Fire in Traditional Russian Weddings in the Ulyanovsk Volga Region

This article considers the ritual use of fire in traditional Russian weddings in the Ulyanovsk Volga Region, seen in the context of the broader Russian and, in part, the Slavic tradition. This ritual act — the lighting of a bonfire at a wedding — began at the end of the nineteenth century and continues today. This tradition is widespread in the Ulyanovsk Region. Analysis of records has allowed the author to build a typology of wedding fires depending on the time and place of their occurrence. Fire might be kindled on the first day after the wedding, at night under the windows of the house in which the young spent the night; in the morning under the windows of the house; in the afternoon in front of the house of the young wife. The many functions of this ritual action are: motivational, informational, ceremonial, theatrical and play, ritual and magic. The author analyzes the semantics of fire in particular wedding acts; it is, first of all, sexual semantics. Lighting a wedding fire is mainly associated with the ritual of the awakening (buzhenie) of the young married couple and the ritual search for little sheep (“yarka”), and in some cases they are one complex action. In general, on the territory of the Ulyanovsk Region, bonfire lighting was active throughout the twentieth century. Informants born at the turn of the nineteenth-twentieth centuries, in the 1920s–1930s and even in the 1940s–1950s, describe this tradition as a living one, and the most recent testimony of a bonfire at a wedding is from 2003.