1. Where Oral Tradition Lived

Перевод рассказа "Устная традиция, где она жила" из сборника "Устная традиция".

In my childhood, in the 1950s, our way of life had not yet moved very far from traditional Russian life. The main thing was that the material basis of life was still almost the same. There were no televisions, tape recorders, record players, washing machines, refrigerators, telephones, vacuum cleaners—none of that. Well, of course, such things already existed somewhere, but not in our world.

Adults were therefore constantly occupied with things to do: work, cooking, washing, trips to the bazaar, work in the garden.

How did this affect our everyday existence? What did it mean, for example, to prepare lunch for the family in summer? What did this involve?

First, in the morning, someone had to walk to the bazaar. There were no buses going in that direction yet. Meat and some vegetables were bought there.

The bazaar is mentioned here as a geographical concept, while meat is mentioned as a function. That was a Soviet era with the shortage of everything.

The bazaar contained cooperative and state-run shops selling various kinds of offal, officially known as by-products, as well as bones. I often ate tripe, hearts with the surrounding fat, tracheas, and lungs. My mother cooked all of it very well. From private sellers we sometimes bought chickens and chicken giblets. To buy actual meat from them, by the piece, was simply beyond our means, and this happened once or twice a year. In the absence of a refrigerator, the trip to the bazaar took place frequently, every two or three days.

Then the stove in the yard was lit, and lunch was cooked on its hotplate. Some greens for lunch came from our own garden; potatoes came from a sack kept in the cellar. The garden, of course, also needed daily attention.

The stove was used because my mother couldn't stand the smell of kerosene. Those who could stand it used a kerosene burner, and life was a little easier for them. Oh, yes, there was also a little electric hotplate. But it consumed a lot of electricity, which limited its use. You could boil water for tea, perhaps. People didn't earn much in those days, and every penny had to be counted.

Hand washing of clothes, mending them. Beating the dust out of bedding. Cleaning the house, putting things in order, polishing shoes. All these operations took vastly more time and physical effort than they do now.

The lunch that had meanwhile been prepared had to be eaten hot, so the whole family sat down at the table at the same time. And in the evening, people did not get up from the table immediately. They lingered.

If there were no more urgent household chores to do—there was nothing else to do at all. Well, perhaps some people could read a book. If that happened, it was rare.

So people simply sat at the table. The adults talked, resting after a hard day. The table was the family's nightly gathering place, the place where the whole family came together. And for children it was a natural habitat. They adored those moments.

There were several children in the family then.

Eating separately was difficult. You had to light the stove all over again and use more firewood. Even if you used a primus stove, you had to know how to light it. Getting kerosene for it, or replacement needles, was another problem. Children couldn't do these things themselves, and men, by their social status, were not supposed to do them.

So, in any case, individual meals were discouraged.

Incidentally, such a way of life would have been unbearable for a woman if it hadn't been for the help of the grandmothers. The grandmothers took over the household work.

And it was from them that the traditions were passed on.

And where there were grandmothers, there were also aunts who came to visit them frequently, and uncles somewhat less often. They often brought the children a little treat: a piece of candy, a cookie, or, in the most extreme case, a coin.

The little gift would be tied up in a handkerchief.

Washing dishes was done in a bowl, to save the water that had been carried in buckets from the street pump. And if someone did have running water, there was no sewer system. And where there was one, it was in the form of a cesspit in the yard, which had to be emptied periodically by calling the sewage workers.

All of this made it impossible to waste water for any purpose whatsoever. So water was conserved for several reasons.

There were little tricks, too.

You began washing the dishes with the least greasy and dirty things, such as teacups. To avoid getting them greasy, the dirty dishes were not mixed together but grouped according to the kind of dirt on them. The greasy water, in which there was almost no soap, could be poured under a tree, so that the good stuff wouldn't go to waste.

If something was left over from lunch in the summer, there was no guarantee that it would survive until the next day without spoiling. The safest thing was to cook exactly enough to eat everything.

So, everyone received a particular portion, and nothing extra. In return, you were expected to eat everything that was put on your plate.

There were few fat people then, and children were practically all skinny.

What food could be kept in reserve to satisfy an unexpected hunger? Bread, butter, herring, cheese, grain for making porridge. Vegetables helped, too. We ate onions, garlic, and cucumbers with bread. In winter there were pickles.

Sausage, cheese, canned food, candy—these were rarities, treats.

Well, in winter, of course, you could prepare and store food for the future.

The first blow to family communication at the table was dealt by the arrival of gas.

The second blow, almost simultaneously, was the refrigerator.

Now every child could take lunch out of the refrigerator and heat it up on the gas stove whenever he wanted—or even fry himself an egg.

Then the blows came one after another, like grain spilling through a tear in a sack: the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, leisure appeared in the form of television, listening to music, and the telephone.

Traditional life quickly dissolved, and the family now came together at the table mainly on holidays.

For a while, relatives continued to make the obligatory holiday rounds, at Easter, for example. Then that disappeared too.

By the 1990s, the sacred space in which the family traditions lived had disappeared completely.

My younger children did not merely lose their connection with the family's past. They had never known it in the first place.

