The life of wonderful wolves

About the book of the famous medievist Michel Pasturo

Wolves live next to people, tamed people, attack people and themselves become victims of hunters. Most often, the wolves serve Satan, but sometimes the holy ascetics manage to convince them with their exhortations to go over to the side of the good and embark on the path of remembering to humanity. What we imagine wolves, almost more speaks of us than about these animals - the evolution of the image of the Wolf is just devoted to the book of the French mediawater Michel Pasturo, published in Russian, “The Cultural History”, which, at the request of Gorky, read Roman Korolev.

Starting from February 24, 2022, we were all in the face of the advancing barbarism, violence and lies. In this situation, it is extremely important to preserve at least the remnants of culture and support the values ​​of humanism - including for the sake of the future of Russia. Therefore, the editorial office of Gorky will continue to talk about books, reminding our readers that the world remains in the world and fiction.

Michelle Pasturo. Wolf: Cultural history. M.: AST: Ice, 2024. Translation from French Stanislav Mukhamedzhanov, scientific editing and introductory article by Mikhail Mayzuls. Content . Fragment

According to the legend common in Europe, in ancient times, the curious moon of one of the long winter nights decided to go down to the ground and visit someone’s secrets, but was confused in the branches of the tree and could not return back. The wolf helped her free to get out. The heavenly luminary and the predator quickly imbued with each other with sympathy and spent the night together, but the next morning the moon was to return to his home in the sky. In memory of the former lover, she took his shadow with her, and since then the wolf howls the moon, in vain persuading him to return it back to him.

Here is only one of the dozens of beliefs, legends and stories explaining (sometimes in the most unexpected way) the behavior of predators known to humanity, which the historian and art critic Michel Pasturo gathered under the same cover. The Russian -speaking reader Pasturo is most known to his cultural works devoted to the perception of individual colors in Western European societies. In addition to the “chromatic” series, however, Pasturo also has a “best”, within which he explores the cultural history of different animals. The book about the wolf that opened this series of monographs reached our latitudes six years after publication in the original. Almost simultaneously with her, a monograph on the cultural history of the bull was published, and the books “Kit” and “Raven” are in line for the publication. The preface to all four volumes of the series was written by a well -known popularizer of medievalism, a participant in the project “The Suffering Middle Ages” Mikhail Mayzuls.

The aforementioned animals, of course, are not interested in the author by themselves (after all, Pasturo is still not a zoologist), but as a projection of certain human qualities that European culture endows them: what we see wolves when we compare ourselves with them; What this image speaks of us and why it changes periodically. According to Pasturo, “any society creates an imaginary world around animals and puts several species into its center that this society seems to be the most important and with which it establishes interesting relations - relations are close, ambiguous and fantasm. These animals form a supporting bestiary (I borrowed this excellent expression from Francois, on the basis of which a whole network of legends, images, myths and symbols is formed. ” The wolf, as it is easy to guess, occupies a special place in the European supporting bestiaria, located close to the center.

The intellectual journey, on which the pasto offers us, begins with wolf images on the ceramic vessels of the Etruscans and the myth of the devastating to Fenrire - and ends with a wolf that exchanged the ability to seriously draw fear for the main role in numerous cartoons and comics. At the head of the book, the wolf, who fed Romulus and Rem, and the elusive Zhvodansky beast; hunting and organized extermination of wolf flocks, which the authorities have been engaged in Europe since the time of Karl the Great; The wolf of the fables and fairy tales and the wolf of the heraldry - as well as, of course, all kinds of folk beliefs associated with the wolf and werewolf.

Being a medievalist, Pasturo expectedly devotes the central part of the book to the adventures of the wolf throughout the Middle Ages and the early New Age. According to Pasturo, "between the IV and X century, the image of a large, just a huge wolf arises - the creatures of evil, gluttonous, predatory, frightening and dangerous." Such a demonization of a gray predator has several reasons, probably the most obvious of which boils down to the fact that with the collapse of the Roman Empire, wolf packs become a much more serious threat to rural residents. From a biblical metaphor, the wolf turns into a very real “mouth with huge fangs, which is associated with hellish abyss” and scribbles near your home.

