March 15, 2022

"You don’t like that kind of beauty?"/"Good grief, what’s likeable in such snakiness?... In our true Russian understanding concerning a woman’s build..."

"... we keep to a type of our own, which we find much more suitable than modern-day frivolity. We don’t appreciate spindliness, true; we prefer that a woman stand not on long legs, but on sturdy ones, so that she doesn’t get tangled up, but rolls about everywhere like a ball and makes it, where a spindly-legged one will run and trip. We also don’t appreciate snaky thinness, but require that a woman be on the stout side, ample, because, though it’s not so elegant, it points to maternity in them. The brow of our real, pure Russian woman’s breed is more plump, more meaty, but then in that soft brow there’s more gaiety, more welcome. The same for the nose: ours have noses that aren’t hooked, but more like little pips, but this little pip itself, like it or not, is much more affable in family life than a dry, proud nose. But the eyebrows especially, the eyebrows open up the look of the face, and therefore it’s necessary that a woman’s eyebrows not scowl, but be opened out, archlike, for a man finds it more inviting to talk with such a woman, and she makes a different, more welcoming impression on everybody coming to the house. But modern taste, naturally, has abandoned this good type and approves of airy ephemerality in the female sex, only that’s completely useless.”

From "The Sealed Angel," an 1873 story by Nikolai Leskov, collected in "The Enchanted Wanderer." That's a character speaking, not the author's attitude.

That passage amused me, as I was listening to the audiobook and hiking in the mud in the Arb today. The story isn't much about women though, but about the Old Believers and their icons. Yesterday, I read the first story in the collection, "The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk."

My reading these stories has nothing to do with the woes unleashed by Russia in the world today. It is a consequence of reading Larry McMurtry's book "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond" (which I mentioned a few days ago, here). That book begins: 

IN THE summer of 1980, in the Archer City Dairy Queen, while nursing a lime Dr Pepper (a delicacy strictly local, unheard of even in the next Dairy Queen down the road—Olney’s, eighteen miles south—but easily obtainable by anyone willing to buy a lime and a Dr Pepper), I opened a book called Illuminations and read Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller,” nominally a study of or reflection on the stories of Nikolay Leskov, but really (I came to feel, after several rereadings) an examination, and a profound one, of the growing obsolescence of what might be called practical memory and the consequent diminution of the power of oral narrative in our twentieth–century lives.

13 comments:

Skeptical Voter said...

Sounds like he wants a Percheron style female; hook two of them up and plow the adjacent field--or something.

wildswan said...

The people around me know how to grill, how to sugar off and how to garden; when the weather will be bitter cold, and the fastest route anywhere. I look up how-to/what-is stuff in Google all the time because there is so much other stuff that I want to do. Such as - why is Kindle now so hard to use; how do you paint a heated floor; gluten-free non-dairy recipes; price comparisons; translations of Italian words for Dante; correct spelling.
I know whether a poem is good or not but that's never been of any practical use and, moreover, people think that that is a subjective judgment which it is not. No one online or off knows how to set a garage clicker.
It's true that there's more stories connected with the actual knowledge people have than with the knowledge I get online. It's kind of an interesting point.

rastajenk said...

That's one helluva sentence

Earnest Prole said...

Looking at my daughters' social media feeds I see snaky thinness is once again out and ample roundness is in.

Amadeus 48 said...

"Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk" was made into an opera by Shostakovich. Stalin hated it, and it was banned in the USSR for 30 years.

His musical portrayal of sex is--ahem--graphic.

rhhardin said...

Barthelme (Snow White)

But of course with the spread of literacy you now tend to get girls who have thought and feeling too, in some measure, and some of them will probably belong to the Royal Philological Society or something, or in any case have their own 'thing,' which must be respected, and catered to, and nattered about, just as if you gave a shit about all this blague. But of course we may be different, perhaps you do care about it. It's not unheard of.

gspencer said...

"The brow of our real, pure Russian woman’s breed is more plump, more meaty, but then in that soft brow there’s more gaiety, more welcome."

250+-pound Russian women on the Black Sea beaches, in bikinis, is quite alluring, n'est ce pas?

https://c8.alamy.com/comp/2C2E067/fine-70s-vintage-black-and-white-extreme-photography-of-an-overweight-woman-wearing-a-leopard-print-bikini-2C2E067.jpg

Christopher B said...

Russians are genetically distinct from their neighbors to the East and West.

tim in vermont said...

" woes unleashed by Russia"

"Our price for joining NATO is a big war with Russia"

2019 interview with Oleksiy #Arestovych, adviser to the Head of the Office of the President of #Ukraine:

Biden wanted this, or he is a moron, but somebody who is not a moron, in the US government, wanted this war. But it's better to be a happy idiot and accept the "bellyfeel" and not worry about whether any of it is actually close to the truth. It's how they rule us, nobody wants to stick his neck out and question anything, just enjoy the reports from the war like it was Packers vs Bears.

Terry di Tufo said...

I would subscribe to your blog if the ONLY subject you wrote about was books.

Wince said...

"we prefer that a woman stand not on long legs, but on sturdy ones, so that she doesn’t get tangled up, but rolls about everywhere like a ball and makes it, where a spindly-legged one will run and trip."

"I don't care if they are Greek columns or secondhand Steinways..."

mikee said...

I am reminded of a college acquaintance who observed that all women were the same height when on their backs in his bed, much as cats are all gray in the dark. He was a minor sort of Baron Munchausen when it came to women, finding beauty in one and all, and using that perspective to enjoy his time with them to the fullest. He eventually wed a woman who was objectively very beautiful, although it wasn't her looks that got him, it was her intelligence and personality.

Another friend used to say that fat women were desirable, because they were warm in bed in the winter, often knew how to cook, and would provide shade from the summer sun.

Jeff said...

""The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk," huh? Tell me, what did you think of that closing sentence?