In this chapter, the subject of our consideration will be the favorite places for children’s walks and the events that unfold there. The first goal of our exploration tour will be the ice slides.
Skiing from the mountains is a traditional Russian winter fun that is steadily preserved in children’s life to this day, but, unfortunately, has almost disappeared as a form of entertainment for adults. From century to century, events on the slides are reproduced for each new generation. Their participants acquire a valuable, in many ways — unique experience, worthy of taking a closer look at it. After all, ice slides are one of those places where the ethno-cultural specificity of children’s motor behavior is formed, which we will talk about at the end of this chapter.
Fortunately, the modern Russian man, whose childhood was spent in places where there is a real snowy winter (and this is almost the entire territory of present-day Russia), still knows what slides should be like. The clause about “yet” is not accidental: for example, in the large cultural city of St. Petersburg, where I live, skiing on the normal ice slide, so familiar to the older generation, is no longer available to children in many areas. Why is that? Here, with a sigh, we can say that the dubious benefits of civilization are replacing the good old slides. Therefore, I would like to start with their detailed description, which will then help to understand the psychological intricacies of children’s behavior while skiing from the icy mountains.
The natural version of the slide is natural slopes, high enough and snow-covered so that a convenient descent can be filled with water and turned into an icy road smoothly turning onto a flat surface. Most often, such descents in the city are made in parks, on the banks of frozen ponds and rivers.
Artificial ice slides are made for children in yards and playgrounds. Usually these are wooden buildings with a ladder and railings, a platform at the top and a more or less steep and long descent on the other side, which is in close contact with the ground below. Caring adults, with the onset of real cold weather, fill this descent with water so that a fairly long and wide ice road stretches from it even further along the ground. A good owner always makes sure that the surface of the descent is without potholes and is filled evenly, without bald spots on the icy surface.
The smoothness of the transition from the descent to the ground should also be checked. They strive to make the roll of ice on its surface smooth and long. Filling an ice slide correctly is an art: it requires both skill, flair, and care for the people who will ride it.
To observe the behavior of children on the icy and snowy mountains, it is best for us to go on Sunday to one of the St. Petersburg parks, for example, to Taurida. There we will find several convenient natural slopes — quite high, moderately steep, with packed snow and well-filled icy slopes with long and wide rumbles at the end. It’s always busy there. Children’s people are of different sexes, of different ages, of different characters: some on skis, some with sleds (they are on snowy slopes), but most of all — on their own two feet or with plywood, cardboard, other linings to go down on their backs — these strive for an icy hill . Adult escorts usually stand on the mountain, freezing, and children scurry up and down, and they are hot.
The hill itself is simple and unchanging, the same for everyone: the icy road, steeply descending, spreads out in front of everyone who wants it — it only invites. You can quickly learn the properties of the slide: having moved down a couple of times, a person is able to feel it quite well. All events on the hill further depend on the riders themselves. Parents have little involvement in this process. Events are created by children in accordance with their needs and desires, which are surprisingly individual, despite the fact that outwardly everyone is doing the same thing. The scheme of actions is the same for everyone: after waiting for their turn (there are a lot of people, and there is always someone already at the top at the beginning of the descent), the child freezes for a moment, then slides down in some way, trying to reach the very end of the ice rumble, turns around and especially briskly begins to climb the hill again. All this is repeated countless times, but the ardor of children does not decrease. The main event interest for the child is the tasks that he sets himself, and the methods he has invented for their implementation. But within the framework of these tasks, the child always takes into account two constant components: the slipperiness of the surface and the speed of descent.
Descending an icy mountain is always sliding, whether on your feet or on your butt. Gliding gives a very special experience of direct dynamic contact of the body with the soil, not like the usual sensations when walking, standing and sitting. A person sliding down a steep icy road feels the slightest changes in terrain, insignificant potholes and bumps with that part of his body that is in direct contact with the soil (feet, back, back). It echoes throughout the body, determining its stability and making one feel the multitude of bodily joints and the complex structure of our entire bodily economy. The descent from the icy mountain on feet, on the back, on the back is always a direct, acutely felt by a person, extended in time interaction of his own body with the flesh of the earth — the eternal support of everything moving.
