"Shadows of the Gloomy East: Foreword & the Darkness of the Russian Village" by Ferdinand Antony Ossendowski
Shadows of the Gloomy East: A piece of moral history of the Russian people, Foreword & the Darkness of the Russian Village
Shadows of the Dark East
by Ferdinand Antony Ossendowski
Originally published in Vienna, 1924
Land of sufferers and humility, my homeland, Russian soil.
Foreword
It is not my intention here to write historical sketches of Tsarist and Soviet Russia. Character traits of the Russian people, the dark side of their life and their psychology, bordering on the unbelievable, are to be revealed. The book is intended to educate and give food for thought. It is my conviction that civilised mankind will soon be forced to go into Russia. Not with profit intentions and money lining their pockets, no, with faith and culture and with the will to make a people capable again, who have lost their destiny, their honour and their fatherland, with such intentions mankind must come to Russia. This is a duty which the civilized states cannot avoid. My writings “Shadows of the Gloomy East” shall contribute to the fulfillment of this duty.
The people of Russia are historically and physiologically related to the peoples of the East. The bright side of the Eastern man, the morality and psychology that strive for strength and sublimity of the spirit, have remained foreign to the Russians, while everything dark and criminal in the East has become their own.
The downfall of family morals, caused by the disregard and mistreatment of women as mother and wife, the political fanaticism of men, the lack of social solidarity, the abyss between the intelligentsia and the dullness of the broad strata of the population, an idealistic democracy that has degenerated into intellectual brutality, excesses of class hatred, robbery and murder, indifference or immorality of religious tenets, superstition, remnants of a 13th and 14th century culture and finally the intemperance and immorality of public life, all those negative aspects of the East which have outlived themselves seem to have become flesh and blood in Russia.
A long period of wandering through the wildest as well as the most cultured countries of the East lies behind me, which has taught me clearly how this East casts its dark shadows over all of Russia. The dangers with which the East threatens Christian culture are clear to me. But not the real East, which slumbers in mystical daydreams or grows up to imposing majesty, it is a matter of defending its old culture and independence from the destructive influences of invaders, it is the dangerous one.
What is marching on in the form of the vanguard of the immeasurable horde of the Russian-Mongolian population is a great danger, and behind this is the threatening wave of desperate and spiteful Asians, who demoralised, revolutionised and decomposed the blood-soaked money of the Soviet diplomats, which was stolen from the murdered peoples and from the churches and the temples of science.
At this moment I have to remember the cynicism of the Russian publicist Engelhart1, who prophesied about the near future of Russia:
“We are an anarchist Tatar people who recognise only physical superiority, a hard fist and the whip. When we didn't want to pay taxes anymore, the government gave us liquor and forced us to drink wherever we went, even on the street. We drank day and night to pay taxes. There was patriotism in drunkenness. When we resisted accepting culture and didn't send our children to school, the priest dared to refuse to baptise our children or bury us, and the policemen drove fathers and mothers out of their stubbornness with a whip. If we denied the fatherland recruits, a company of soldiers fired at us or stabbed us with fallen bayonets. So we were raised to be patriots and citizens, we became taxpayers and served to protect Mother Russia, we sought enlightenment and went to the battlefields for the trinity of Tsar, Faith, Fatherland. Now it lies shattered, this almighty trinity. We have ceased to be servants of a tsar. We are the freest of peoples today. Ours is the right of robbery, we have learned from the bourgeoisie how to sweep the streets and clean the stables and so brother kills brother with the revolutionary chant: “Always three of one2 and afterwards the drinking.” O how gloriously freedom has been bestowed on us. She gave us a hunger! A hunger like the world had never seen before. We filled our stomachs with roots and berries, we attacked animal corpses like hyenas. With a sharp knife in their boot leg, people murder from house to house until the flood of our own blood threatens to drown us.
Only then will we throw down the knives, fall on our knees, wring our hands and cry out imploringly:
‘Our guilt cries out to heaven. We killed our very conscience and mother earth. You civilised peoples around: come and save us!’”
(This book was written when Russia was in its deepest travail. Some things, including the Soviet itself, are viewed with different eyes today. Since the author's attitude against the great Russian revolution is characteristic, the somewhat outdated foreword is nevertheless essentially retained.)
From the Darkness of the Russian Village
Russia’s greatest poets have sung about their native villages, but no one has truly described them. Was the village of their own fatherland alien to all of them, in all its gloom and its depression, or did they not want to give it back their love? Let’s go to a Russian village, no matter where. Whether near the big city or deep in the jungle, whether somewhere north of the Volga or near the Kuma, everywhere we find the same low status and the same derangement, only that the villages furthest from the centres of culture show the characteristic features even more profoundly developed.
