Narrative and Poetic Worlds: the House as Myth[1]

Indo-European tradition in Russian culture.

Joost Van Baak

University of Groningen

Although living in a house seems to be as normal and natural as breathing, eating, or sleeping in a bed, it involves a complex range of human social behaviours and values which can be found in symbolic representations, art, and narratives of all cultures and in all ages. During the course of the civilisation process, especially in Western civilisations, the positive and individual aspects of living in houses have become increasingly important, resulting in the ideals of domesticity, privacy and comfort. That these are related to the emergence of bourgeois society, and thus are of relatively recent origin, is shown by such authors as John Lukacs (1970) and Witold Rybczynski (1987). According to Rybczinski, domesticity as we know and value it originated in the social, cultural and visual-artistic context of the emerging Dutch republic at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It should be thought of as 'a set of felt emotions, not a single attribute. Domesticity has to do with the family, intimacy and a devotion to the home, as well as with a sense of the house embodying - not only harbouring - these sentiments' (Rybczynski 1987, 75). In this perception, the house provides protection and cover, but adds to that 'commodity and delight' (idem, Chapter 4), and thus becomes a home. This quality had become a common element of European life by the time the Russians were systematically and intensively exposed to it under Peter the Great. As with other aspects of that great confrontation, however, the absorption of domesticity and the home into Russian culture exhibits features that are specifically Russian.[2] As I hope to show in these introductory chapters, from a cultural and anthropological perspective there is more to the notion of the House than the conception of domesticity on which Rybczynski focuses.

Of course it is all a matter of definition: the phenomenon of the House bears an enormous range of significances. As a starting point for this chapter, I shall define the House as the shape, image, or concept of a man-made cultural space. In spite of the importance of the cave metaphor in myth and literature, caves are not houses in this primary sense, even though they may be spaces of habitation, and thus of human culture.[3] Some basic notions of house and home may be as old as culture itself (see Hodder 1990, 94), but the scavenger, hunter-gatherer and fisher stages precede the beginnings of mankind's agricultural life, which is where his evolution into domesticity begins.

There is little evidence of man-made protective structures of any kind during the palaeolithic period (that is, before mankind adopted a mainly-agricultural and sedentary way of life) but this whole area is, at best, highly speculative.[4] Archaeologists[5] tend to believe that the earliest humans, living in groups largely by scavenging, made crude shelters that were not houses in the sense that we would understand them; see Mellars in Cunliffe 1998, 25. The Neanderthals (200.000 - 40.000 years ago in Europe) also seem not to have made house-like structures; their cave fires are more likely to have been made for the purpose of defrosting meat taken from frozen carcasses than for cooking. Homo sapiens sapiens (modern man) appears in Europe from about forty-thousand years ago, during the Upper Palaeolithic period, the coldest period of the Pleistocene Ice Age. He was an efficient hunter, using rock shelters and caves but mainly as temporary camps while hunting in much the same way as Nuniamut caribou hunters do in Alaska today. There is evidence of tent-like structures from this period, and at Mezhirich, in the Ukraine, house-like structures dating from around 14,000 BCE have been found, constructed entirely from the jaws, bones, and tusks of mammoths; see Mellars in Cunliffe 1998, 62.

The first archaeological evidence of European dwellings, ranging from windbreaks to substantial huts, dates from the Mesolithic period in Europe (the seventh millennium BCE; see Mithen in Cunliffe 1998, 102), but the beginnings of genuine domestication are found in the Near East and date from the Neolithic period (the eighth and seventh millennia BCE), spreading significantly into Europe during the late sixth and fifth millennia BCE. This was probably the beginning of a complex process that included the development of more-or-less permanent houses with hearths, the economic domestication of animals and plants, the use of clay for pottery, and social and symbolic domestication as reflected in the architecture and internal differentiation of houses, the nature and distribution of artifacts, tools, decorations, figurines and cultic objects, and burial sites; see Hodder 1990, 20-43, 48.

Hodder's starting point is that domestication is about bringing 'the wild' under the control of what he calls the 'domus' (idem, Chapter. 3). This 'provided a way of thinking about the control of the wild and thus for the larger oppositions between culture and nature, social and unsocial' (Hodder, 39). He concludes that 'despite all the variability and difficulty of definition of 'domestication', it seems clear that the origins of agriculture take place within a complex symbolic web that centres on the house and on death' (36).

The idea of 'domus', both in its pragmatic aspect of everyday, life-sustaining routines and with its more abstract and symbolic connotations, has enormous consequences for the emergence of human society; see Hodder, 44. It will be developed further in this book as a key typological concept of the House. In my analyses of the literary sources, I shall use the conceptual term Domus alongside House, the former conveying the cultural anthropological and archetypal meaning of the House that I have just sketched, and the latter covering the entire range of domestic phenomena that are encountered in the texts. In specific instances these may, of course, coincide.

From a non-chronological typological viewpoint, we could charac­terise man's fundamental, original way of life as nomadic, sedentary (agricultural) or a combination of the two. It is not the purpose of this chapter to address the 'genetic' question of whether one of them could, or should, be considered as older, or more basic, than the other. There will be very few cultures in which houses as fundamental protec­tive structures are not socially, economically and symbolically significant, but the specific cognitive, symbolic and evaluative frame­works in which House concepts function differ markedly between cultures. However, I will not be discussing the problem of cultural universals and the possible formal status of the House concept from that perspective. I rather subscribe to the ethnopsychological and ethnophilosophical view of Wierzbicka on 'universal human concepts in culture-specific config­urations' (Wierzbicka 1992; see especially her introduction and Chapter 1). She allows for a small set of universal cognitive primitives but relies on detailed linguistic evidence and contrastive semantic analysis when it comes to describing 'folk concepts' such as 'soul' and 'mind'(idem 44). My interest is in the characterisation and differentiation of attitudes towards cultural and natural space, and the articulations that result from it, with particular attention to the House and to the structure of that concept in Russian literature. This means that I adopt a phenomeno­logical and semiotic view that has both typological and historical aspects; see Chapter 3. In historic reality there are combinations of nomadic and sedentary lives, and the available archaeological and linguistic data, which are often contradictory, at least make clear that the issue of domestication is a complicated one.[6] Nevertheless, in my analysis I too make use of insights resulting from the combined study of archaeology and comparative linguistics. On the basis of linguistic and textual evidence, Schrader concludes that the Indo-Europeans were familiar with the building of houses or huts at a very early stage (Schrader 1917, 443). His results suggest that they lived in fortified villages of wooden houses, often in elevated places (Sergent 1995, 185, Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1984, II, 744) or partly embedded in the earth (Schrader 1917, 444-8), typically executed in wattle and daub (idem, 457). From Vedic texts one can conclude that Old-Indian houses or huts were typically simple constructions built around a central pillar, often reinforced with cross beams (Bodewitz 1977).

On the strength of prehistoric evidence and reconstruction, Leroi-Gourhan stresses the importance of the human organisation of space, including that of man's living space. His argument (Leroi-Gourhan 1965, 150 - 'L'espace humanisé') is that the organisation of inhabited space is not only a matter of technical commodity but also, like language, the symbolic expression of human behaviour in general - 'un comportement globalement humain'. For all known groups of humans, he continues, the habitat answers a triple need:

1. the creation of a technically efficient milieu;

2. a framework for the social system;

3. the establishment of an orderly centre in an apparently chaotic universe.

These three issues will be of increasing importance, respectively, in the analytical approach of this book .

Any given language and its literature constitutes a growing repository of historical information regarding the culture and world-view of its users. For this reason, I shall now survey the pertinent comparative-linguistic data.