Such experiences were very vivid and significant in the early period of life, when the child was just learning to crawl, stand, and walk. They usually become dull later in life as sitting, standing, and walking become automatic and without conscious control. However, a decrease in awareness does not diminish the deep meaning of the full contact of our body with the ground under our feet. It is well known in psychotherapeutic practice that the quality of this contact determines a person’s “groundedness” in reality: normal energy exchange with the environment, correct posture and gait, but most importantly, a person’s “rootedness” in life, his independence, the strength of the foundation on which he rests. personality. After all, it is not by chance that they say: “He has ground under his feet!” It turns out that this expression must be understood not only figuratively, but also in the literal sense of the word. People with serious personality problems associated with lack of contact really do not step on the ground with their whole foot. For example, they have an unconscious tendency to shift their body weight onto their toes and not lean properly on their heels. Therefore, in body-oriented psychotherapy, many practical methods have been developed for establishing contacts between a person and the world through living — and awareness of the contact of one’s body with various types of supports, and above all with the ground under one’s feet.
In this regard, walking down an ice slide is an ideal type of natural training that perfectly strengthens the lower limbs physically and helps a person feel the gamut of various experiences on the topic of how to stay on one’s feet in life. Indeed, you can’t go down the mountain on toes. Below we will consider this with live examples. And now, to complete the psycho-physiological picture, it should be added that riding from the icy mountains on the feet is the prevention of stagnation in the lower body, because in this case, an active release of energy through the legs occurs. For modern people, this is very important due to constant sitting, inactivity, and a decrease in walking volume. (Concretizing the thought, we can say that this is the prevention of ovarian cysts and uterine fibroids in women and prostate adenomas in men. As you know, our time is marked by a sharp increase in these diseases.)
Children use three basic ways to slide down an ice slide, corresponding to increasing degrees of perfection. The simplest (this is how the little ones ride) is on the back, the second, transitional, is squatting (this is already on its feet, but still in a low position so that it does not fall high) and the third, corresponding to the upper class, is on its feet, as they should be able to younger students. Actually, to move down the hill on your feet — this is, in the children’s understanding, to move down it for real. Within these three ways, there are many variations that can be seen in the performance of children riding on a slide.
Here is a four or five year old. He is already skating without the help of his mother. These three-four-year-old children are usually helped by mothers to sit evenly on the mat and are gently pushed from above into the back to start the movement. This one does everything himself. He slides right on his backside, he has no bedding, but his hands are busy. Climbing up the hill, he carefully carries in his hands a large piece of frozen snow. Having waited for his turn upstairs, the child sits down on the ice with concentration, looks around, pressing a piece of snow to his stomach, gathers his courage and … lets the snow roll down in front of him. The sight of a moving piece, paving the way for him and calling for him, calms the baby. He pushes off and moves out after. At the bottom, he picks up his companion and runs with a piece, satisfied, upstairs, where everything is methodically repeated again.
As we can see, this child is a “beginner”. He lives the very idea of self-descent: how is it to roll? How is it for yourself? The example of older comrades is not inspiring enough — they are different. The kid feels lonely and needs a model of behavior that is clear to him. A piece of frozen snow, which the child brought and pushed down in front of him, plays the role of a detached particle of the “I” of the child himself, and its movement sets the pattern of actions for him. If the older child, having prepared for the descent, thinks in his mind how he will move down, then the little one needs to see it with his own eyes, using the example of the movement of an object with which he has an internal connection like “this is mine”.
Children of seven or eight years of age are fluent in the art of riding on their backside. They know what to put under them so that there is a good glide: they love plywood, pieces of thick cardboard, but they also appreciate the opportunity to move out, sitting on some interesting thing (bottle box, basin, etc.), which complicates the task and turns the descent into a game. Experienced children know the situation well: they know how to push off strongly at the top, achieve maximum acceleration during the descent, and roll down very far. They can either then or quickly rise, picking up their bedding and giving way to the children rushing after them, or they can lay down picturesquely below in order to fix the final moment of descent and enjoy the state of rest to the fullest.
Children who slide down on their backs feel safe — they have nowhere to fall. They enjoy bodily sensations of contact with the ice surface, sliding and speed, and even try to sharpen these sensations. For example, they increase the area of body contact when they roll down on their stomachs, on their backs with their arms and legs outstretched, or they arrange a “bunch-and-small” below with other children, and then they continue to wallow in the snow, having already left the icy path.
