, and lives in a hut that stands on Chicken legs in the forest. She flies around in a mortar, steers with a pestle and covers her trail with a broom.
A lot of the Baba Yaga's behavior is difficult to totally explain. She's not necessarily evil, but she does eat people who cross her, and she does appear to play by some set of moral rules that are only known to her. I have a lot of theories about the Baba Yaga as a figure in the Russian psyche. She embraces a specific kind of ambiguity that is unacceptable to Westerners. A consistent moral of Baba Yaga stories is that asking too many questions is gonna get one got; which is a pretty non-Western lesson to take away from literature. There's also a specific story about Baba Yaga and a nimble youth that has elements of Hansel and Gretel in it that I think explains a lot of the way Putin interacts with the concept of truth. The Yaga can teach us much about the Russian.
But there's one thing I want to know that is a total mystery: Why does the Baba Yaga break into people's houses and count their spoons? This comes up A LOT. She's always breaking in and molesting the silverware. See for example this first place entry in a Baba Yaga art contest.
Post your theories below: What's up with all the spoon counting?
As always, bringing you the most important content of the day: Sirkickyass