The comparative study of Indo-European languages and archaeology has a long tradition. When this is combined with a semiotic approach, the possibility of historically and typologically relevant analyses and reconstructions of cultures is increased, as can be seen in the work of E. Benveniste, O. Schrader, V.V. Ivanov, T.V. Gamkrelidze, V.N. Toporov, Ju. M. Lotman, B. Sergent, N. D. Andreev and the encyclopedia Myths of the World/Мифы народов мира. Analysis of the vocabulary of the House, its semantic structure and related etymological patterns can yield new information regarding the anthropological and cultural significance of the House concept. My sources for this outline are predominantly, but not exclusively, the results of research in the Indo-European area.

The primary House terminology, or lexical field, belongs to the oldest layers of the Indo-European vocabulary and their derivatives in the various branches and cognates of that language family; see, for example, Benveniste 1969, Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1984, II, 741, Fasmer 1986, Van Veen 1989, De Vries 1957 & 1971, Klein 1971 and Sergent 1995. The notion of architecture, of something built, is the dominant feature in the lexical material examined here. Nevertheless, Benveniste finds that in the case of the Domus-complex this should be considered not as the original but as a derivative meaning in the broader context of Indo-European social organisation and its evolution (Benveniste 1969, Vol. 1, Chapter 2, especially 297-308).[7] In many of the languages invol­ved, he observes a gradual shift from the social concept of 'maison-famille', like the Latin Domus ('house'), to that of 'maison-édifice', like the Greek dómos.[8] In his opinion this reflects a social change: the breaking up of the large family in a society ordered according to genealogy, and the gradual emergence of a society which is subdivided according to geography (ibidem). His linguistic argument is based on his interpreting the root *dem- as homophonic (see Sergent 1995, 192) and distin­guishing between two roots responsible for the development of this semantic distinction - 'spatial /construc­tive' and 'social'; these are, respectively, *dem ('to build') and *dom(ə) ('to tame, domesticate', L. domare); see Benveniste, 293.[9]

Of course, that still leaves us with an extensive network of domestic vocabulary of which the spatial foundation is undeniable, even though non-spatial, sociological and other aspects are also expressed in a variety of ways using the same vocabulary; see Sergent 1995, 192.[10] Thus, we have the cosmogonic meaning of house building; for example, in Slavic: Russ. здание < зъдати, and related forms, meaning 'to create', 'to found', 'to erect (in stone)'; compare Slov. zidati ('to build a brick wall') and Bulg. зид ('wall'), зидам ('I build'), etc. There appear to be two main tendencies here, though they may coincide in a particular lexeme. One stresses the building and the closed space of human habitation, implying a certain metonymic relationship of the type container-contained type. The other emphasises the positive evaluative (emotional and moral) semantic components of this concept; that is, its protective, sheltering, and socialising qualities. The first comprises the 'architectural' vocabulary complex already differentiated above: Russ. дом, L. domus ('house', in spite of the above), Gk. dómos/dōma, -atos, démō ('house' or 'chamber', 'I build'), OI. dámas ('house'), Goth. timrjan ('to build'), OE. timber ('to build, timber, a building'), Du timmeren ('to put together (as a carpenter)'); cf. also Gk. démas ('bodily frame'); further E. manor, mansion, F. maison < OF. manoir, L. mansio, -onem ('a staying, remaining; night quarters, station'), manēre ('to remain', Late L. 'to dwell'); in the Germanic languages, G. Haus, E. house, Du. huis ('house'), hut (idem), ON. hauss ('skull'), various Old Germanic dialects hûs < I.-E. *qeu, *qeus-, ('to cover, to hide'), E. hose ('stocking'), G. Hose ('trouser'), E. husk < MDu. (dimin.) huuskijn, huusken ('little house, husk of fruit'), Gk. keuthein ('to cover'), keuth(m)os ('shelter, cave'), kutos ('skin, cover'), skutos ('leather'), L. cus, cutis ('skin'), OPruss. keuto 'skin', E. hide (n. and v.), Du. huid, G. Haut (idem). Furthermore there is the very interesting and rich anthropomorphic etymology connecting Gk. kefalè ('head', meto­nymically 'mouth') and (as the most noble part of the body) 'person', (symbolically) 'seat of life', as well as 'origin', and 'apogee' (Montijn 1960, 427); OSax. gibillia ('skull', 'head'), G. Giebel, ('house front', 'facade)', Du. gevel (idem) (DeVries 1959, Van Veen 1989); and compare also the ON. Hauss ('skull') just mentioned. The second is exemplified by the verb 'to dwell, to reside' in Germanic languages. G. wohnen, Du. wonen, is related to G. Wonne, or MG. wonne, wunne ('joy, enjoyment, pleasure, delight'), ON. una ('to be satisfied, contented'); compare also L. venus ('love'), OI. vanati, vanoti ('to desire, to love'). De Vries (1971) points out the broad semantic range of the Germanic root wen, including such meanings as 'to get used to', 'to have a habit, custom, or practice'(Du. gewoon), and refers to Du. wennen ('to accustom to', 'to get used to'),[11] and wens ('wish'), Got. unwunands ('sad'). He further argues that the meaning of ON una should not be directly connected to the meaning of wonen ('to reside', 'to dwell'), the former having developed from the notion of a 'fenced -off area' analogous to OHG winna, 'meadow', or 'fenced-off piece of land where the cattle are kept' (ibidem). Following J. Trier (PBB 66, 1942, 251), he derives Du. wonen ('to reside', 'to dwell'), for example, from 'to remain within a fenced-off space' (of the village community, or of the yard on which the house is built). Spatial features such as these will prove to be characteristic of the House image in a variety of cultural and literary contexts. Although the data discussed here are of a diachronic linguistic nature, their semiotic and typological significance still appears to be general, and therefore exceeds their actual diachronic and etymological (language-bound)[12] connections. This suggests that the house is a fenced-off space in relation to the outside world, which is at the same time connected to it in the sense of a territory, and this can be corroborated by other, related facts; see below. According to De Vries then, the concept of 'closed community, circle' has given rise to the notions of 'close company' and 'family circle', 'living in a settlement' and the idea of an 'agreeable and comfortable life in a community'(De Vries 1957). Gamkrelidze and Ivanov agree with Benveniste that the root *t'om (their notation) also resulted in derivations that refer to the 'head of the house'; cf. OI. dámpati, Lat. dominus, as well as to 'servants' (Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1984, II, 742).

Equally old and literally central to our theme is the 'hearth' complex, which relates the fireplace to the life of the family or the clan; see, for example, Du. haard (idem), OHG. herd ('rammed down earth before the fireplace'), ON. hyrr ('fire'), Got. hauri ('ember'), OI. kudayati ('scorches', singes') and OSlav. курити ('to smoke'). The hearth is the architectural and social centre of the traditional house, and it is the place where the cult of the fire is concentrated; compare the Latin goddess of the hearth, concord and the safety of the state, Vesta, and her Greek equivalent Hestia, from hestia, 'hearth', 'altar' and 'family'. The collocation 'hearth and home' (Du. huis en haard, G. Haus und Herd) is symptomatic of their interrelatedness. Schrader adduces comparative linguistic evidence for their metonymic exchangeability, which, according to him, is reminiscent of the time when 'house' and hearth' coincided spatially; compare L. aedis (originally 'fireplace, hearth'), and Gk. hestia ('house') both of which can signify the entire house (Schrader 1917, 455).