The child does everything in order to maximally enliven the feeling of his bodily boundaries, to sensually live the presence of himself in his body, to feel his vital-bodily being and — to rejoice in this. The experience of the integrity of the “I” always fills a person with energy and joy. It is not for nothing that an adult is always struck by the special liveliness with which children jump up below and again rush up the hill.
Here it would be appropriate to recall that in Russian folk culture, rolling down a mountain has always been associated with the idea of acquiring and accelerating the flow of vital forces both in a person and in the earth with which he interacts. Therefore, during the winter calendar holidays, people of all ages tried to move down the mountain. Children needed brisk energy for growth, newlyweds for a successful start to life together, and old people for its continuation. It was believed that if an old man left the mountain on Maslenitsa, he would live until the next Easter.
In the folk tradition, it was argued that the rolling of people from the mountains also has an activating effect on the earth — it was called «the awakening of the earth»: the rolling people wake her up, awaken in her the life-giving energy of the coming spring.
At the age of seven or eight, a child learns to slide down an icy mountain on his feet, and by the age of nine or ten he usually knows how to do it well — he is able to move down “difficult” mountains, high, with a long uneven descent.
Mastering this skill, the child solves a whole range of motor tasks and continues to learn, as well as physically and mentally work out his body. The need to stay on the feet develops their springiness, which is achieved due to the mobility of the joints and the harmonious work of the kinematic chain: toes — ankles — knees — pelvis — spine. The ability to maintain balance is determined by the cooperation of muscle sensations with the work of the vestibular apparatus and vision.
Again — on the ice mountain there is a natural training of what is necessary in many situations of everyday life. After all, it is desirable to maintain stability and balance everywhere.
Observing children, one can notice that each child rides in a way that corresponds to the limit of his personal capabilities, but does not exceed it. The child wants to show the maximum of his achievements, but at the same time not get injured. Normally, normal children have a good sense of their limits. Neurotic and psychopathic children feel it worse: they are either overly shy, or, conversely, lack a sense of danger.
On the slide, the child’s ability to invent more and more new tasks for himself and thereby make a constant contribution to the enrichment of the situation is clearly manifested. This is how the child prolongs his communication with the game object (in our case, with a slide) and turns it into a source of personal development. Children generally love toys that do not have a rigidly defined way to use them: transformers and any objects with a large number of degrees of freedom — they all allow a lot of action «on their own», at the discretion of the user.
When children have more or less mastered the technical skills of going down an ice slide in one of the ways described above, their creative search usually comes through changes in posture and expansion of methods of descent.
For example, the child moves well on the back. Most likely, he will then try to learn how to accelerate at the beginning of the descent, try everything he can sit on in order to famously move out and roll as far as possible, explore the possibilities of making additional rotations around his “fifth point”, when he is already rolling at a slow speed on an even icy walkway on the ground, etc. It will be interesting for him to slide down on his stomach, on his back, sitting backwards, which children are usually afraid of, “by a train” — hugging the child sitting in front of him (“Where are we going?”), On a plastic bottle crate, like on a throne, etc. P.
If further the child does not dare to move to a higher level of skiing and try squatting or on his feet, then he will probably stop at some of the most pleasant ways for him to descend and plunge into the game: while riding, he will imagine himself in some role and live events already invisible to an external observer.
Although sometimes these imaginary events can also be unraveled by the external behavior of the child. Here, next to the ice slide, a big boy on a sled is sliding down a steep snowy slope. He is thirteen years old, and he, like a little one, rolls down on a sleigh over and over again, and then with concentration and cheerfully climbs up, and everything starts again. Why isn’t he bored? After all, this simple occupation is clearly not for his age! Looking more closely at his actions, we find that he, it turns out, is not riding a sled.
