Snokhachestvo
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In Imperial Russia, snokhachestvo (Russian: снохачество, lit. "daughter-in-law privileges") referred to illicit sexual relations between a pater familias (bolshak) of a Russian peasant household (dvor) and his daughter-in-law (snokha) during the minority or absence of his son.
With a view to attracting additional workers to the household, marriages in rural Russia were frequently contracted when the groom was six or seven years old. During her husband's minority, the bride often had to put up with advances of her assertive father-in-law. Snokhachestvo entailed conflicts in the family and put moral pressure on the mother-in-law, who would treat her son's wife as a rival for her own husband's affections.
Snokachestvo was considered incestuous by the Russian Orthodox Church and unseemly by the obschina, the rural community. Legally it was considered a form of rape and was punished with fifteen to twenty lashes. Understandably, cases of snokhachestvo were not publicized and the crime remained latent, making it difficult to assess its true extent in Imperial Russia.
One of the first Russian writers to decry snokhachestvo, describing it as a form of "sexual debasement," was Alexander Radishchev, who saw it as an outgrowth of Russian serfdom. In the 19th century, its resurgence was fueled by obligatory conscription and "the seasonal departure of young men for work outside the village."[1]
Snokhachestvo remained relatively widespread even after the abolition of serfdom in 1861. Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, a jurist, resented the fact that "nowhere it seems, except Russia, has at least one form of incest assumed the character of an almost normal everyday occurrence, designated by the appropriate technical term."[1] The Narodnik writer Gleb Uspensky, while deploring the plight of young peasant women, sympathized with "the emotional and physical needs of the mature peasant man."[2]
Snokhachestvo in the arts[edit]
There are sexual connotations in the relationship between Katerina and her father-in-law in Shostakovich's 1934 opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, but not in the 1865 story it is based upon.
In 1927, Olga Preobrazhenskaia, "the leading woman director of [Russian] fiction films in the twenties," and her co-director, Ivan Pravov, released a movie condemning snokhachestvo. Titled The Peasant Women of Riazan (in Russian, Baby Riazanskie), the silent film is about the rape and pregnancy of a woman whose husband is away in World War I. The rapist is her father-in-law, and the woman, overcome by shame, drowns herself when her husband returns from battle.[3]
References[edit]
^ Jump up to: a b Engelstein, Laura. The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-siècle Russia. Cornell University Press, 1992. ISBN 0-8014-9958-5, p. 45.
Jump up ^ Mondry, Henrietta. Pure, Strong And Sexless: The Peasant Woman's Body and Gleb Uspensky. Rodopi, 2005. ISBN 90-420-1828-3, pp. 34–35.
Jump up ^ Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s by Denise Jeanne Youngblood. Cambridge University Press (1992) at p. 168. ISBN 0-521-46632-6 Accessed August 19, 2007.
External links[edit]
Women of Ryazan or Baby Ryazanskie Internet Movie Database entry. Accessed August 19, 2007.
[hide] v t e
Incest
Incest
Accidental incest Avunculate marriage Consanguine marriage Cousin marriage (List of cases) Covert incest Inbreeding Incest between twins Motherfucker Parallel and cross cousins Snokhachestvo Sibling incest Child incestuous abuse
Laws regarding incest
Article 809 of the Korean Civil Code Consanguinity Cousin marriage law in the United States by state Cousin marriage court cases in the United States Mahram Muth v. Frank Laws regarding incest in the United States Prohibited degree of kinship Ten Abominations
Culture
Incest in the Bible Incest in folklore Incest in popular culture Incest in film and television Incest in literature Incest pornography Incest taboo Jewish views on incest
Theory
Science
Coefficient of relationship Genetic sexual attraction Inbreeding depression Pedigree collapse
Psychology
Electra complex Jocasta complex Oedipus complex Phaedra complex Westermarck effect
Cases
Alvarez case Armando Lucero Fritzl case Goler clan Maria Ersdotter Moe incest case Mongelli case Patrick Stübing Sheffield incest case
Categories: IncestRussian Empire
Navigation menu
Not logged inTalkContributionsCreate accountLog inArticleTalkReadEditView history
Main page
Contents
Featured content
Current events
Random article
Donate to Wikipedia
Wikipedia store
Interaction
Help
About Wikipedia
Community portal
Recent changes
Contact page
Tools
What links here
Related changes
Upload file
Special pages
Permanent link
Page information
Wikidata item
Cite this page
Print/export
Create a book
Download as PDF
Printable version
Languages
Čeština
Português
Русский
Slovenčina
Українська
Edit links
This page was last modified on 11 December 2015, at 03:21.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
Privacy policyAbout WikipediaDisclaimersContact WikipediaMobile viewDevelopersWikimedia Foundation Powered by MediaWiki
― smoothy doles it (nakhchivan), Saturday, 23 January 2016 18:21 (eight years ago) link
SECTIONS HOME SEARCHSKIP TO CONTENTSKIP TO NAVIGATIONVIEW MOBILE VERSION
The New York Times
SUBSCRIBE NOW LOG IN SETTINGS
Iggy Pop and Josh Homme Team Up for ‘Post Pop Depression’
In Praise of Blue Notes: What Makes Music Sad?