A significant role in the codification of the image of a wolf as a four -tereller was played by medieval bestiarias: “Curious“ Books about the Beasts ”that talk about the varieties of animals not so much to study them as such as to endow them with the meaning for the purpose of moral and religious instruction.” However, thanks to such books, not only judgments about the moral qualities of the wolf (or their absence), but also valuable information about its behavior and physiology survived. For example, that the wolf’s breathing is poisoned as a result of his habit of devouring toxic toads, or about the deadly power of his gaze, capable of forcing a person to lose the gift and numb, after which he will inevitably be torn to pieces. Fortunately, the creator in the indescribable goodness of his wolf and near the Achilles heels, knowing about which it is not so difficult to deal with this monster. So, because of its short, leaning neck, the wolf is absolutely unable to turn his head, and his brain, how it was possible to establish a dominic-encyclopedian to the XIII century Foma from Kantemre, increases and decreases in accordance with the size of the moon: having reached the maximum of his cunning in the moonlight, the beast turns into a helpless fool during the day, when it should be called up for all the completed answers. atrocities.

Greed, anger and stupidity connected by people with a wolf are personified in the image of Izengrim: the antagonist “Roman about the fox”, a monument of medieval literature, to which Pasturo also pays significant attention. And as if there were few of these qualities alone, the image of the wolf is given the distinct connotations of the devil worship. As, without a doubt, the reader is known, it was the early new time (and not at all the Middle Ages) that became the period of mass persecution of witches and all -encompassing fear of witchcraft. Then the wolf turns into one of the "satanic" creatures, described as a favorite riding animal of witches, saddling which either grabbing his tail with his hands and sitting on a broomstick, they go to the Sabbath. In the XVI-XVII centuries, “throughout Europe, processes were conducted over men and women who were recognized as sorcerers or werewolves. <...> Jean Boden - an erudite, a philosopher, a lawyer and a well -known demonologist - claims that he has ceased to believe in the existence of real wolves: they are all “sorcerers”, evil creatures, magicians or deviants who take the animal form for a while to commit the most terrible “atrocities, crimes and sacrilege,” Pasturo writes.

An understandable antipost of the wolf in this case is an lamb, which, as befits a symbol of Christ, is located on the opposite of our hero the scale of the scales of the images of the Divine/Devilsky.

With the advent of the Art Nouveau, the image of the Wolf is rethought by writers like Redjard Kipling and Jack London: now it is no longer evil and bloodthirsty, but a beautiful and strong animal endowed with indomitable craving for freedom. The wolf is romanticized on the one hand; On the other hand, it is domestic, turning into a cute prototype of plush toys and a slightly clumsy hero of animated stories. It is not surprising that if earlier people were concerned about how to protect themselves and their neighbors from the wolf, then in our time there are more and more people who want to save wolves from people.

The beginning of this process of domestication, however, was laid back in the Middle Ages: so, Pasturo shares with readers fascinating stories from hagiographic literature about how one or another saint called on the Wolf to order, forcing him to return the stolen, or tamed, forced to serve the people whom he had threatened before. For example, the Holy Hens forced the wolf to plow in the plow the field instead of the will, which he was gobbled; Saint Gertway convinced the wolf to become his guide, replacing the dog killed by that; And Francis, Assisian, even helped the inhabitants of the Italian commune Gubbio conclude a peace treaty with a huge wolf, terrorized the whole district due to his insatiable belly. "St. Francis Assisian (1181–1226) came to the beast and began to speak with him in a Christian. He called him a “brother’s wolf”, reproached for behavior, but at the same time admitted that he was not himself, and hunger was guilty of crimes. Then St. Francis asked him to improve and live in peace with the inhabitants of Gubbio, who, in exchange for this, were ready to feed the wolf. <...> The contract was respected by both parties: the residents of Gubbio regularly fed a wolf, which, in turn, lovedly lived side by side with them and became in a sense the defender of the city. When he died of old age, all the inhabitants mourned his death, ”this touching story retells the pasturo.

Who knows, perhaps someday the process of dositification of the wolf will come to the point that he really lies with the lamb, and this will not happen because of the divine intervention, but, for example, as a result of the philosopher David Pierce for the genetic transformation of predators in order to make those vegans. True, whether such an animal will remain fully a wolf is a big question, the answer to which is clearly outside the text of the Pasturo. The goal that he set for himself was another: to show how a certain cultural construct (in this case, the image of the wolf) undergoes changes under the influence of social transformations - and Pasturo copes with this task, as always, brilliantly.

The reader should hardly expect from the “wolf” the all-encompassing volume of material or some cultural revelations-in the end, we are talking about a volume of less than 200 pages, and most of the plots included in him are already known to an educated person. However, this small and elegant book is quite suitable in order to refresh the aforementioned plots in its memory, and thanks to a fascinating manner of presentation and many wonderful illustrations, it can serve as a good candidate for the role of a gift to the younger relative enthusiastic wolves.