The boy is dark-haired, with narrow eyes, looks like a Tatar. He sits on his sleigh, leaning back, firmly resting his outstretched, half-bent legs on the front bend of the runners, in his hands is a long rope, both ends of which are tied to the front of the sleigh. He slides down a high snowy slope. The main events begin for him at the moment when the sled picks up speed. Then the boy’s face changes, his eyes narrow, his legs rest even more strongly on the front roundness of the runners, like in stirrups, he leans back even more: his left hand, squeezing the middle of the double rope in a fist, pulls it tightly, like reins, and his right hand, intercepting a long loop of the same rope sticking out of the fist of the left, passionately swinging it in circular motions, as if twisting and whistling with a whip, urging his horse. This is not a boy riding down a mountain on a sled, but a steppe rider galloping at full speed and seeing something ahead. For him, both the slide and the sled are a means. A slide is needed to give a sense of speed, and a sled is needed to saddle something. The only thing that makes up the immediate content of the game is the experience of the boy who rushes forward.
Everyone rides independently — this is an individual matter, focusing the child’s attention on his own bodily self and his personal experiences. But the situation on the hill, of course, is social, since a children’s society has gathered there. It does not matter that children may be complete strangers and do not communicate with each other. In fact, they observe others, compare themselves to them, adopt patterns of behavior, and even show off in front of each other. The presence of peers awakens in the child the desire to appear before the people in the best possible way, as they say, to present the product with its face, and therefore inspire him to creative searches.
On the hill you can get a rich social experience. Since the children’s people on it are of different sexes and different calibers, you can observe the most diverse patterns of behavior there and take something for yourself. Children learn from each other in the blink of an eye. To describe this process, the adult word «copying» seems too neutral-sluggish. The children’s term «licking» — much more accurately conveys the degree of closeness of psychological contact and the child’s internal identification with the model he has chosen to follow. Often the child adopts not only the mode of action, but also side features of behavior — facial expressions, gestures, cries, etc. So, the first social gain that can be made on the slide is the expansion of the repertoire of behavior.
The second is the knowledge of social norms and rules of the hostel. Their necessity is determined by the situation. There are many children, and there are usually one or two ice slopes. There is a sequencing problem. If you do not take into account the age, mobility, dexterity of children riding in front and behind, then falls and injuries are possible — therefore, there is a problem of maintaining distance and general orientation in the space of the situation. No one specifically declares the norms of behavior — they are assimilated by themselves, through the imitation of younger elders, and also because the self-preservation instinct is turned on. Conflicts are relatively rare. On the slide, you can clearly see how the child learns to distribute his behavior in the space of the situation, commensurate the distance and speed of movement of the participants and his own.
The third social acquisition while riding downhill is the special opportunities for direct communication (including bodily) with other children. An adult observer can see a wide range of different forms and ways of establishing relationships between children on the slide.
Some children always ride by themselves and avoid contact with others. Having driven down the mountain, they try to get out of the way of those rolling after them as quickly as possible.
And then there are the kids who crave skin-to-skin contact: they don’t mind making a little «pile-and-small» at the end of a slope down a mountain, where children moving at different speeds sometimes bump into each other. It gives them pleasure at the end of speed to provoke a collision or a joint fall of one or two more people, so that later they can tinker, getting out of the general heap. This is an early childhood form of satisfying the need for contact with other people through direct bodily interaction. It is interesting that on the slide it is often used by children of a fairly old age, who for some reason cannot find other ways to establish social relations with their peers, and also suffer from the lack of bodily contacts with their parents necessary for children.
A more mature version of the physical communication of children is that they agree to ride together, holding each other like a “train”. They do it in pairs, threes, fours, encouraging their comrades to try different ways of skating. Thus, children get a variety of motor and communicative experience, as well as a good emotional release when they squeal, laugh, shout together.
The older and socially bolder the child, the more likely it is that on the ice slide he will not only test himself, but also move on to small socio-psychological experiments. In preadolescence, one of the most tempting topics of such experiments is to explore ways to build relationships with other children and influence their behavior: how to get their attention, make them respect themselves, include in the orbit of their actions, and even how to manipulate others. All this is done quite carefully. Usually children’s people observe the basic law of the slide: ride yourself and let others ride. They do not like assertive reckless drivers and keep a distance towards them.
Usually children experiment by creating difficult group situations (this is more often done in relation to acquaintances) or arranging small emotional shakes for others. The task of the test subjects is to remain self-sufficient and self-sufficient.
