![]() Then, after a period of preparation (usually a week), the wedding itself is marked by the arrival of the groom’s party at the bride’s house, the formal display and hand-over of the bride in the context of a feast, a journey of the wedding procession from the bride’s house to that of the groom, and a feast at the groom’s house, followed by some variable events on the next morning, for example, the “awakening” of the newlyweds and various gift-exchanges. The preliminary negotiations between the two families lead to a formal ceremony of betrothal. It is, broadly speaking, similar to the ancient Greek wedding, and no doubt to weddings in many other cultures. The progression of the traditional Russian wedding is endlessly varied (even neighboring villages often display marked differences) and yet remarkably stable in its general outline. The twentieth-century publications are typically bursting at the seams with the kinds of information classicists can only dream of: names and biographies of the performers, dates and places of recording, photographs, musical notation, even disagreements (apparently recorded verbatim) between people being interviewed about the details of wedding celebrations in their village. The earlier publications often include, by way of archival information, only the region where the songs come from and the collector’s name, although there are exceptions: Basov’s large collection of laments is based primarily on his work with one brilliant performer and accompanied by information about her life, the circumstances of her performances, and the conditions under which they were taken down. Some songs, also recorded during fieldwork by Russian folklorists, are over a century earlier, but, to my eye at least, remarkably similar. Many of these songs were recorded in 1960s–1980s and published during the same period or later along with the performers’ recollections of the way weddings used to be celebrated in their villages at the beginning of the twentieth century. Describing such a wedding and selecting songs suitable for a comparison with the ancient Greek evidence is a profoundly intimidating task because of the wealth and diversity of the available records, and what I offer for the moment can only be provisional, based in equal parts on choice and chance.Īll Russian songs cited below come from villages, primarily from the relatively remote regions of Siberia and the Russian North-West (the area between the Gulf of Finland and the White Sea), though some come from other regions (the shores of Volga, the central Russian region of Voronezh, etc.). In short, what had started for me as a look at hairdressing customs quickly developed into a broader look at the bride’s side of the traditional Russian wedding. Consequently, the maiden’s hair is the center of a remarkably complex metaphorical system, and almost every theme that belongs to the bride is expressed in connection to it. In the poetry of the traditional Russian wedding, the bride’s hair with its coverings and decorations is a poetic focal point, and perhaps no other part of the wedding is lyrically as rich as the bride’s parting with her maidenly hair-dress. Although there are some parallels between ancient Greece and Russia in the treatment of hair, the more interesting similarities have to do with the shared metaphors: a metaphor applied to hair in a Russian song may be paralleled by a similar metaphor in Greece that does not have the same tenor. I have not been able to keep to the subject of hair sensu stricto. The old handout seems to be gone, a victim of fonts no longer in use and files lost while moving, but below is its much enlarged reincarnation, namely a selection of Russian wedding songs preceded by a description of their ritual context and followed by some initial thoughts on a comparison between them and the ancient Greek ones. But years passed and other things took precedence, the Russian wedding songs remaining at the back of my mind as something halfway between a delightful prospect and an unpaid debt. ![]() Discussions with Greg followed and left me with a definite sense that I should look deeper into it. The Russian texts came from the wedding songs I had found in a collection of folklore and had to do with the bride’s hair. A discussion of age-related hairstyles in ancient Greece and elsewhere and Greg’s inspiring thoughts on the subject prompted me to put together a handout for a class report with a few Greek and Russian texts side by side. This paper has its roots in a nostalgic recollection: being a graduate student in Greg’s seminar.
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