I know these lands and those of the Petersburg district, the Novgorod and Pskov oblasts as well as the settlements in Siberia. In every village, with its huts quickly made of adobe or thick logs with thatched roofs, the house of God (the Tserkiev3) or a chapel of the Orthodox Church occupies the main place. Sometimes the elementary school, which the peasant children usually stay away from, is also housed in some abandoned hut near the church. The village has its priest and its teacher. The former drinks and extorts gifts for his parish from the poverty of the village, while the latter is mostly a revolutionary propagandist but otherwise also a drunkard.
Around these villages, representatives, who have to represent faith and enlightenment, soothsayers, miracle workers and witches lead their dark existence, even dark paganism has its apostle somewhere nearby. A traditional school of sorcerers and soothsayers, handing down mysterious precepts from generation to generation, has endured for centuries. Witches and warlocks are mostly ancient people who boast of strange knowledge and skills. They treat diseases in people and cattle, banish house demons that get angry, bleed them, drive out bugs, cockroaches4 and mice from the huts, drive out the devil, find horse thieves, call up the souls of the dead, dig for treasures and predict the future. The fact that witches and soothsayers are well versed in botany lets poisoning run like a red, mysterious thread through the dark history of the Russian peasantry. Some practices of such sorcerers, as I know them from my own experience, are recorded:
Sokolov
In the Petersburg province, near the Veimarn station, lies the village of Manuilovo, where Sokolov, the father of a large family, lived a decade ago. The Sokolovs formed the type of a village family that lives close to the city. The daughter, first a chambermaid in the city of Yamburg, soon was caught stealing and chased away, and has since been a maid without any other occupation. Two sons, initially factory workers but soon tired of their work, were pushed astray and took part in a murder that landed one in prison and the other in Siberia. The latter, having returned from exile, became the organiser of a gang of robbers who made paths and footbridges unsafe in a wide area and bought impunity from the local police with part of the stolen goods.
The head of this family was Sokolov. His reputation as a magician was great and his practice as a doctor was well known in several counties. I remember how a number of sick people were brought to Manuilovo from the Gdov district, including typhus patients, lepers and syphilitics. Healing is done. The leper, who is tightly covered with towels, is put in a barrel of hot water. Now Sokolov throws herbs of all kinds into the water, muttering magical incantations to himself. The words “Nostradamus” and “Shugan” can be heard constantly in the murmur. Sokolov makes strange signs with tar on the outside of the barrel, then he smokes it with smoke from burnt grass and herbs. After an hour the leper is dragged out of the barrel in a faint red as a boiled crab, with eyes staring and glassy, and with wounds on his mouth, nose, and hands that have become more terrible than they already were.
Having come to life again, the magician makes the sick man drink a large glass from the water in the cask, takes his head between his two hands, stares at it for a long time with an eerie look, and in a grave and solemn voice commands:
“Go — go away, — Shugan of disease! — The Dark One5 commands it, the Dark One wills it — go — go — get out of here!”
Did this cure help the leper? It has remained unknown to me. All I know is that because of the rapid spread of leprosy, the Russian government had to build a hospital in the districts of Yamburg and Gdov.
Typhoid was cured in a no less strange way. The sick, wallowing in fever and chills, are laid naked in the snow for a few minutes and then tied tightly in fresh towels. The patient prepared in this way must now eat hot brown bread mixed with the powder of dried cockroaches. Then, under all sorts of incantations, thirteen heated bricks, inscribed with strange signs, are laid one after the other on the patient's stomach.
Sokolov’s cure was considered reliable, but I can only say that in the case described here the patient died of peritonitis and that a certain Dr. Abramychev, professor at the Medical Academy in Petersburg, reported Sokolov’s activities to the authorities. However, the report then disappeared somewhere in the district office, since the police, as it turned out, often enlisted the magician's help themselves.
Sokolov also cured the syphilitic in his own peculiar way. The patient is stuffed into a heap of horse manure such as one throws into the stable. Seven sticks of different lengths with rags hanging from them, on which signs and incomprehensible words are written, such as: Prys, Tacznj, Habdyk, are buried in it.
Sokolov cured cattle with incense from herbs, powder from burnt hair, dried frogs or bats, and ointments from badger and rat fat. Mysterious incantations were not lacking in animal healing either.
The Demon in the Hair
In the Pskov province, in the district of Ostrava, I witnessed how a strange disease was being cured in women and animals. The horses’ tails and manes, like the women’s braids, sometimes become so tangled that they can no longer be combed through. It is known in medicine that this phenomenon is caused by aquatic algae, which tends to appear in the waters of swampy regions.