The importance of the oven in the Slavic cultural context has been studied extensively. From the perspective of this semiotic etymological interpretation, there is an intriguing connection between the Russian печора/пещера, печь, печаль andбеспечный (respectively: 'cave', 'stove/oven', 'grief/sorrow' and 'careless/­carefree'); see Fasmer 1986. No less striking is the etymolo­gical connection in Russian between the lexemes 'to cover', or 'to roof' ('крыть'), 'roof' ('крыша', 'кров') and 'treasure'('сокровище') (idem), and in Latin between tego ('to cover, hide'), tectum (both 'roof', and 'house') and its Germanic cognates Du. 'dekken' (to cover) and 'dak' (German 'Dach'). In other words, this is the House concept linguistically modelled as the protective structure par excellence.

Such conceptualisations of human habitation presuppose not only a social and material house structure but also hierarchical organisation (Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1984, II, 742), and this too is also reflected in language, as we would expect. The family level (whatever its structure) is inevitably incorporated within a higher community level, which in its turn is structured spatially. The relationship between these two levels appears to be symmetrical, and, to a certain degree, repetitive because both are based on a boundary of some kind and a relationship of enclosure and inclusion. This is evident from a group of words meaning 'to fence off, enclose' (from the root *gher-), including, among others, Goth. gards ('house'), ON. gardr ('enclosure, fortress, courtyard'), E. garden, Du. gaard ('enclosed garden'), Oslav. градъ ('citadel, city, garden'), Russ. город ('city'), Alb. gardh/garth ('hedge') and Lit. gardìs ('palisade, fence'). Also widely distributed among the members of this language family is the basic technical terminology for fencing-off with poles, wattle and daub, and so on. The spatial opposition 'closed - open' is very well represented in the Indo-European vocabulary. Sergent points out that the Western Indo-European languages are rich in terms meaning 'village' or 'enclosed unit of habitation' as opposed to open outside spaces (Sergent 1995, 186-7). He gives an Indo-European root *koymo-, meaning 'village'; compare Gk. kōmè ('village, hamlet'), Got. haims ('village'), E. home, Lit. káima(s)('village'). Other examples include *woyk-, giving a term for 'clan' in Indian and, in the Western languages, connotations such as 'enclosure, house, village'(hence L. vicus, Oslav. вьсь, or Du. wijk), and the verbal root *weyk-, 'to enter', indicating the enclosed space in which the members of the clan sleep (root *key-, the same as in *koymo-). There is equally abundant ethnographic evidence supporting the importance of the opposition (en)closed - open, in which walls, and particularly thresholds, are sacred and densely beset with rituals and beliefs; see, for example, Sergent 1995, 187-8, and below.

Another phenomenon of the lexical and conceptual material discussed here is its metonymic (pars pro toto) potential, as in the above mentioned 'hearth and home'. In collocations, idioms and sayings in general, as well as in poetic imagery, other parts of the house, the walls or the roof for example, can also easily be substituted for the whole of the house in both social and architectural aspects; compare the Latin tectum ('roof' and 'house'), tecta accipere ('to be billeted, quartered') and tecta solida ('prison'). In the following example from Russian literature, 'walls' stand for this comprehensive house concept:

У Федора нет ни стен, ни семьи, он последние годы только то и делал, что рвал с людьми.[13]

Outside the Indo-European area there is comparable evidence of the House as a basic and major focus of social and cultural significance. About the House: Lévi-Strauss and beyond (Carsten & Hugh-Jones (eds.) 1995), a collection of essays concerning the significance of houses in South-East Asia and South America, offers an interesting review, as well as a re-evaluation, of the House concept in anthropological theory and description since Lévi-Strauss. With the growth of research, earlier anthropological concepts such as kinship theory were gradually found inadequate for the explanation of actual sociological complexities. Lévi-Strauss had proposed the concept of the house as a social institution because it unites and transcends a number of concepts which traditional kinship theory treated as mutually exclusive[14]. His sociological notion of sociétés à maison - 'a hybrid, transitional form between kin-based and class-based social orders' (Introduction, 10) - was intended to reconcile such contradictions. However, concept of house employed in his theory was a social one[15] that disregarded its physical aspects. Part of the purpose of Carsten & Hugh-Jones et. al. is to address these aspects and explicitly draw them into consideration, 'exploring the physical char­acteristics of houses and linking these to the role that houses, like bodies, come to play as symbols of social groups [...]'. (Introduction, 21). A particularly interesting topic of their book concerns the anthropo­logical significance of the material, and symbolic analogies between the human body and the house; see especially their Introduction and Chapter 11.

Being in the world, 'being there', inevitably implies a relationship, whether of association or dissociation, between the self and the world, and this relationship also forms the basis of the psychological (cognitive, emotional), social and cultural division of the world into sensible spaces, shapes, and connections. The house in its own multiple manifestations, together with other articulations of culturally significant space such as walls, paths and roads, gardens and stretches of land, makes up what we can call 'territory', or 'home'. This is the space in which mankind settles down and tries to achieve a harmony between nature and himself, implying the absence of any insoluble conflict between culture and nature. The concept of the garden, as an adjunct to the settlement itself, follows logically from this in its implication of a man-made space and order. This is also reflected etymologically in the Russian lexical complex for 'garden' and 'estate' - sad and usad'ba, both derived from roots referring to a complex of meanings including 'tree', 'plant', 'grove' and 'garden' (as in Old Russian 'садъ', idem), 'to plant' and 'to sow' (Russian 'сажать/­посадить', 'садить' ('to plant')), 'to sit (down)', 'to settle (down)', 'to (set up) house' (Russian 'сесть/садиться' ('to sit down'), as well as 'село' ('village'), 'селение' ('settlement'), '(по)селить(ся)' ('to settle down'); see Fasmer 1986.

Such spatial configurations are capable of embodying a sense of orientation towards a centre from which everything else is measured and valued, a sense of belonging, of ownership, and, of course, of the link between individuals and generations through time - hence the evident metonymic connection between the notions of 'house' and 'family' ('dynasty', 'lineage', 'line'), and the individual.[16] Mankinds's sense of origin, of historic beginning, has been linked with the concept of a house and its founding, or building. It is also evident that this connection has been extremely powerful in generating images and symbols in religion, myth and literature as well as, more generally, cultural and anthro­po­lo­gical reflection, and philosophy. A quotation from Aristotle's Meta­physics Vi, dealing with 'beginnings', may serve as a first illus­tration here. In the opening of this book he speaks about the various meanings of 'beginning' and his third, fourth, and sixth definitions read as follows:

[...] (c) That thing as a result of whose presence something first comes into being; e.g., as the keel is the beginning of a ship, and the foundation that of a house, and as in the case of animals some thinkers suppose the heart to be the 'beginning', others the brain, and others something similar, whatever it may be. (d) That from which, although not present in it, a thing first comes into being, and that from which motion and change naturally first begin, as the child comes from the father and mother, and fighting from abuse. [...] (f) Arts are also called 'beginnings', especially the architectonic arts [...].

                                 (Aristotle 1975, 209-211.)

