Catherine the Great and the British. A Pot-Pourri of Essays by Anthony G. s> Cross (review)

Abstract

558 SEER, 8o, 3, 2002 (p. 66). It is the firstof these that is problematical.It is surelythe white magic practitioner, the zhakhar'/znakharka (folkhealer) who, despite the possibilities of confusion and similarities with black magic exponents, represents the positive end of the good/evil polarity. The folkhealer was present in villages as much, if not more than, sorcerersor witches (as far as we can tell), while klikushestvo was a more sporadic phenomenon. She was an active figure for good, someone who might undo the sorcereror witch'sspell,though sorcerers could also perform benevolent magic, and, as Worobec rightly notes, terms for the two were sometimes interchangeable. None the less, the folk healer possessed beneficent powers and was closely linked to Orthodoxy (if only of the popular kind). The klikusha,on the other hand, while regarded with sympathy as an unfortunately afflicted creature, hardly represented 'good', and the redemption she gained through being cured and returned to the community from her state of limbo (assuggestedon p. 65) is not so much the returnto a state of goodness as to the normal condition of human life with its potential for sin aswell asvirtue. Establishingthe gender participation and numbers of magic practitioners in the Russian countryside is well nigh impossible, but the evidence clearly showsthat, as the nineteenth centuryprogressed,it was women who attracted more of the officialaccusationsof witchcraft.How then can one reconcile this with the ruralcustom of inviting a male sorcererto everywedding?Although the dividinglines between sorcerersand witches are fuzzy to say the least (for example, witches in Russia were more commonly called koldun'ia (sorceress) than ved'ma), it may be, perhaps, that the sorcerer existed in a symbiotic, if very uneasy, relationshipwith the restof the community, rarelyattractingthe attention of outside authorities?Those who are accused in the records the authorhas analyseddo seem quiteoften not to have been previouslysuspected of witchcraft.Iftrue,the genderbalance among practitionersof maleficmagic in the Russianvillagemay have been more even than the recordsindicate. Christine Worobec's chief contribution is in rooting the phenomenon of demoniacalpossessionin the specificculture,religiousand secular,in which it was found. By subjectingall the playersin this ritualto scrutiny(witch, fellow villagers, society, state and Church), she has managed to offer a subtle but detailed analysisof gender relationsand tensionsin imperialRussia. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies FAITH WIGZELL University College London Cross,Anthony G. Catherine theGreat andtheBritish. A Pot-Pourri ofEssays.Astra Press, Nottingham, 200I. vii + I I5 PP. Illustrations. Notes. Index. 1I3.50 (paperback). THIS volume contains ten essays, nine of them reprinted from elsewhere, either unchanged or with some revisions and/or additional material, and one on Catherine in British caricature - written for the collection. They range from a three-page 'bagatelle' reprinted from The Cricketer (I 975), where the engraver James Walker recalls a conversation in which the empress dismissed cricket as too dangerous for her grandsons, to more substantial REVIEWS 559 offerings, such as the opening piece on 'Catherine through Contemporary British Eyes' (I997), which provides a context for the articleswhich follow. The new essay (pp. 29-44) is the first systematic attempt to trace British caricaturists'treatments of Russian themes during Catherine's reign. It is accompanied by several reproductions. As Anthony Cross notes, it was Catherine's 'misfortune'that her reign coincided with the careersof Gillray, Rowlandson, Newton, Cruikshankand other satirists,providing them with good Russian material either for inclusion in set pieces about dividing up the European 'cake' and making pacts with the Devil or for more personal allusionsto Catherine/Kate asa 'shrew'being tamed, to hersexualproclivities and her bloodthirsty share in dismembering Poland and Poles. Few Western writers on the period can resist illustratingtheir books with the anonymous 'AnImperialStride'(I79I), inwhich variousworldleaderslookup Catherine's skirts,but such images were not reproducedin Russia itselfeven in the Soviet period. Only recently have they become accessible to a wider public. Other articles, all written with Professor Cross's characteristic blend of wit and erudition, explore Catherine's knowledge of English (slight, apparently),her British-inspiredexperiments in gardening and penal and medical reform, a visit which she did not make to Ireland, her reputation as an author and various views of her, including Horace Walpole's implacably hostile one. These articles...