Here, a child stands expectantly at the edge of an icy slope in the middle of a snowy slope and watches the children slide down. When his friend drives by, the child abruptly jumps from the side and clings to him. Depending on the stability of a friend, the children either fall together, or the second one manages to attach themselves to the first, and they stand up and roll like a “train” to the very end.
Here is a boy of about twelve, who deftly, with acceleration, rides on his feet, whooped loudly, running up the hill. He was very surprised that a child of nine years old, rolling far ahead, suddenly fell from this cry. Then the twelve-year-old with interest began to check this effect over and over again, and for sure: as soon as you whistle loudly or yell at the back of slow-moving and unsteady children moving down the hill on their feet, they immediately lose their balance and begin to stagger, or even fall, as if from the whistle of the Nightingale the Robber.
In general, on a hill a person is visible at a glance. Riding, he shows his personal characteristics: the degree of activity, resourcefulness, self-confidence. The level of his claims, characteristic fears and much more are clearly visible. It is not for nothing that in the folk communal culture skiing from the mountains on winter holidays has always been the subject of observation, gossip, and rumors of the village people present. Based on these observations, even predictions were made regarding the future fate of the skiers, especially if they were newlyweds: whoever fell first would be the first to die. If they fell together on one side, they will be together in life’s difficulties. They fell apart on different sides of the ice track — so they will do on the road of life.
Therefore, while the child is riding, the parent can also not only be bored and cold, but also watch their brainchild with benefit. The slide well reveals the bodily problems of children: awkwardness, poor coordination of movements, instability due to insufficient contact of the feet with the soil, underdevelopment of the legs, and an upward shift in the center of gravity of the body. There it is easy to assess the general level of bodily development of the child in comparison with other children of his age. It is remarkable that all these problems can be perfectly worked out and partly outlived precisely on an ice slide, which, from a psychological point of view, is a unique place for the cognition and development of the child’s bodily “I” in natural conditions. In this regard, no school physical education lesson can compete with a slide. Indeed, in the classroom no one pays attention to the individual psychological and bodily problems of children, especially since the teacher does not go deep into clarifying their internal causes. Most often, these reasons are rooted in the early childhood of the child, when the formation of the body image took place, then — the schemes of the body and the system of mental regulation of movements. In order to understand and eliminate the failures that have arisen in the process of developing the bodily «I» of the student, the teacher must be psychologically literate, which our teachers are sorely lacking. You also need a psychologically based program of physical education. Since this is not the case, the school teacher gives the same tasks for everyone in accordance with the impersonal general developmental program of physical education.
But during free walks in the natural object-spatial environment, in particular on an ice slide, the children themselves set tasks for themselves in accordance with the urgent needs of their bodily and personal development. These needs may not coincide at all with the teacher’s ideas about what is useful and necessary for the child.
There is a whole range of children’s problems associated with the development of the body «I» and the socialization of the body, which are practically not recognized by adults. Actually, the source of many problems of this kind are usually violations in the relationship of parents with their child. Adults not only cannot help him cope with these difficulties, but even begin to persecute the child when he tries to do it in his own ways, annoying and incomprehensible to an adult.
For example, some children love to roll around on the floor, on the grass, on the snow — under any pretext and even without it. (We have already noted this in the behavior of some children on the hill) But this is indecent, for this they scold, this is not allowed, especially if the child is already big and goes to school. Although such desires can be found in a teenager. Why? Where do they come from?
Active wallowing (with rolling, turning from back to stomach, etc.) provides an intensity of sensations of touch and pressure on large surfaces of different parts of the body. This sharpens the brightness of the experience of the boundaries of the body and the tangible presence of its individual parts, the experience of its unity and density.
In neurophysiological terms, such felting includes a special complex of deep brain structures (thalamo-pallidar).
It provides regulation of movements based on muscular (kinesthetic) sensations within the coordinate system of one’s own body, when the main thing for a person is to feel himself, and not the world around him, when his motor activity unfolds within the limits of his body movements and is not directed to any objects outside.
In psychological terms, such wallowing provides a return to oneself, contact with oneself, unity of the body with the soul: after all, when a person wallows selflessly, his thoughts and feelings are not occupied with anything other than feeling himself.
Why is the child looking for such states? The reason can be both situational and long-term.