Let us return to the 1950s. During the day, children played outside, but after supper there was nothing for them to do out there anymore. Reading, books, were not really customary. And in general, whatever document from those years you may take, the handwriting of most people was barely literate, full of mistakes.

There was especially much free time in winter.

The whole family sat at the table, next to the stove, and talked. The adults told stories, many of them not for the first time. Complete unity of souls.

Everything belonged to everyone: memories, stories, views.

Back then, the stove in winter homes was not always heated as much as one might have wished, but according to circumstances, according to what could be afforded.

It was often precisely the cold in the bedrooms that forced everyone in the household to gather in the warm kitchen, over a cup of hot tea.

The same applied to light, which was conserved as well. The kitchen was always its main source.

People went to bed early. Sometimes they even slept two to a bed. There was always someone visiting from my father's numerous relatives, unless you yourself were visiting somebody else.Here was a guest—a grandmother, an aunt, or some cousin—and they would lie down beside you.

Or simply your father, mother, or sister might lie down next to you to get you to sleep. Or, what I liked best of all, they would take me into their own bed when it was especially cold.
 
And naturally, before sleep—stories.

My father told me stories, both at bedtime and just for no particular reason.

My grandmother and Aunt Vera told them to me just as much, but I remember my father best of all. Later he told the same stories to his grandchildren, with me present. So, I heard them again, already an adult.

And then I told them, while my father was still alive, to my own children and nieces.

And evidently, in our family, I am the last person to tell them.

Incidentally, I don't remember my mother ever telling me any stories.

But I distinctly remember that once she began reading the poem Mtsyri to me, only she didn't have time to finish because an ambulance arrived and took me to the hospital, where I spent the whole summer.

The day before, there had been a parents' meeting to celebrate the successful completion of first grade. I was given a set of chess pieces with a dedication and a date written in it.

As my mother and I walked to the school for the meeting, a storm was gathering, and my mother kept lamenting that we had not brought an umbrella and that I was lightly dressed. On the way home, we were already running, driven by a downpour mixed with snow.

I was wearing short corduroy pants with suspenders and a shirt. It was a fifteen-minute walk home, with nowhere to take shelter along the way.

The next morning I fell ill.

That evening my mother still had time to show me how the chess pieces moved and explain the rules. But I had to begin playing in the hospital.

Did my mother read books to me on other occasions besides that one? I don't remember. But I cannot say that she didn't. Perhaps I have simply forgotten.

For example, I told stories to all my children. Every evening at bedtime.

For my son I invented seven magnificent multi-part stories. He remembers absolutely none of them.

To my daughters I told all the stories I had heard from my father, plus Hauff's fairy tales and things of that sort. They don't remember those either.

So perhaps I simply don't remember my mother's stories, or the way she read books to me at bedtime?

Here I have a vague memory of a green volume of Pushkin in her hands beside my bed. Besides, she probably didn't know any folk tales. They probably hadn't been told to her at bedtime when she was a little girl.

She was a city girl for four generations, unlike my father.

Why, then, do I remember all the folk tales told to me by my father, my grandmother, Aunt Vera, and my sister?

Is it because they corresponded more precisely to my national, my family profile, than our poets Pushkin and Lermontov put together?

My grandmother's and father's stories were, generally speaking, folk tales. They were all widely published, right down to little fold-out books and coloring books. But our home versions had melodies, little sung passages, and the books did not. And did the people who compiled those books ever hear those melodies themselves? Even the words in our stories differed slightly from the printed versions.

My grandmother had heard those stories from her own mother and grandmother. She herself, incidentally, could not read.

Those stories had come to me from thousands of years ago, from times when the very concept of “Russian” did not yet exist, and there is nothing in them tied to specific events that would allow us to date when they appeared.

Two or three thousand years ago, a hungry fox could have been carrying a rolling pin along a winter forest road from village to village.

Oral tradition—that is what I call the custom by which members of a family, teachers, acquaintances, people in general, exchange some body of shared, family-specific information.

This information—or the interpretation of known events—is particular to that family, that circle.

To some degree it is even sacred.

What trace did it leave in me? Sometimes I think that without it I would have grown into somebody else.

In fact, oral tradition was the only way of transmitting information before the invention of writing. For hundreds of thousands of years, practically for the entire span of human existence, everything was passed on orally—through legends, fairy tales, songs. How did our ancestors, without writing, give names to the stars, calculate the movements of the planets, create calendars thousands of years ahead, create and pass down to us the Iliad, for example?

For a start, by listening carefully to their elders and remembering everything.

But the invention of writing did not suddenly change the course of the information stream. At first, a tiny little brook branched off from it, carrying texts only to a small number of the initiated. Those groups of initiates slowly grew, sometimes shrinking up like colonies of bacteria exposed to bleach, until at least they had fermented the whole of society.

Although the overwhelming majority of the population continued to form its ideas about life through the traditional oral way. Only a couple of centuries ago did the written method gradually begin to become more or less a common possession, but even then, it could not immediately encompass every aspect of life.

But the database kept growing and growing. And finally, it grew dramatically.

Then, beginning in the 1950s, radio and television opened their floodgates, and the torrent of information washed away all the traditions.

Oral tradition finally died, and I lived through its fading away.

I want to tell here about some of its stories.