Salonen Makes Clear He Won’t Lead New York Philharmonic
Review: ‘The Book of Disquiet,’ Opera as One Man, With Films
Review: John Epperson Steps Out, Leaving the Diva at Home
Review: Daniel Wohl’s ‘Holographic’ Is Performed for the First Time
Early-Music Ensembles: Praised as Pure, but Seeking More
FEATURE
Kamasi Washington’s Giant Step
Jazz Listings for Jan. 22-28
Classical Music Listings for Jan. 22-28
Pop & Rock Listings for Jan. 22-28
David Bowie: Invisible New Yorker
David Bowie Hits No. 1 on Billboard Chart with ‘Blackstar,’ a First
Iggy Pop on David Bowie: ‘He Resurrected Me’
ARTSBEAT
Brooklyn Rider Gets a New Cellist
ARTSBEAT
Lincoln Center Festival Announces Summer Season
ARTSBEAT
2016 Grammy Awards Performers Include Adele and Kendrick Lamar
David Bowie Dies at 69; Star Transcended Music, Art and Fashion
POPCAST
Popcast: Love, Death and David Bowie
Remembering ASAP Yams
NYC Winter Jazzfest Marathon
David Bowie
ARTSBEAT
Classical Playlist: Bach, Biber, Gottschalk and More
Loading...
MUSIC
Viscerally Piercing the Semantic Mist
‘Soused,’ Scott Walker’s Unusual New Album With Sunn O)))
By BEN RATLIFFOCT. 9, 2014
Photo
A veteran obscurantist: Scott Walker, whose album “Soused,” a collaboration with Sunn O))), is due out Oct. 20. Credit Jake Walters/Contour by Getty Images
Continue reading the main storyShare This Page
Email
Save
LONDON — There’s a song on the singer Scott Walker’s modestly terrifying new collaboration with the drone metal group Sunn O))) called “Herod 2014,” and it seems to have something like a narrative.
This is unusual for Mr. Walker, 71, an American who became famous in Britain with the Walker Brothers in the mid-’60s, singing dance-craze numbers and morose, easy-listening wall-of-sound ballads. (The best known was “Make It Easy on Yourself,” in 1965.) As a group, the Walker Brothers were flawed almost to the point of being nonsensical, and after 1967, Mr. Walker set upon a course of ambitious solo records. Especially since “Climate of Hunter” in 1984, they have become cultish prizes, intricate puzzles of shock, indirection, nonresolution, theatrical uses of text and extended technique, often with a 40-piece orchestra. In an interview last month at his manager’s home office here, he told me that he was always looking for what he called a “whoops factor”: a moment of incomprehension on the part of the listener
Once a romantic hero, then an existential one — blond, narrow-hipped, unsmiling behind sunglasses — Mr. Walker no longer has a stage persona. He hasn’t performed in public since a television appearance in 1995, and hasn’t played a concert since 1978. Whatever his music is now, it’s not pop. He’s a composer who happens to use his voice, a semi-operatic baritone pushed to high and quivering extremes, as an instrument to serve his meticulous texts, which on the new album, “Soused,” include words like “bliaut” — a 12th-century European overgarment — and “bescumber.” (Look it up.) And maybe something else: a maker of abstract dramas with tones as characters. His work demands that you come more than halfway toward his isolation, his need to do things differently, and perhaps his story of turning from light to dark.
I would argue that “Soused,” which comes out Oct. 20 on the 4AD label, might be the first music Scott Walker has made in a very long time — maybe since his contributions to the Walker Brothers’ final record, “Nite Flights,” in 1978 — that can be absorbed into the body and enjoyed as a thrill, without needing to learn a lot of other context about his aesthetic transgressions, without attending to the Myth of Scott. Rather than withholding musical or emotional payoffs, which has long been his way, there’s a sort of constant payoff here: no orchestra this time, but the steady electric-guitar and bass drones of Sunn O))) (simply pronounced sun), rich and distorted and marvelous.