But the village magician’s diagnosis is different. He asserts that an evil domestic demon, made angry for some reason, braids the braids of women and the manes and tails of horses in the night, maliciously entangling. Sacrifice is necessary to appease the demon. An old abandoned shack is chosen and heavily burned out because the devil needs heat. Sheepskins and rags are laid out for him behind the stove, where, according to the magician, the devil likes to rest. A circle is drawn on the floor with the blood of a black rooster, in which honey, milk, salt and grains are prepared for the “Dark One’s” banquet. At midnight, a young girl of fourteen or fifteen years of age, with her hands tied and her hair loose, is led into the hut that has been prepared in this way. The demon is supposed to play with the hair of the poor victim so that he leaves the other hair alone in the future. After such a night of reconciliation with the devil, the abandoned girl usually falls into madness or hysteria and remains abnormal for the rest of her life. But these poor madmen always enjoy the greatest respect in the village, because they saw the demon, feasted with him and treated him to schnapps.
The Cockroach Trapper
Cities like Petersburg, Odessa, Moscow, Kiev and Kharkov are also haunted by sorcerers. Of course, it's the poorest sections of the cities who encourage the magicians. But now and then one gets lost in the palaces. I remember the year 1897. At that time I taught the children of a high official who lived in the beautiful palace of Prince Leuchtenberg, a relative of the imperial family. One day my pupil informed me that the cockroaches had multiplied in the kitchen and dining room to such an extent that a magician was called to drive them away. Since the magician was at work, I went to see the spectacle. The cockroach catcher, an old, small, ragged little man, had just caught a roach, looks at the little animal very attentively from all sides, lifts it very close to his mouth and whispers something to him, the word "Ig" is often heard. After a few minutes of incantation, he takes a piece of chalk from his pocket, makes a sign on the cockroach’s back and lets him go. The animal disappears in no time into the cracks of the sideboard. The magician receives a silver ruble as a fee.
The next day my student tells me that the cook swears by all holiness that the cockroach marked by the magician has gathered his clan in large numbers from every nook and cranny and has emigrated with them from the Palais Leuchtenberg into the wide world. She swore she saw it with her own eyes.
The Devil in the Bathroom
When I was wandering through Siberia in 1920, I was forced to spend the night in a small village. Tired from a long ride and covered in dust from head to toe, the first thing I asked my landlord to do was use the bathing room. “My wife,” remarked the innkeeper, “don't let our guest go to the bathing room alone. I am sending for Maxim to accompany our guest.” “I really don't need any help,” I protested vigorously. “Sir, it really isn't possible, something bad can happen to you without our magician.” says the innkeeper in a serious voice. “Why?” is my astonished question.
“Well, you must know, sir, that the devil has his dwelling place in our bathroom,” explains the farmer earnestly. “The day before yesterday he pushed an old lady off the stove bench, she hit the kettle of hot water, scalded herself and died.” They don't leave me alone in bathroom, I have to wait for Maxim, a huge peasant with disheveled gray hair and a white patriarch's beard. In front of the bathhouse, which is on the edge of a vegetable garden, Maxim stops and calls out:
“Devil — black devil — big or small — sad or merry — there I am — there I am.”
We enter.
It is misty, hazy and hot in the room. We light a Pechpfanne,6 in its glow I see the most diverse objects appear in their outlines. The gigantic massif of a Russian stove, two simple wooden benches, vats with hot and cold water and a heap of stones, such as those used to generate steam, become visible. The uncertain, flickering light of the Pechpfanne darts here and there across the floor, along the wooden ceiling and along the walls, sometimes brightened by the reflection of the moving water in the vats.
Finally Maxim, after undressing, takes a kind of broom made of dry grass, dips it in hot water and, sitting down in the darkest corner of the room, begins to talk to an invisible man, his conversation occasionally interrupted with exclamations like “A kysch,” — “A kysch.” I also hear him hitting the unseen man with his broom.
In Maxim's corner, of course, there are large and bright, trembling beings. He speaks to them, he hits them, the old magician, who doesn't want to know that the flickering light of the Pechpfanne casts shadows that scurry back and forth like mice, almost invisible.
“There, don't come now.” the old man finally says in a soothing voice. They didn't come either, because I was able to clean myself thoroughly in peace and quiet.
The Horse Thief
A penchant for stealing horses is a feature of the Russian people. Certainly it is an atavistic holdover of the ancestors, the Mongolian nomads or Finnish pagans. It should also be noted that the criminal law practiced in the Russian courts for hearings about horse thefts used to be rather dubious. Stealing horses is an ancient specialty of the tribe.
All nomads, even the most pious and absolutely honest Chalchi Mongols7 are horse thieves. This theft resembles a form of robber barony and is seen as a display of skill and courage. In such an undertaking the horse thief is forced to rely only on himself, since he tramples on the law and everything else that binds him to life. Mongolian law from the Volga steppes and the law of the Indians of North America expressly emphasise horse theft as a particularly serious crime.
