Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial Russia

by Christine Worobec

Women known as "shriekers" howled, screamed, convulsed, and tore their clothes. Believed to be possessed by devils, these central figures in a cultural drama known as klikushestvo stirred various reactions among those who encountered them. While sympathetic monks and peasants tended to shelter the shriekers, others analyzed, diagnosed, and objectified them. The Russian Orthodox Church played an important role, for, while moving toward a scientific explanation for the behavior of these women, it was reluctant to abandon the ideas of possession and miraculous exorcism.

Possessed is the first book to examine the phenomenon of demon possession in Russia. Drawing upon a wide range of sources—religious, psychiatric, ethnographic, and literary—Worobec looks at klikushestvo over a broad span of time but focuses mainly on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when all of Russian society felt the pressure of modernization.

Worobec's definitive study is as much an account of perceptions of the klikushi as an analysis of the women themselves, for, even as modern rationalism began to affect religious belief in Russia, explanations of the shriekers continued to differ widely. Examining various cultural constructions, Worobec shows how these interpretations were rooted in theology, village life and politics, and gender relationships.

Engaging broad issues in Russian history, women's history, and popular religious culture, Possessed will interest readers across several disciplines. Its insights into the cultural phenomenon of possession among Russian peasant women carry rich implications for understanding the ways in which a complex society treated women believed to be out of control.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Russia

303 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2001

Reviews

[Ann Chamberlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is it a spoiler in a nonfiction book to focus on the insights of the last chapter? This is where I think Worobec's research comes together with profound implications. The different levels of interpretation from the possessed shriekers' own through Dostoevsky's through the clumsy devotees of modern psychoanalysis parsed to great effect. These possessed women are shown to have been perhaps the most sane of the lot, reacting in the only way they knew how to the stresses of their lives: abuse, rape, barrenness, in-laws, starvation when they were otherwise powerless. I think Worobec correct to peel away the capitalist blinkers from our eyes when she equates the enclosure movement of early modern England with Stalin's brutal communalisation of farms. Another parallel I found with women of my modern acquaintance: we take meds instead of shrieking at holy icons. Yet the secrets of our medical chests put all the blame on ourselves for things we cannot bear and never make the society look at itself for loading us down with more than we can handle, the exploiters taking more than we can give. At least until the arrival of "science", a shriek would be a cause for the community to rally around you instead of leaving you to shoulder it quietly on your own.

I thought of Pussy Riot, shrieking in church.