In the lyrics of “Herod,” a woman appears to be protecting her children from the outside world, which is full of forces that seem treacherous, skeletal, verminous. “She’s hidden her babies away,” he croons repeatedly. There’s a reference to “the goon from the Stasi,” to crèches “heaving with lush lice” and to “posed, high,/pelvic bridges.” And under the carpeting drones of Sunn O))) and various prehistoric-sounding noises, there is a small bell tone, repeatedly struck, almost all the way through.
Mr. Walker, born Noel Scott Engel in Ohio — the Walker Brothers were neither Walkers nor brothers — has lived in London for most of his life now. During our conversation, I asked him about the bell. It’s a strange thing, I said: It becomes blotted out by the other sounds, such that you forget it’s there. But it keeps going. “Yes,” he said, perking up. “Oh, I’m glad you mentioned it. I haven’t mentioned this to anyone. The bell, in a sense, is representing her.”
The mother?
“No, the, uh....” Mr. Walker suddenly redirected the conversation. He is more like a writer or a painter than a musician. You get the sense he’d like to be alone with his work as soon as possible. Dressed in his regular uniform these days of skinny jeans and military cap, he was polite and factual, and stopped talking when he wanted to keep something to himself. But here, he felt compelled to elucidate, if only to convey the song’s meaning to me in particular, a listener with the capability of influencing other listeners. “The she, of ‘She’s hidden her babies away,’ the woman, the woman image.” Not a mother, not even necessarily a person. The bell, he explained, is “being suppressed, and buried all the way through the track. I’m glad, because I was worried: Can you still just about hear that?”
Later, I asked Mr. Walker’s producer and engineer, Peter Walsh, about the bell. (Mr. Walker has worked with Mr. Walsh exclusively since 1984, and with many of the same musicians. When he talks about his music, he says “we,” or sometimes “you,” as in, “There’s always 40 strings on all the records, because you need that weight.”) Mr. Walsh hadn’t known about the bell’s representing the woman, but indicated that it was a “major concern”: carefully adjusting its volume through the mix, making it just audible.
Another major concern during the making of “Soused,” recalled Stephen O’Malley, a guitarist in Sunn O))), was that the record should not sound “epic” — which is funny, of course, because epic is what you’re going to get if you enlist Sunn O))). Mr. Walker likes it when instruments don’t fulfill their normative roles. So saxophones and trumpets sound like animal cries. And guitars sound like the creation of the universe.
Mr. Walker’s tendency toward protection and obscurantism runs deeper than that, however. He doesn’t communicate what the songs are “about” to the musicians, or even Mr. Walsh, and only sings the lyrics in isolation, at the end of a recording session. Mr. Walsh is possibly the only person who has seen Mr. Walker sing in the last two decades.
The Myth of Scott includes a period of alcoholism (and strangely halfhearted country-pop records) in the 1970s. But the word “Soused,” Mr. Walker confirmed, is to be taken in its other meaning: drenched, or plunged into water. That could have something to do with the flooding quality of the drones, the thickness of that sound. Mr. O’Malley, 40, and Greg Anderson, 43, the principals in Sunn O))), are serious fans of Mr. Walker. They asked him to participate on its album “Monoliths & Dimensions,” from 2009, but Mr. Walker wasn’t available; subsequently, he circled back to using them on his own record.
“I’m always looking for an elemental, primal noise in my music,” he explained. “I thought, what’s more basic, more primal, than a drone?” It didn’t take long to make his decision. “I figured, if I’m going to do the drone thing, they’re the kings of the drone, to me. I might as well get them.” But interestingly — or typically — the decision to work with Sunn O))) wasn’t necessarily about musical sound per se. Like all Mr. Walker’s decisions about his music, the words come first. The sound is something to set the words against, a kind of cushion to display the text. “I love the idea of the drones,” he said, “because I could get those gaps, you see, between phrases. Which I usually fill with silence, but now I had the drones.”
Without meeting in person, without discussing how much he or the band knew of the other’s work, he provided Sunn O))) with wordless demos of the tracks that he and Mr. Walsh made entirely with synthesizers, plotting out almost exactly what the band was to play, Mr. O’Malley said, with great intuition about the band’s sound and style.
Sunn O))) brought its entire stage back line to London: a wall of amplifiers variously made by Marshall, Ampeg, Hiwatt and Sunn, from whose logo the band took its name. Mr. Walker told me that he was used to recording guitars loud in the studio but that this was a different story. “When you stepped into the studio, it just came up to your knees,” he said. “We all had to wear earplugs when we were in there.”