The exercise of criminal law regarding this is obscure. It is up to the injured party to regain his horse in any way he likes and to punish the thief himself. Thus it usually happens that the one caught stealing a horse perishes in an almost horrible way under the frontier justice of the indignant, while the authorities tacitly recognise this unauthorised court-martial as a matter of common law, without especially taking action against the violation of the law.
If the person who has been stolen from doesn’t manage to get hold of the thief himself, you go to the sorcerer, the “Koniewik,” who has specialized in finding horse thieves. During the night, the victim comes to the magician and brings oats, manure and the bridle of the stolen animal. In the Valday district, in the Novgorod oblast, I myself witnessed such activity.
At ten o’clock in the evening we take the offended party to the magician’s, knocking on his door. With the door still closed, the sorcerer orders the farmer to scatter oats in every corner of the outside of the hut and to bang the missing horse's bridle on the hut’s only window facing east. It passes, the window gets bright and we are allowed to enter. The low, dimly lit room is muggy and stuffy. A Pechkien8 smokes in the furnace, which is made of roughly assembled, broken stones.
The bloody glow of the fire restlessly illuminates the ceiling of the room, from which hang the bridles, tails and skins of horses between dried herbs and full, black bags. The magician, a little gray man, with an open mouth showing black rotten teeth and squinting, staring eyes, crouches by the stove. He looks at me anxiously with inquiring eyes, then takes the bridle of the stolen horse from the farmer, examines it carefully, sniffs it like a dog, tests the hardness of the strap with his teeth and spontaneously starts a terrible howl.
“They have taken it away — the horse — and are driving it — far, — far away from here. — The horse is good, — the horse is good, — completely covered with foam, — it wants to go home, — home, — how it whinnies, — loyal, — loyal, — there, — there, — you have good oats, — la , — la — lala — la, — good, little horse come, — come, — come here.”
As he howls, he tosses oats into the embers of the fire and gazes intently at the blue and gold tongues of flame that curl like serpents above the embers. Suddenly he jumps up, tears the grass and black bags from the ceiling and throws them into the embers. They stretch and bend in the embers, the withered stalks and blossoms, before they burst into bright flames. Now he throws in the farmer's horse manure, so that it hisses and smokes thickly. Bent over the smoke he whispers:
“The horse, — the horse, — a great path, — a road, — three huts, — a burnt pine tree, — a meadow, — a haystack, — a tall, thin man leads the horse — his head is cropped, — a scar on his forehead — he limps — limps — limps.”
“I know him — I know him!” the farmer who was robbed now cries out. "It's Kuzma, the gypsy from Nieshetilov. He doesn't escape me.”
With these words he rushes out of the hut. I go home and find out after a few days:
The farmer took his two sons and his son-in-law with him, attacked the gypsy and dragged him, tied up, to the village. He is beaten in a merciless people’s court, his bones are broken, his hair is torn from his head in order to learn a confession and the hiding place of the horse. Kuzma swears on high that he doesn't have the horse. Nobody believes him.
Again the pack throws itself at the poor man, tormenting him with the most exquisite cruelties, until a merciful executioner is found and rams the pitchfork into his stomach. The corpse is buried in an empty field and a stake is erected on its grave. The stake is the emblem of the ancient law of the “golden horde,” which commands the thief to be tied to a stake. But such an execution is too time-consuming and cumbersome for the peasants, so they only keep the post upright as a warning sign. Fists and pitchforks suit the peasant wildlings more than an executioner’s tools.
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I believe the author is referencing Alexander Nikolayevich Engelhardt.
„Immer drei auf einen und hinterher das Saufen.“ I’m honestly not sure what the author meant with drei auf einen beyond the literal meaning.
Schwaben is what was written, which would literally mean Swabian, but it’s also sometimes jokingly used for the word Schabe which is a word for cockroach, and so maybe the author, being Polish, was mistaking it for the actual meaning of the word. I’m unsure and I could be wrong.
One might be skeptical of Ossendowski’s claims, but perhaps this “Dark One” was Chernobog, or something similar. Chernobog meant “black god” in proto-Slavic, and though the actual existence of any Slavic cult of Chernobog is debated by scholars this all is nevertheless very interesting.
I’m unsure how to translate this, but literally it would mean “pitch pan,” and I believe it’s a little pan one kept a fire in, probably to burn whatever the peasants had as other materials were probably too expensive and too difficult to obtain.
I believe the author is referencing the Kharchin Mongols, but I could be wrong.
I’m unsure what this means as I’ve never seen this word before and can find nothing on it.