Narrative and Poetic Worlds: the House as Myth[1]Indo-European tradition in Russian culture.

Joost Van BaakUNIVERSITY OF GRONINGEN

Although living in a house seems to be as normal and natural as breathing, eating, or sleeping in a bed, it involves a complex range of human social behaviours and values which can be found in symbolic representations, art, and narratives of all cultures and in all ages. During the course of the civilisation process, especially in Western civilisations, the positive and individual aspects of living in houses have become increasingly important, resulting in the ideals of domesticity, privacy and comfort. That these are related to the emergence of bourgeois society, and thus are of relatively recent origin, is shown by such authors as John Lukacs (1970) and Witold Rybczynski (1987). According to Rybczinski, domesticity as we know and value it originated in the social, cultural and visual-artistic context of the emerging Dutch republic at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It should be thought of as 'a set of felt emotions, not a single attribute. Domesticity has to do with the family, intimacy and a devotion to the home, as well as with a sense of the house embodying - not only harbouring - these sentiments' (Rybczynski 1987, 75). In this perception, the house provides protection and cover, but adds to that 'commodity and delight' (idem, Chapter 4), and thus becomes a home. This quality had become a common element of European life by the time the Russians were systematically and intensively exposed to it under Peter the Great. As with other aspects of that great confrontation, however, the absorption of domesticity and the home into Russian culture exhibits features that are specifically Russian.[2]As I hope to show in these introductory chapters, from a cultural and anthropological perspective there is more to the notion of the House than the conception of domesticity on which Rybczynski focuses.

Of course it is all a matter of definition: the phenomenon of the House bears an enormous range of significances. As a starting point for this chapter, I shall define the House as the shape, image, or concept of a man-made cultural space. In spite of the importance of the cave metaphor in myth and literature, caves are not houses in this primary sense, even though they may be spaces of habitation, and thus of human culture.[3]Some basic notions of house and home may be as old as culture itself (see Hodder 1990, 94), but the scavenger, hunter-gatherer and fisher stages precede the beginnings of mankind's agricultural life, which is where his evolution into domesticity begins.

There is little evidence of man-made protective structures of any kind during the palaeolithic period (that is, before mankind adopted a mainly-agricultural and sedentary way of life) but this whole area is, at best, highly speculative.[4]Archaeologists[5]tend to believe that the earliest humans, living in groups largely by scavenging, made crude shelters that were not houses in the sense that we would understand them; see Mellars in Cunliffe 1998, 25. The Neanderthals (200.000 - 40.000 years ago in Europe) also seem not to have made house-like structures; their cave fires are more likely to have been made for the purpose of defrosting meat taken from frozen carcasses than for cooking. Homo sapiens sapiens (modern man) appears in Europe from about forty-thousand years ago, during the Upper Palaeolithic period, the coldest period of the Pleistocene Ice Age. He was an efficient hunter, using rock shelters and caves but mainly as temporary camps while hunting in much the same way as Nuniamut caribou hunters do in Alaska today. There is evidence of tent-like structures from this period, and at Mezhirich, in the Ukraine, house-like structures dating from around 14,000 BCE have been found, constructed entirely from the jaws, bones, and tusks of mammoths; see Mellars in Cunliffe 1998, 62.

The first archaeological evidence of European dwellings, ranging from windbreaks to substantial huts, dates from the Mesolithic period in Europe (the seventh millennium BCE; see Mithen in Cunliffe 1998, 102), but the beginnings of genuine domestication are found in the Near East and date from the Neolithic period (the eighth and seventh millennia BCE), spreading significantly into Europe during the late sixth and fifth millennia BCE. This was probably the beginning of a complex process that included the development of more-or-less permanent houses with hearths, the economic domestication of animals and plants, the use of clay for pottery, and social and symbolic domestication as reflected in the architecture and internal differentiation of houses, the nature and distribution of artifacts, tools, decorations, figurines and cultic objects, and burial sites; see Hodder 1990, 20-43, 48.

Hodder's starting point is that domestication is about bringing 'the wild' under the control of what he calls the 'domus' (idem, Chapter. 3). This 'provided a way of thinking about the control of the wild and thus for the larger oppositions between culture and nature, social and unsocial' (Hodder, 39). He concludes that 'despite all the variability and difficulty of definition of 'domestication', it seems clear that the origins of agriculture take place within a complex symbolic web that centres on the house and on death' (36).

The idea of 'domus', both in its pragmatic aspect of everyday, life-sustaining routines and with its more abstract and symbolic connotations, has enormous consequences for the emergence of human society; see Hodder, 44. It will be developed further in this book as a key typological concept of the House. In my analyses of the literary sources, I shall use the conceptual termDomusalongsideHouse, the former conveying the cultural anthropological and archetypal meaning of the House that I have just sketched, and the latter covering the entire range of domestic phenomena that are encountered in the texts. In specific instances these may, of course, coincide.