The desire to lie around often arises in a child when he is mentally tired — from learning, from communication, and has not yet mastered other ways to switch to rest. Then the child needs his attention, previously taken outside and focused for a long time on foreign objects: on the tasks set by the teacher, on the words and actions of the people around him, to return back, inside the bodily space of the I. This enables the child to return to himself and rest from the world, hiding in his bodily home, like a mollusk in a shell. Therefore, for example, there are children who need to lie on the floor after a lesson in kindergarten or even after a lesson during a school break.
In adults, the behavioral analogue of the childish desire to lie down will be the desire to lie down, moving lazily, with closed eyes, in the fragrant water of a warm bath.
A long-term, persistent cause of some children’s desire to wallow is an early childhood problem that may persist into older ages. This is the lack of the volume of touches necessary for the child and the variety of bodily communication with the mother, as well as the incompleteness of living through the initial stages of motor development. Because of this, the child retains an infantile craving again and again to receive intense sensations of touch and pressure, to live the state of contact of his body with something else. Let it be a surrogate contact — not with a mother who strokes, hugs, holds in her arms, but with the floor, with the earth. It is important for the child that through these contacts he bodily feels that he exists — «I am.»
A grown-up child has very few socially acceptable ways to get the psycho-corporeal experience he lacked in early childhood without causing criticism from adults. One of the best places for these purposes is an ice slide. Here you can always find an external motivation for your actions and fulfill your hidden desires in a completely legal way, regardless of age.
Here, for example, is how a long, awkward, often stumbling teenager solves this problem on an icy mountain. He constantly fools around, under this pretext defiantly falls and as a result moves out lying down. In fact, at the very least, but he knows how to slide down the hill on his feet, which he already proved at first. It is also clear that the guy is not just afraid of falling. When descending lying down, he obviously likes to feel his back, buttocks, the whole body as a whole — he tries to spread himself wider, looking for as much bodily contact as possible with the surface of the ice track. Below, he freezes for a long time, living this state, then reluctantly gets up, and … everything repeats again.
A more mature and complex form of elaboration by children of the topic of cognition of the bodily «I», but already in a social situation, is the «pile-small» known to us. Children often arrange it at the end of the descent from the hill. Taking a closer look, we will notice that the “heap-small” is far from being as simple as it might seem. This is not a random dump of swarming children’s bodies. Children didn’t just collide and accidentally fall on top of each other. They (at least some of them) provoked this pile and continue to act in the same spirit: having got out from under the bodies of other children, the child again deliberately falls on top of them, and this can be repeated several times. What for?
In the «heap-small» the child’s body no longer interacts with the inert surface of the earth, but with the living, active bodies of other children — army, leggy, big-headed. They lean, push, fight, pile on from all sides. This is an intense communication of moving human bodies, and each has its own character, which is rapidly manifested in actions.
Here the child no longer simply feels the autonomy of his body, as it was when felting. Through living bodily interaction with his own kind, he begins to know himself as a bodily and at the same time social personality. After all, a “pile-small” is the most condensed children’s community, compressed to such an extent that there is no distance between its participants. This is a kind of material condensate of children’s society. In such close contact, the knowledge of oneself and each other goes much faster than at the usual decent distance. It is known that for children to know is to touch.
In the traditions of children’s communication, bodily fuss with each other (the apotheosis of which is the “heap-small”) always occupies an important place. It often ends motor games (for example, a general dump after a leapfrog or a game of horsemen), it plays an important role in the group telling of traditional scary stories, etc.
We will not now consider the various psychological functions that such a general fuss has in the children’s subculture. It is important for us to note the very fact that the periodically arising desire for bodily grouping is a characteristic feature of relationships in a children’s company, especially a boyish one. (We note for ourselves that boys are weaned from close bodily contact with their mother much earlier than girls, and they get the amount of bodily contact they lack in fuss with their peers).
What is interesting for us is that «a lot-small» is not only a common form of direct bodily interaction with each other for children. In the context of national culture, it is a characteristic manifestation of the Russian folk tradition of socializing the body and educating the child’s personality. From there, the term «heap-small» itself. The fact is that in folk life such a bunch of children were often arranged by adults. With a cry: “Pile-small! Heap-small! — the peasants picked up a bunch of children in an armful, dumping them on top of each other. Those who got out of the pile were again thrown on top of everyone else. In general, the exclamation “A bunch of little!” was a generally accepted warning signal that, firstly, the screamer perceives the situation as a game, and secondly, that he was about to increase the «heap» at the expense of his own or someone else’s body. Adult women looked at it from the side and did not interfere.