To some extent, the directive that the record not sound epic is followed in the first seconds of the album, in the menacing track “Brando.” (The title, and its refrain — “A beating would do me a world of good” — refers, Mr. Walker explained, to how Marlon Brando seemed to get beaten up in so many of his films.) The opening is gigantic: an organ tone; Mr. Walker belting, “Ah, the wide Missouri!”; and a sweeping, clear guitar line — one that could easily be described as epic. That guitar line is followed by another one, abrasive and staccato and brutal, about 20 decibels louder in the mix. It’s like the beating up of epic.
I also asked about “Fetish,” an episodic song on the album that builds up serious intensity three minutes in, with crashing drums and power chords, so that you expect the singer to suddenly be singing the heart of the song. But he doesn’t: He continues with the same kind of fractured images as before. It’s startling how that frustrates the listener. Was that on purpose?
“Well, yes,” Mr. Walker said, “because in a sense that’s what most of my songs are about. Frustration, and failure. Sometimes, if I have a romantic lead line, I think to myself, people are really going to like this, because they can lock on to it. And if that starts to happen, I’ll” — he smacked his fist — “do something about it. Because I’m — I’m not interested in that, basically.”
A version of this article appears in print on October 12, 2014, on page AR17 of the New York edition with the headline: Viscerally Piercing the Semantic Mist. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
TRENDING
Bloomberg, Sensing an Opening, Revisits a Potential White House Run
How Much Snow Has Fallen
Sports Business: True Scandal of Deflategate Lies in the N.F.L.’s...
Heavy Snows Bring East Coast to Near-Standstill
The Timeshare Hard Sell Comes Roaring Back
Clues Emerge on Robert Levinson, C.I.A. Consultant Who Vanished in...
Op-Ed Contributor: In Case of Blizzard, Do Nothing
Op-Ed Contributor: Sarah Palin, This Is What PTSD Is Really Like
Op-Ed Columnist: Coming to Terms with Donald
U.S. Relies Heavily on Saudi Money to Support Syrian Rebels
View More Trending Stories »
More in MusicGo to the Music Section »
Iggy Pop and Josh Homme Team Up for ‘Post Pop Depression’
In Praise of Blue Notes: What Makes Music Sad?
Salonen Makes Clear He Won’t Lead New York Philharmonic
Review: ‘The Book of Disquiet,’ Opera as One Man, With Films
Review: John Epperson Steps Out, Leaving the Diva at...
“An Evening With Lypsinka’s Maid,” Mr. Epperson’s new show at Feinstein’s/54 Below, features him without his female alter ego.
Review: Daniel Wohl’s ‘Holographic’ Is Performed for the First Time
Top NewsGo to the Home Page »
Heavy Snows Bring East Coast to Near-Standstill
How the Snow Storm Is Affecting Travel
Bloomberg, Sensing an Opening, Revisits a Potential White House Run
Go to Home Page »
SITE INDEX THE NEW YORK TIMES
Site Index Navigation
NEWS
World
U.S.
Politics
N.Y.
Business
Tech
Science
Health
Sports
Education
Obituaries
Today's Paper
Corrections
OPINION
Today's Opinion
Op-Ed Columnists
Editorials
Contributing Writers
Op-Ed Contributors
Opinionator
Letters
Sunday Review
Taking Note
Room for Debate
Public Editor
Video: Opinion
ARTS
Today's Arts
Art & Design
ArtsBeat
Books
Dance
Movies
Music
N.Y.C. Events Guide
Television
Theater
Video Games
Video: Arts
LIVING
Automobiles
Crossword
Food
Education
Fashion & Style
Health
Jobs
Magazine
N.Y.C. Events Guide
Real Estate
T Magazine
Travel
Weddings & Celebrations
LISTINGS & MORE
Classifieds
Tools & Services
Times Topics
Public Editor
N.Y.C. Events Guide
Blogs
Multimedia
Photography
Video
NYT Store
Times Journeys
Subscribe
Manage My Account
SUBSCRIBE
Times Insider
Home Delivery
Digital Subscriptions
NYT Opinion
Crossword
Email Newsletters
Alerts
Gift Subscriptions
Corporate Subscriptions
Education Rate
Mobile Applications
Replica Edition
International New York Times
Site Information Navigation
© 2016 The New York Times Company HomeSearchAccessibility concerns? Email us at accessibil✧✧✧@nyti✧✧✧.c✧✧. We would love to hear from you.Contact UsWork With UsAdvertiseYour Ad ChoicesPrivacyTerms of ServiceTerms of SaleSite Information Navigation
Site MapHelpSite FeedbackSubscriptions Go to the next story
― smoothy doles it (nakhchivan), Saturday, 23 January 2016 18:22 (eight years ago) link