It is interesting to note how Aristotle, in his examples of 'beginnings', draws on anthropomorphic analogies between architecture (ships and houses), anatomy (heart and brain) and biology (parent - child).[17] As we shall see, such analogies will prove to be of central importance when we focus on literature and poetry. It is a well known observation that mythical thinking, and the semantic strategies underlying poetic language, have characteristics in common (hence the terms 'mytho­poesis' and 'mythopoetic'); see, for example, Meletinskij 1976, Frejdenberg 1997, Lotman 1979, Hansen-Löve 1987, Schmid 1987 and Van Baak 1987. Thinking and imagining along lines of (concrete) analogy or homology is one of them, involving structural and symbolic equivalences or associations between disparate realms of signification such as the human body, human habitation and the cosmos, the latter particularly in creation myths. Bollnow, referring specifically to Cassirer and Eliade, summarises the archaic vision of building cities, temples or houses as 'imitating creation': 'Jeder Hausbau ist die Gründung eines Kosmos in einem Chaos [...] Jedes Haus, so betont er (i. e. Eliade), ist ein Bild der Welt im ganzen, eine imago mundi. Die Welt im ganzen spiegelt sich im Hause' (Bollnow 1964,144). This is reflected in archaic rituals and texts connected with the foundation of the house. In the myth and shamanism of Northwest Amazonia, for example, 'the nested imagery of womb and child, compartment and family, longhouse and community, territory and neighbourhood group extends outwards to embrace the cosmos and humanity. The longhouse itself replicates and models the structure of the cosmos: its floor is the earth and its posts are mountains that support the roof or sky above' (Hugh-Jones in Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995, 233-4). In Vedic consecratory formulas, the god Indra is supposed to fix the central post around which the house or hut is being constructed because he is associated with the cosmic pillar, the cosmogonic axis mundi. Thus the symbolic analogy is that the space between heaven and earth is created by raising heaven along the axis mundi, a process that is repeated in putting up the house around its central post, also symbolising the centre or navel of the world (Bodewitz 1977, 63, 65)[18]. It has been established in Indo-European and many other cultures (African, Chinese, Finno-Ugric, Melanesian) that the foundation of a house, or of a city, was accompanied by specific rites involving human or animal sacrifices. The sacrificial victim was afterwards buried in the foundations, in the walls or under the threshold of the house, thus becoming an integral part of it - apparently a protective ritual to ensure the solidity of the house (Sergent 1995, 188-9). Considering its anthropological, cultural, and psychological significance, the concept of the House can be called an archetype, or archetope; see Van Baak 1990. However, we should not forget the fact that basic notions related to the House archetype need not necessarily imply a material representation of a building or construction as the comparative linguistic argument of Benveniste and Sergent makes clear; see above. Australian aboriginal pictural semiotics present an interesting case in this respect. The Anangu, living in the Western Desert, have a traditional art form called Tjukurrpa, through which they express their myths and religious beliefs visually; see Birnie Danzker 1994. The inventory of ideograms, or pictograms, consists of a number of simple visual elements that are combined in order to map the aboriginal world and its components: animals, objects and natural phenomena as well as the world of the ancestors. A striking feature of this pictorial language is its graphic simplicity, or reductionism, in combination with a strong tendency towards semantic syncretism, either on grounds of visual similarity, as when three parallel, horizontal, wavy lines represent fire, water, smoke, or blood, or according to functional criteria, as when a series of concentric circles denotes cave, campsite, stone, hole, well, fruit, fireplace, food tree or breast, depending on the context. The latter sign can be combined with the symbol for a human being, which has a shape reminiscent of a horse­shoe. A combination (syntax) of two or more humans around the concen­tric circles means 'sitting people' and represents a gathering round a fireplace. As such it unites the notions of fundamental human cohabita­tion, involving orientation towards a centre (however ephemeral), togetherness, shelter, warmth and food. A pictorial equivalent of a material house is absent, but we have a symbolic pictorial rendering of the archetypal human values that have come to be associated with the concept of the House in most cultures. Also absent from these pictograms, however, are other minimal but universal, concrete and spatial features of the House that form the basis of its symbolic potential as a psychological, cultural and artistic image: interiority versus exteriority, or closedness versus openness. There are many other texts, some more archaic than others, in which the House concept is a forceful generator of images and significance. One characteristic of creation myths and of cosmogonic thinking in general is the fundamental and axiologically significant opposition between chaos and creation, where the created universe is itself characterised by structure. From the earliest times, the dominant traditional views of Chaos have equated it either with 'the void' or with 'humidity' and 'water', in other words with that which is amorphous and disordered, primordial and unstable, endless and all-encompassing. It is from this that Cosmos originates as that which is ordered, structured, measurable, discrete and firm; see Tokarev 1981. This is reflected in archaic, biblical and medieval thinking about the universe: the architectural metaphor in concepts such as firmamentum (Russian equivalent tverd') and its analogies, including the arch, vault (Genesis 1: 6-8), canopy of heaven and expanse of the sky, and the image of the sky as a roof, as in L. tectum altum caeli. Another consequence of this architectural analogy is the spatial vision of 'heaven', or the underworld, as a place to live in the afterlife. Related to the latter is the 'house of the dead'. A common phenomenon, in Roman culture for example, is the necropolis, with its house-shaped grave or sarcophagus and its epitaphs referring to the expectation that it will be 'a house for ever' (domus aeterna). According to Zinn this idea originated in Egypt but spread throughout the world of Antiquity. The Etruscans in particular took great care to have their tombs made to look like actual living-rooms (Zinn 1998, 77).

Religious, mythical and moral texts of various sorts have in common their function of attributing sense to the world and human existence in it. In such texts the House is most prominent as a symbol of stability, dynastic power, righteousness and legitimacy. A common model is the combination of two symbolic aspects of the House: the cosmological analogy between creation as a whole and the image of the House, and a patriarchal, hierarchical model of human relations reflected in the image of the 'House of the Father'. This is, of course, a well known metaphor from both the Old and New Testaments (II Sam. 7, Ps. 132, John 14:2), and it is repeated in such moralistic texts as the Old Russian Domostroi. In the Book of Samuel, we can follow the development of a peculiar network of cosmological and anthropomorphic images connecting 'house', 'temple' and 'tent' to express the establishment of a new relationship between God, as father, and man (king) as son. This text is also interesting because of the typological and ideological opposition between the nomadic and sedentary types of culture. Since it originated in or about the seventh century BCE, it may well comprise evidence of the profound anthropological significance of this opposition, given that the nomadic phase of the people of Israel had ended around 1200 BCE (J. P. Fokkelman 1990).

The idea of the House also plays a role in the Greek myth of Prometheus, which is essentially about the beginnings of man and his culture. Owing to the process by which they were transmitted, Myths, including this one, usually exist in a number of variants that may differ substantially from one another. For example, according to some sources Prometheus was the creator of man; see Tokarev 1982. The most impor­tant common elements, however, are that the titan Prometheus was punished by Zeus beause he stole fire from heaven and gave it to man, out of love. With the gift of fire mankind also received the opportunity to learn arts and skills, to control his environment and to emancipate himself from nature. The earliest extant version of the Prometheus myth is the tragedy Prometheus Bound (Promètheus desmōtès, fifth century BCE) by Aeschylus, who 'found in man the centre of gravity of the world, in man, whose mind, experience, and action are implicated alike in his environment and in those far-off influences that descend to him from successive generations of his ancestors' (H. W. Smyth, introduction to the 1973 Loeb edition of Aeschylus, Vol. I xiii). In this text, Prometheus claims to have been the creator of man's human qualities and culture, including thinking and planning, astronomy and astrology, numbers, writing, memory and art, the domestication of animals, sailing, medicine and healing, and house building. Interestingly, the gift of the house is related to the light of the sun; it signifies mankind's emancipation from the dark cave-dwelling (anticipating Plato's famous cave simile) and immediately follows the gifts of reason, orientation in space and time, planning and anticipation, the latter being the etymological meaning of Prometheus' name. The concept of the House symbolically entails consciousness, light, and order, and can therefore be typologically related to creation myth. In the following account of the process, given by Prometheus to the chorus, the building of houses out of bricks is the highest of human technical skills (texnè):

[...] and I made them to have sense and be endowed with reason. [...] First of all, though they had eyes to see, they saw to no avail; they had ears, but understood not; but, like to shapes in dreams, throughout their length of days, without purpose they wrought all things in confusion. Knowledge they had neither of houses built of bricks and turned to face the sun, nor yet of work in wood; but dwelt beneath the ground like swarming ants, in sunless caves. They had no sign of either winter or of flowery spring or of fruitful summer, whereon they could depend, but everything they wrought without judgement, until such time as I taught them to discern the risings of the stars and their settings [...] Aye, and numbers, too, chiefest of the sciences, I invented for them, and the combining of letters, creative mother of the Muses' arts, wherewith to hold all things in memory. I, too, first brought brute beasts under the yoke [...]. 'T was I and no one else that contrived the mariner's flaxen-winged car to roam the sea. [...]