From a non-chronological typological viewpoint, we could characterise man's fundamental, original way of life as nomadic, sedentary (agricultural) or a combination of the two. It is not the purpose of this chapter to address the 'genetic' question of whether one of them could, or should, be considered as older, or more basic, than the other. There will be very few cultures in which houses as fundamental protective structures are not socially, economically and symbolically significant, but the specific cognitive, symbolic and evaluative frameworks in which House concepts function differ markedly between cultures. However, I will not be discussing the problem of cultural universals and the possible formal status of the House concept from that perspective. I rather subscribe to the ethnopsychological and ethnophilosophical view of Wierzbicka on 'universal human concepts in culture-specific configurations' (Wierzbicka 1992; see especially her introduction and Chapter 1). She allows for a small set of universal cognitive primitives but relies on detailed linguistic evidence and contrastive semantic analysis when it comes to describing 'folk concepts' such as 'soul' and 'mind'(idem 44). My interest is in the characterisation and differentiation of attitudes towards cultural and natural space, and the articulations that result from it, with particular attention to the House and to the structure of that concept in Russian literature. This means that I adopt a phenomenological and semiotic view that has both typological and historical aspects; see Chapter 3. In historic reality there are combinations of nomadic and sedentary lives, and the available archaeological and linguistic data, which are often contradictory, at least make clear that the issue of domestication is a complicated one.[6]Nevertheless, in my analysis I too make use of insights resulting from the combined study of archaeology and comparative linguistics. On the basis of linguistic and textual evidence, Schrader concludes that the Indo-Europeans were familiar with the building of houses or huts at a very early stage (Schrader 1917, 443). His results suggest that they lived in fortified villages of wooden houses, often in elevated places (Sergent 1995, 185, Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1984, II, 744) or partly embedded in the earth (Schrader 1917, 444-8), typically executed in wattle and daub (idem, 457). From Vedic texts one can conclude that Old-Indian houses or huts were typically simple constructions built around a central pillar, often reinforced with cross beams (Bodewitz 1977).

On the strength of prehistoric evidence and reconstruction, Leroi-Gourhan stresses the importance of the human organisation of space, including that of man's living space. His argument (Leroi-Gourhan 1965, 150 - 'L'espace humanis') is that the organisation of inhabited space is not only a matter of technical commodity but also, like language, the symbolic expression of human behaviour in general - 'un comportement globalement humain'. For all known groups of humans, he continues, the habitat answers a triple need:

1. the creation of a technically efficient milieu;

2. a framework for the social system;

3. the establishment of an orderly centre in an apparently chaotic universe.

These three issues will be of increasing importance, respectively, in the analytical approach of this book .

Any given language and its literature constitutes a growing repository of historical information regarding the culture and world-view of its users. For this reason, I shall now survey the pertinent comparative-linguistic data.

The comparative study of Indo-European languages and archaeology has a long tradition. When this is combined with a semiotic approach, the possibility of historically and typologically relevant analyses and reconstructions of cultures is increased, as can be seen in the work of E. Benveniste, O. Schrader, V.V. Ivanov, T.V. Gamkrelidze, V.N. Toporov, Ju. M. Lotman, B. Sergent, N. D. Andreev and the encyclopediaMyths of the World/. Analysis of the vocabulary of the House, its semantic structure and related etymological patterns can yield new information regarding the anthropological and cultural significance of the House concept. My sources for this outline are predominantly, but not exclusively, the results of research in the Indo-European area.

The primary House terminology, or lexical field, belongs to the oldest layers of the Indo-European vocabulary and their derivatives in the various branches and cognates of that language family; see, for example, Benveniste 1969, Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1984, II, 741, Fasmer 1986, Van Veen 1989, De Vries 1957 & 1971, Klein 1971 and Sergent 1995. The notion of architecture, of something built, is the dominant feature in the lexical material examined here. Nevertheless, Benveniste finds that in the case of theDomus-complex this should be considered not as the original but as a derivative meaning in the broader context of Indo-European social organisation and its evolution (Benveniste 1969, Vol. 1, Chapter 2, especially 297-308).[7]In many of the languages involved, he observes a gradual shift from the social concept of 'maison-famille', like the LatinDomus('house'), to that of 'maison-difice', like the Greekdmos.[8]In his opinion this reflects a social change: the breaking up of the large family in a society ordered according to genealogy, and the gradual emergence of a society which is subdivided according to geography (ibidem). His linguistic argument is based on his interpreting the root*dem-as homophonic (see Sergent 1995, 192) and distinguishing between two roots responsible for the development of this semantic distinction - 'spatial /constructive' and 'social'; these are, respectively,*dem('to build') and*dom()('to tame, domesticate', L.domare); see Benveniste, 293.[9]Of course, that still leaves us with an extensive network of domestic vocabulary of which the spatial foundation is undeniable, even though non-spatial, sociological and other aspects are also expressed in a variety of ways using the same vocabulary; see Sergent 1995, 192.[10]Thus, we have the cosmogonic meaning of house building; for example, in Slavic: Russ.