Reading Russian Fortunes: Print Culture, Gender and Divination in Russia from 1765 by Faith Wigzell

Abstract

MLR, 104.4, 2009 1201 of the post-Soviet period (p. 224): Vladimir Sorokin, Viktor Pelevin, and Boris Akunin. The discussion of Akunin's The Winter Queen is framed by Karamzin's Poor Liza, thereby illustrating Russian literature'smost defining characteristic: the resonant interplay of its ideas, themes, and characters; inEmerson's own words, the old myths take on new life' (p. 245). Apart from the advanced beginner, there aremany other categories of readerwho will derive profit and enjoyment from this book. Ifyou are looking for a compre hensive survey of the topic, you will be disappointed. In itsplace, however, you will embark on a literary tour (of a country within a country) that challenges precon ceived notions and liberates the imagination. The text iscomplemented by a glossary ofRussian words and nouns used, togetherwith extensive and informative notes. Exeter Roger Cockrell Reading Russian Fortunes: Print Culture, Gender and Divination in Russia from 1765. By Faith Wigzell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2006. xi+25opp. ?26.99. ISBN 978-0-521-02479-2. In the opening chapter of this digitally printed paperback version of a book first published in 1998 FaithWigzell surveys the various types of fortune-telling prac tised in pre-revolutionary Russia. These included oneiromancy and cartomancy (divination by dreams and playing-cards respectively), physiognomy, chiromancy, reading coffee grounds, numerology, and astrology. (The latter practice, however, did not take firm root inRussia; nor did scrying, or crystal-gazing.) Then, in seven slightly shorter chapters, she examines the following: the practice of divination in traditional Russian culture; the readership of fortune-telling books and the cri tics of the genre; the divinatory role ofwomen in the private sphere; professional fortune-tellers and their clienteles; the 'sages' who dominated the Russian imagi nation in the field of divination; and the disappearance of fortune-telling books in the Soviet period, when such works ceased to be published since they represented a superstitious world-view at odds with official ideology, but when rural divination none the less persisted. The form of text inwhich Wigzell ismost interested is the dreambook. She has tracked down numerous examples of this genre, despite the bibliographical diffi cultyposed by thebelief ofmany a pre-revolutionary librarian that such books were not worth collecting and of Soviet librarians that certain books which libraries did hold might stillbe omitted from catalogues as unsuitable for readers. So popular was the dreambook over the period from 1765 (when the firstprinted fortune-telling book appeared inRussia) to theBolshevik Revolution that a high proportion of the literateor semi-literate,Wigzell speculates, must have owned at least one example of the genre. This divinatory literature consisted of, or grew out of, importedWestern texts.At the same time itdid develop local features, established itself as part of Russian life, and interacted with what Wigzell believes to have been an ancient indigenous oral tradition. 1202 Reviews Focusing on the urban, newly literate section of Russian society from the late eighteenth century on,Wigzell presents the enthusiasm fordivinatory literature as a product of Westernization. Itwas a phenomenon, though, thatwas promptly under mined by other products ofWesternization, namely the rational mode of thought associated with the Enlightenment and the empirical tradition of natural science. Fortune-telling therefore remained respectable inRussia foramuch shorter period than in the pre-modern West. In this respect, as in somany others, Russia presents an interesting case study of a society which [. . .] telescoped the transition from a pre-modern to a modern society into a mere one hundred and fiftyyears' (p. 1). Moreover, Wigzell emphasizes, it was the intelligentsia rather than the state or even the Church thatwas chiefly responsible in Russia for castigation of the practice of fortune-telling. For divination, by perpetuating irrational belief, represented an obstacle to the progress that theWesternist section of the intelligentsia craved. As for those writers and thinkers who did not embrace a positivist tradition, the cultural nationalists who admired what they discerned as national folk culture, they too viewed fortune-telling books in a negative way, as an urban influence that would contaminate the authentic national essence supposedly to be found in the countryside. Even women writers, conscious of theperception of fortune-telling as a primarily female preoccupation and...