                  (Transl. Smyth, idem, 255 and 257)

Homer's Odyssey is the first and greatest story of homecoming. In probably the most touching passage of the epic (book 23) Ulysses, just returned from his perigrinations after the Trojan War, has to prove his identity to Penelope, who is too astonished to recognise him imme­di­ate­ly. She thinks of a ruse to test him beyond all doubt by making him tell things about their house that only he can know. She therefore orders a servant to take Ulysses' bed 'outside the bed chamber that he himself built', to which Ulysses reacts angrily:

"Wife, I am much displeased at what you have just been saying. Who has been taking my bed from the place in which I left it? He must have found it a hard task, no matter how skilled a workman he was, unless some god came and helped him to shift it. There is no man living, however strong and in his prime, who could move it from its place, for it is a marvellous curiosity which I made with my very own hands. There was a young olive growing within the precincts of the house, in full vigour, and about as thick as a bearing-post. I built my room round this with strong walls of stone and a roof to cover them, and I made the doors strong and well-fitting. Then I cut off the top boughs of the olive tree and left the stump standing. This I dressed roughly from the root upwards and then worked with carpenter's tools well and skilfully, straightening my work by drawing a line on the wood, and making it into a bed-prop. I then bored a hole down the middle, and made it the centre-post of my bed, at which I worked till I had finished it, inlaying it with gold and silver; after this I stretched a hide of crimson leather from one side of it to the other. So you see I know all about it, and I desire to learn whether it is still there, or whether any one has been removing it by cutting down the olive tree at its roots." When she heard the sure proofs Ulysses now gave her, she fairly broke down. She flew weeping to his side, flung her arms about his neck, and kissed him. "Do not be angry with me Ulysses, [...]."

(Transl. Samuel Butler, The Internet Classics Archive)

Ulysses here proves himself to have been the builder, not only of his bed chamber but of his house as a whole. It is noteworthy that he chose an olive tree as the centre of it. This is a deeply symbolic choice, connecting the creation of the House with the natural and cosmic order. It is a literary illustration of Bollnow's statement (quoted above) concerning the archaic vision of house-building imitating creation and the Cosmos. It is also reminiscent of the god Indra, of the Vedic consecratory formulas, who was supposed to fix the central post around which the house or hut was being constructed, thus associating it with the cosmic pillar, the cosmogonic axis mundi (Bodewitz, also quoted above).

In the Latin classical tradition, Virgil's Aeneid presents another example of such cosmogonic House building around a tree.[19] Virgil's case deserves more detailed attention here. His epic is all about founding Houses, dynastic continuity and destiny. It contains interesting examples of the founding of a House in its archaic and symbolic significance of collective identification that could embrace a large group of people - not simply a family, but a clan or a tribe. In his epic as a whole Virgil realises the essential elements of what I call the House Myth, which will be elaborated as a concept in in Chapter I.4.

It is Aeneas's destiny and duty to guard and transfer his penates,[20] the house gods (or rather their effigies) of his family and clan, to Italy after the destruction of Troy. Aeneas's searching for a new home in a new land stands out in dramatic relief because of the fact that he (like Ulysses in the previous example) is destined first to roam the seas for seven years without a roof over his head and without a house of his own; see Toporov 1993, 170). The transfer of the penates is at the same time a symbolic act, ensuring the future continuity of the House as a dynasty. Aeneas settles in Italy with his people, wages war, marries a local Princess and founds the city of Lavinium, thereby also laying the foundations of Rome. Throughout the Aeneid, Troy is remembered and mourned as the lost home city (especially when Aeneas and his men have to fight for their lives again) that must now be founded anew. Thus, the final settlement of Aeneas and his people in Italy is both a continuation and a new beginning. This is expressed with ultimate terseness in book X, verse 58, where the Trojan Aeneas and his people are called Teucri (after Teucer (Teucrus), the first king of Troy) and are said to 'seek Latium and a new-born Troy' (Virgil 1998, 174/5: dum Latium Teucri recidivaque Pergama quaerunt).[21]

Because of the epic character of the poem, the hero's story is also the story of a nation's origins and an attempt at conveying a legitimising message in support of the then rulers of Rome. Before Aeneas fulfils his destiny, however, the story tells of the founding of another House on a much smaller scale. At the beginning of book VII, Aeneas and his people land at the mouth of the Tiber, in Latium, the kingdom of the old king Latinus. He has no sons, but he does have a daughter, Lavinia, who is the most courted woman in the land. She is the onlt person who can 'preserve the house':

sola domum et tantas servabat filia sedes,

iam matura viro, iam plenis nubilis annis.[22] (verses 52-3)

Besides the use of both domus and sedes ('abode', 'place of residence'), lexicalising the respective distinction between 'maison-famille' and 'maison-édifice'(see Benveniste, above, and note 7), this episode illustrates the dynastic motif representing the House (Domus) concept as continuity and succession in time. Legend relates the origins of the line of Latinus, via his ancestors Faunus and Picus, to Saturn himself (verses 48-9: sanguinis ultimus auctor). According to the mythological world model of Virgil's epic, the founding of a House in the sense of actually building it is still a religious, cosmogonic act, which takes account of divine intentions regarding the House of Latinus. In this text these archaic features took shape in the motif of a sacred laurel tree, which Latinus found by chance and around which he built his palace. The tree was thus the symbolic and spiritual centre of the house and, like the world tree, gave assurance of divine protection. Latinus dedicated the Laurel to Apollo, and from it Latinus's settlers received their name, Laurentes:

laurus erat tecti medio in penetralibus altis,

sacra comam multosque metu servata per annos,

quam pater inventam, primas cum conderet arces,

ipse ferebatur Phoebo sacrasse Latinus,

Laurentisque ab ea nomen posuisse colonis.[23]         (verses 59-63)

This succinct passage recounts the foundation of a House in the full sense of Domus as a House Founding Myth (see Chapter I.4), of which it realises and implies essential 'programmatic' components. Taking into account some observations made earlier in this chapter we can discern the following interrelated motifs and dimensions:

-    the dynastic beginning and transmission: Latinus's role as founder - father (pater, like Faunus, Picus and Saturn before him);

-    the founding by this father of the house as a building (primas cum conderet arces);

-   the architectural dimension: the palace, the towers (tecti [...] in penetralibus altis; arces);

-   the religious and moral dimension: the reverence for the sacred laurel tree (multosque metu servata per annos; Phoebo sacrasse);

-   the similarly sacral and creational establishment of social and kinship ties between people by giving a name to the tribe (nomen posuisse colonis);

-   the aspect of power and hierarchy invested in a ruler, which is also related to the dynastic beginning. (According to Gamkrelidze & Ivanov and Benveniste (see above) this is inherent in the root *t'om, and also resulted in old derivations that refer to the 'head of the house' (like L. dominus) as well as to 'servants'. This idea is realised in Latinus's actantial role as king (See v. 45: rex Latinus) and as subject of the agentive verbs in the quoted passage (building, dedicating, giving (naming): conderet, sacrasse, posuisse).

-   the house (palace) as a construction and concentric structure around the laurel tree. (This is the centre of the world for the people of the Laurentine clan, determining their orientation and self-identification in relation to the rest of the world (tecti medio in penetralibus altis; ab ea nomen [...] colonis)).

The intriguing role of the laurel tree in these verses deserves further consideration. It is the central object of Latinus's symbolic founding actions. It is 'found' (inventam) by him while he is laying the first foundations of his house (stronghold: primas cum conderet arces), which means that it is a wild tree, found in nature. The tree is then incorporated into the structure of the house and made the centre of worship. The importance of its being taken into the sphere of culture lies in the fact that this emphasises the fundamental anthropological distinction between given nature (the 'wild') and the cultural deed of creating the House/Domus. Remarkably, this is exactly the point of the archaeologist Hodder's thesis concerning the origin and nature of the domus in the context of the process of domestication in general; see earlier in this chapter. He takes as his starting point the observation that domestication is, indeed, about bringing 'the wild' within the control of the domus, which is what Latinus does in a highly symbolic manner, 'domesticating' the tree by 'bringing it into the house'.[24] The domus, according to Hodder, 'provided a way of thinking about the control of the wild and thus for the larger oppositions between culture and nature, social and unsocial' (Hodder 1990, 39). We can consider the process of culture, in so far as it is related to the emergence of the domus, as both man's emancipation from nature and, after a fashion, his 'coming to terms' with it. This implies a double vision of his relationship with nature and his attempts at 'taming' it. This also complies with the insights of compar­ative linguists such as Benveniste concerning the root *dom-(or homo­phonic *dem- as in Sergent's analysis), which deals with the social dimension of the domus complex, as in L. domare, 'to tame, domes­ticate', thereby bringing 'the wild' within the control of the domus.

We shall now return to Aeneas, waiting on the banks of the Tiber to fulfil his destiny. When he recognises the omen as predicted by his father Anchises, he knows that he has found his new home and fatherland, and exclaims: hic domus, haec patria est ('Here is our home, here our fatherland'; VII, 122). Aeneas himself marks out a preliminary camp, and the newcomers begin to reconnoitre the land. Invited by king Latinus into his palace the Trojan Aeneas, himself a king (VII, 220), tells his host that all he asks for is 'a scant home for our country's gods':

dis sedem exiguam patriis litusque rogamus

innocuum et cunctis undamque auramque patentem.[25] (VII, 229-230)

After a long war (which takes up most of the second half of the Aeneid), Aeneas will found a city to be named Lavinium, after Latinus's daughter, whom he will marry after killing his competitor Turnus. The foundation of the city is presented as analogous to the building of a house by 'raising walls', i.e. by separating and enclosing space from nature:

[...]; mihi moenia Teucri

constituent urbique dabit Lavinia nomen.[26]  (XII, 193-4)

Thirty years later, Aeneas's son, Ascanius, or Iulus, will found the city of Alba Longa. This is also predestined according to divine portents, and takes its place in the long, complex but unbroken Trojan chain leading to the foundation of Rome (with its metonymical walls) by Romulus (after whom the Romans are named) and ultimately to the deified 'Trojan' Julius Caesar, in whom history reached its apogee and fulfilment in the eyes of this Roman poet of the first century BCE. There is a clear structural parallel between these founding stories, and that of Latinus; all three of them combine the components and dimensions of the Founding Myth of the Domus as analised above:

[...], regnumque ab sede Lavini

transferet, et longam multa vi muniet Albam.

hic iam ter centum totos regnabitur annos

gente sub Hectorea, donec regina sacerdos

Marte gravis geminam partu dabit Ilia prolem.

[...]

Romulus excipiet gentem et Mavortia condet

moenia Romanosque suo de nomine dicet.

[...]

Nascetur pulchra Troianus origine Caesar,

Imperium Oceano, famam qui terminet astris,

Iulius, a magno demissum nomen Iulo.[27]  (I, 270-77, and 286-8)

At the beginning of this chapter, the concept of Home was brought up as a fundamental aspect of man's relationship towards the places where he lives. The difference between House and Home can sometimes seem blurred in linguistic expression, at least in English: American English speaks of 'setting up house' and 'moving home', while British English refers to 'moving house'. In other languages this may be expressed in other ways, but a basic conceptual differentiation will certainly be present and coded somehow.[28] However, it is essential to realise that the idea of Home is a subjective evaluative component of domestic thematics which is not necessarily inherent in all its occurrences; neither is it restricted to these thematics.[29] Significantly, the qualitative feeling or attitude conveyed by the concept of Home can be dissociated from that of House: we can speak, for example, about a place where we 'feel at home' that need not even be a building or enclosed, sheltered structure of any kind.

In American cultural history, settling in the Great Plains and occupying the West in general has fundamentally shaped American attitudes. Mobility, dynamic heroism and the other qualities of character that were required of the pioneer (and which still constitute an archetype and identification model in American culture) were gradually replaced by the idea of settling, becoming a rancher or farmer, conquering and colonising, subjugating nature, tilling the soil and transforming the wilderness - often with scant regard for its history - into arable land. These people were, significantly, called 'homesteaders'. They had under­gone a development from being newcomers and colonisers to home-loving settlers.[30]

Any discussion of the cultural significance of the house must deal with the question of gender. Specifically, this means contrasting the female and male perspectives in relation to domestic space and thematics. For a number of reasons, archetypal or typological as well as historical, domestic space has always been associated in some way with the feminine in human nature. Even though the act of founding and building a house is usually considered a typically male occupation, domestic life itself, its maintenance and its values, is inconceivable without the female image.[31] Rybczynski analyses the development of the cultural value of domesticity in Western Europe and states that 'if domesticity was, as John Lukacs suggested, one of the principal achievements of the Bourgeois Age, it was above all, a feminine achievement' (Rybczynski 1987, 75).

The House and its Functions in Structuring

Writing about literary settings, and especially domestic settings, as expressions of character, Wellek and Warren stated that 'A man's house is an extension of himself' (Wellek and Warren 1973, 221). This chapter comprises an analysis of the functions of the House as a structural element of literary worlds. This requires a conceptual and theoretical framework for the relevant literary and semiotic phenomena, and the ways in which these are interconnected.^[32]

I take as my starting point the idea, developed by the Moscow-Tartu school, that semiosis in literature involves secondary modelling in relation to the primary modelling of language. From there I argue that any work of literature, whether it is an epic, an elegy, a novel or a short story, has as its foundation a specific abstract model of the world, a combination of literary semiotic categories that are responsible for such global characteristics as genre. On the basis of this model, a specific literary world-picture is shaped with the help of concrete motifs. In some cases it is possible to identify a particular element of the literary world-picture that stands out as being more responsible than other elements for the conceptual and literary coherence of the verbal world as a whole. On the level of the image - the level which we have been discussing so far - we could say that we are looking at the archetypal and gestalt qualities of images, but now we want to determine their role in the construction of the literary world-picture. This is where myth comes in as a significant category of literature. Myth, in this sense, is not only an archaic cognitive and narrative structure; it has a role to play, however fragmentary or rudimentary, in literary texts of diverse periods and stylistic traditions. We can even argue that the literary modelling potential of images, as well as their expressiveness and aesthetic effectiveness, depends upon the strength of the mythical representations that they convey. At the same time, however, we must be aware that the semantics of the literary text - by comparison with the semantics of primary linguistic modelling - is characterised by a special openness or indeterminacy; see Ingarden's notion of Unbestimmtheitsstelle. This semantic and cognitive openness results from the polysemy of literature, but it also manifests itself through time in the variability and changeability of interpretation and appreciation of literary works, including their imagery; see the theoretical work of the Prague literary structuralists Mukařovský and Vodičká. Moreover, the range of images and world-pictures that characterises national literatures or the works of individual authors may vary.

Once we decide to interpret the image of the House in this context as a myth, we need to determine its properties as such, preferably on the basis of the outcome of the previous chapters. We have seen that, as an anthropologically and culturally relevant image, the House is a complex of spacial, cultural and axiological concepts or representations of the world that also has the potential to bestow sense upon that world. For these reasons we are dealing with a cognitive complex to which we can also apply notions such as archetype and gestalt. Such complex images not only have cognitive, psychological or symbolic meanings; they also have narrative potential. In other words, in the structure of myth, even in its modern 'rudimentary' manifestations, the narrative potential of the original myth 'lies low'. This narrative potential can either be (re)activated in a narration or remain present as a 'nucleus' with associative potential. This also means that, in analysing myth on this level, one need not necessarily distinguish between 'prose' and 'poetry'; see also Van Baak 1989. Such an interpretation agrees with the concept of myth according to Aristotelian poetics, distinguishing between 'mythos' - 'plot', 'intrigue', 'narration', 'story' - and 'logos' - 'discourse', 'exposition' (Wellek and Warren 1973, 190). This means that the 'House Myth', besides providing symbolic and axiological representations of the spatial world, can also have a function in the construction of narrative plots.^[33]

If we connect this concept of the House Myth with the insights of the previous chapters, we can identify mythical 'stories of the House'. It will be clear that it is the prime task of this book to research the significance of these, and comparable stories and their mythopoetics, to Russian literature and culture (part II.). Thus, we can speak about 'stories of the House' in the context of cosmogonic myths, about the 'stories' of founding first dynasties by the gods or the first man, about the 'story' of the hearth (the domestication of fire and, more concretely, the meaning of the Prometheus myth; see also Van Baak 1981) and, in a more abstract sense, the anthropocentric, existential 'story of man,'; that is, of his own position in relation to these and of the relationship of his 'self' (or 'soul') to his own body.

If a myth contains narrative, it will be clear that archaic types of plot will be essential to the narrative structure of myth. The most fundamental, archaic form of plot is that of 'the road'; see, for example, Toporov on 'путь', Tokarev 1982, 352-3). From the anthropological, typological point of view as adopted in the preceding chapters, this type of plot brings into perspective two fundamental ways of perceiving or experiencing space, which we may now more appropriately express as 'two models of the world': that of the (typological) nomad, and that of the (typological) sedentary dweller. The ethnologist Leroi-Gourhan (1965, 155-9; see also Tokarev 1982, 341-2) devised a corresponding typological terminology, setting 'espace itinérant' (the hunter's dynamic, linear perception of space) in opposition to 'espace rayonnant' (the sedentary dweller's concentric perception and hierarchi­sation of space). This typological opposition can be usefully translated into analogous social and psychological terms as well as into the semiotics of (literary) space; see Van Baak 1983a. So, for example, there is on the one hand the idea of stable order associated with the concentric, 'own' domestic centre to which one belongs and with which one identifies, and on the other the situation where such a centre is absent or lost, or where a person lacks such a spatio-evaluative orientation and longs for such a place. In terms of narrative structure, the former is typically the case at the beginning of certain types of novel, or of fairy tales: the initial situation is one of balance and harmony; this will be disturbed by conflict (plot events), which in turn will lead to a later situation - the hero forced to leave his home, losing his house, regaining his house or acquiring a new one, to take just a few examples.

In some periods and genres, a variant of this typical fabular chain elaborates the fates of houseless heroes. They may be exiles, drifters or vagabonds, abandoned, abducted or illegitimate children, or orphans. It need hardly be said that the Homecoming story is of fundamental importance. Suffice it here to refer to the Odyssey as a model. Its status as a universal and archaic plot type demonstrates the intrinsic, natural connections within the triangle that constitutes the basis of the 'arch-fabula': Hero - Road - House (or Home). This triangle implicitly represents a specific world-order in which the House is the invariant 'centre' to which all plot developments gravitate.

Notwithstanding the above, in most works of literature the House will be (at least) a natural locus, or point of reference within the literary world. It therefore becomes interesting to notice cases where such a house is absent from the world-picture, or out-of-place, or a problem, for example in literary texts which in some way revive a nomadic world-view. The consequences are far-reaching because the absence of the house is bound to entail either a fundamental characteristic of the world-picture being presented or a fundamental violation of the immanent world-order as a whole. This opposition can take a prominent place in the structures of literary plots and settings. We might view the two concepts as mutually exclusive typological opposites. However, when dealing with literary representations we should rather consider them as two poles of the possible range of world-views which can come into conflict, and of which the concrete expression is directly related to literary phenomena such as genre and period characteristics.

For example, in the world-view of the Russian estates as reflected in the works of Turgenev or Goncharov, sedentary life is the norm; see also Chapters II.11, 13, 15, and 30 on 'normative orientation towards the world'. Leaving the estate, coming back, coming of age and exerting one's rights as a landowner constitute the basic model of the hero's life plot from which the novel's conflicts are developed (Van Baak 1983b). During the course of that plot, the world of the estates as such remains essentially unaltered.

At the other end of the spectrum we can consider the meaning of the Cossack myth and the Scythian myth in Russian culture; see for example, Gogol's romantic Cossacks in Taras Bul'ba, the revolutionary Cossacks of the nineteen twenties in Isaak Babel's Red Cavalry (Конармия) and the 'neo-nomadism' of the image of the Scythian in twentieth century Modernism and Avantgarde (for example Blok, or Pil'niak). In Gogol's representation, the identity of the Cossacks as warriors is not compatible with living in houses, whose closed, interior, feminine spaces pose a threat to their masculinity; see the analyses of Lotman 1968, and Deutsch Kornblatt 1992, 72. In Babel's Red Cavalry (Конармия), the revolutionary Cossacks as nomadic warriors bring catastrophe to sedentary domestic life; see Van Baak 1983a, 1987b.

The myth of the House was presented above as a fabular invariant in the plots of a basic world-order. Myth is especially concerned with 'origins and destinies', and it is 'a programme' (Wellek and Warren 1973, 191). In this context it is important to quote Wellek and Warren on the subject of myth in more detail:

For literary theory, the important motifs are probably the image or picture, the social, the supernatural (or non-naturalist or irrational), the narrative or story, the archetypal or universal, the symbolic representation as events in time of our timeless ideals, the programmatic or eschatological, the mystic. In contemporary thought, appeal to the myth may centre on any one of these, with a spread to others.

                                                             (Ibidem)

These formulations offer useful leads in describing the House's functions in modelling the narrative and poetic world. On the level of narration, the cyclical 'programme' of the myth's implied world-order is translated into 'events': plot motifs involving the category of time, actors and circumstances. In its cyclical characteristics, the House Myth becomes manifest in the chain of generations: the dynastic and ancestral principle, heredity, tradition and the responsibilities that come with it. These are, in the terms of Wellek and Warren, 'symbolic representations as events in time of timeless ideals'. This analysis mainly addresses the narrative mode, but, as I have already remarked, the mythic qualities of the House as an image (in the sense of Wellek and Warren) are activated no less forcefully in lyric poetry. We could just as easily say, following Lotman, that in 'modern' literature we encounter the double structure of mythical cyclical conceptualisation and the historic mode of successive narration; see Lotman 1979 on the origin of plot in the light of typology, and on the structural relations between archaic myth and modern plot. Here we find houses not only as images but as settings and conflict spaces (see Van Baak 1990ab, 1987b), shaping the diversity and variability of literary world-pictures with their specific qualities. Thus, the concrete enclosure of domestic space can be perceived as positive and valuable, associated with comfort and warmth, protection, refuge and identity, or as negative and oppressive, associated with captivity, coldness, stress, neglect and alienation. According to context and plot, the homeliness of a house can be lost, or changed into its opposite: the House can become a Pseudo-House, or an Anti-House.

In advance of the actual analysis of the literary sources, we can already draw up provisional (but reasonably representative) typological classifications of House images, and the basic dynamic fabula motifs connected with the House. Such an inventory, making allowances for combinations or shifts between the valuational categories and variants, might well look something like this:

-   The Archaic House, comprising such images as the Womb-House, the Cave-House and the Personified House that can be psychologically ambivalent, but also including the House as a projection of psychic faculties such as the subconscious and memory;

-   The Utopian House, basically positive and uniting the forces of life;

-   The House of Childhood, the Paternal/Parental House, the House and Garden as Paradise, the Old House, the House of Memory and the House of the Future (that is, more genuinely Utopian in the political, or eschatological sense);

-   The Anti-House or Pseudo-House;

-   The Haunted House, the Closed House, the Prison-House, the Madhouse, the Underground House, and the House as Hell;

-   The basically negative or Unhappy House of dysfunctional families;

-   The House of Unhappy Marriage, or, more generally, the House without Love (also for orphans, wards, and the like);

-   The House of Death, where death, destruction, demoralisation and decadence are stronger than the forces of life and perspective in the concrete image of the House as a Grave or Coffin.

What is absent from this scheme is a 'neutral', 'normal' image of the 'homely' House or Home. This does not imply that such a condition would not be a reality. On the contrary, it represents the unmarked, 'given' or 'by default' mode of the domestic theme as opposed to the literary, secondary modelling given in the above scheme. We could say that the unmarked mode of the domestic theme is, by definition, inherent in literary structures. According to the context, however, it can develop literary prominence as a mythopoetic image or fabular mytheme.

In the fabular inventory drawn up below, I also leave out the basic, uninterrupted and 'self-contained' routine (or 'programme'; see above) of the House Myth because that would not result in plot development of the formal kind. This does not mean that 'uninterrupted idyllic flow' cannot occur in literary texts. It can, but then it is only temporary, as in plotless narration involving reminiscences and dreams - Oblomov's famous dream about the Oblomovka estate of his childhood is a good example - and therefore tends to be limited to specific lyrical genres such as the elegy. In saying this, I share Lotman's view of plot as necessarily involving the crossing of a spatio-temporal, moral or cognitive boundary. The 'ideal routine', the basic programme of the House Myth as an uninterrupted, self-contained cycle, does not go 'out of bounds' by itself and therefore yields no plot in the usual sense. Even Paradise, as a timeless concept, lacks a plot; it is only when the serpent and Eve come into action that it acquires one. It makes sense to draw up a basic classification beginning with the phases of human life in relation to the house and thereby acknowledging the thematics of 'origins and destinies', the moral and the social, as stressed by Wellek and Warren. The following fabula motifs, then, appear to cover the essential variation 'around the house':

-   To build, or found a house, both materially and in the sense of a 'Domus' (as Aeneas does in the Aeneid, Book 7; see also Chapter I.1).

-   To come into a house by being born, by marriage or simply by moving house.

-   To leave the house or home, either

1.  as a phase in life, a 'rite de passage' that also involves finding a new house by coming of age, marriage or moving house, or in connection with death; or

2. as a result of conflict, by fleeing or being driven away and possibly becoming a homeless wanderer.

-   To look for and find a new house.

-   To return to a house or home; this includes the homecoming of lost persons (the Prodigal Son, The Odyssey) and the experience of 'revisiting' a house or home.

-   To lose a house (through a catastrophic occurrence perhaps involving fire or water), to be evicted from it or to be threatened or killed in it by an invasive agent. Taking into account the dynastic meaning of the House, this motif might be identified as 'Death of the House'.

The last category is different from the others on account of the position of the hero or house as victim of an external agent. It clearly represents an important group of plots. Individual texts may of course comprise combinations of these motifs, but they may also employ a wide range of variations, or make metaphoric, metonymic, imaginary, personifying or otherwise symbolic transformations of them. This aspect requires further discussion because it is connected with the structure of literary texts on the level of concrete imagery and plot structure.

As I have already remarked, the verbal motifs mentioned above are all of a fabular nature. This means, in accordance with the classical formalist theory of Tomashevskii, for example, that they represent dynamic and non-omissible motifs, such as 'leaving' or 'returning' and their equivalents. Of course, elements of the House thematics can become manifest in connection with such fabular, 'narration-propelling' motifs, but they can also become circumstantial, attributive and static sujet motifs of a setting, with psychopoetic, qualifying or digressive functions. Numerous literary texts show that houses, and especially certain 'privileged' parts of houses such as thresholds, doors, windows and drawing-rooms, are intrinsically linked with the manifestation of the dynamic fabular motifs on the level of the sujet. This is what could be called, after Bakhtin, their chronotopic function, or, in a different terminology, the articulation of the conflict space; see Van Baak 1983a, 1990. It is these articulations and metonymies of the House Myth, on the level of the sujet or in lyrical phraseology, that are the vehicles of the psychopoetic qualities of the house discussed in Chapter I.3. As we should expect, both classifications of house motifs, the dynamic-fabular and the attributive and psychopoetic-digressive, often co-operate in literary semiosis.

In Turgenev's A Nest of the Landed Gentry (Дворянское гнездо), Lavretskii's life-plot involves a particular chain of the motives classified above. He is the owner of two very different estates on each of which he has spent parts of his childhood: Lavriki, which he detests, and the poor and long-neglected but much-loved Vasil'evskoe, where he settles down. Strikingly, in the novel's epilogue, where the now-lonely hero is revisiting a third house that has been important to him, the narrator refers to him as a 'homeless wanderer' (бездомный странник). We can interpret this as the narrator's figurative psychological and moral résumé of his hero's life plot, and draw the conclusion that life did not grant Lavretskii 'a nest of the landed gentry'; that is, a genuine Domus. From the point of view of the domestic myth we could indeed say that the qualification 'homeless wanderer' is a particular, condensed manifestation of the 'arch-fabula: hero - road - house', as discussed earlier in this chapter. At the same time it needs to be interpreted against the background of the three House images and their significance for the hero looking back on his life. Only thus can we appreciate the integrating role of the literary House images as they fulfil their psychopoetic function as emotional, or moral, frames within a narrative structure.

Another complete and expressive example illustrating the House Myth and its psychopoetic capacity to symbolise and integrate dynastic, emotional and spiritual images is the following passage from the early-twentieth-century memoir 'My fatherland' ('Моя родина'), written by the religious philosopher and theologian S. N. Bulgakov:

Наш дом, в котором я родился, был недалеко от нагорной части над рекой в пяти минутах от Сергиевской церкви. Он был деревянный, в пять комнат, расширявшийся пристройками. Он принадлежал семейству моей матери. Сколько здесь было рождений и смертей - тоже алтарь предков. Он был одноэтажный, серый, выходящий на угол своими многими небольшими окнами. Такой интимный, задушевный. Но я не помню, чтобы в нем праздновались браки, но помню, много похорон. Он был живой этот дом, как будто часть нашего семейного тела и излияния души предков. Когда приходилось приезжать домой издалека, он тихо обнимал странника и нашептывал ему песни детства.. Святая колыбель. Внутри его было бeдно и просто (хотя и выше среднего убогого уровня ливенской жизни.[34]                                         (Bulgakov 1992, 365)

In this extract, the motifs of the House Myth are presented as the motifs of life's cycle and the traditional rituals that come with it: births and deaths, weddings and funerals. The house itself, personified as a member of the family, seen as the embodiment hospitality and as a cradle, provides the emotional and moral framework for the life that is lived there.