What was the socialization of children in this «heap»?
On the one hand, the child acutely lived his body — squeezed, wriggling between the bodies of other children, and in doing so learned not to be afraid, not to get lost, but to preserve himself, crawling out of the general dump. On the other hand, it was impossible to forget for a second that the mountain of living, floundering, interfering bodies is relatives, neighbors, playmates. Therefore, defending oneself, moving quickly and actively, it was necessary to act with understanding — carefully so as not to break someone’s nose, not to get into the eye, not to damage anything to other children (see Fig. 13-6). Thus, the “heap-small” developed bodily sensitivity (empathy) in relation to another into the skills of bodily communication with close motor contact of a person with a person. We have already talked about this when we talked about the ethno-cultural features of the bodily behavior of passengers in Russian public transport.
By the way, a bus full of people is, in principle, surprisingly similar to a “pile-small” for adults — it’s not without reason that we considered it as a wonderful (albeit in moderation) place for practicing bodily communication skills with others (footnote: In the male folk tradition, “pile-small «was one of the elements of the Russian school of education of the future fist fighter. As the reader remembers, Russian warriors were distinguished by their exceptional ability to fight at short distances, easily penetrating into the enemy’s personal movement space. The advantages of Russian melee tactics are clearly visible in modern tournaments, when fists converge in a duel with representatives of martial arts schools.The same was observed by contemporaries in hand-to-hand fights between Russian soldiers (mostly village men) and the Japanese during the war of 1904-1905.
To be successful in Russian-style martial arts, it is necessary to have a soft, mobile in all joints, absolutely liberated body that responds to the slightest movement of a partner — a Russian fighter does not have a starting stance and can act from any position within a small space (see Gruntovsky A. V «Russian fisticuffs. History. Ethnography. Technique. St. Petersburg, 1998). Here, by the way, we can recall a laconic description of the Russian ideal of a developed, harmoniously mobile body, which is found in folk tales: «Vein — to vein, joint — to joint.»
In this regard, «a lot-small» is indeed a very successful training model for the development of bodily responsiveness and contact, and these qualities are most easily formed in young children. The author was convinced of this many times in the classes of E. Yu. Gureev, a member of the «Petersburg Society of Fisticuffs Lovers», who developed a special program for the development of traditional Russian plasticity in young children).
Continuing the theme of the ethno-cultural features of the motor behavior of children on a hill, of course, one should not lose sight of the central event — the slide itself from the icy slope.
During the winter calendar holidays in ritual situations, the ability of a person to move down the mountain well on his feet had a magical meaning. For example, in order for the linen to grow long in the summer, and the thread from it does not break, the boys rolled on their feet as far and evenly as possible, shouting: “I’m rolling on my mother’s linen!”
But in general, for a Russian person, the ability to be stable is always tested by his ability to deftly stay on his feet on the ice. Just as a highlander must be able to walk along steep mountain paths and slopes, just as a desert dweller must feel the quickness of sand, so a Russian must move well on ice. In winter, everyone needs to be able to do this due to the peculiarities of the climate and landscape.
In the old days, winter festive fistfights — «walls» and real battles with enemies usually took place on the even ice of frozen rivers and lakes, since there are many of them in Russia and they are wide. Therefore, fist fighters necessarily trained on ice to develop stability.
In this sense, a high icy mountain with a long descent is a place of maximum testing of a person by slipperiness combined with speed and at the same time a school where he learns stability and the ability to feel, understand and use his legs. Previously, many flood mountains (i.e., specially flooded for the formation of an icy slope) on the high banks of the rivers had an extremely large roll length — many tens of meters. The older the child became and the better he kept on his feet, the more he was attracted to the opportunity to learn speed on these high mountains. Both children and adults came up with a lot of devices, moving down on which it was possible to develop a very high sliding speed and set themselves increasingly difficult tasks for dexterity, balance and courage. Of the simplest devices of this kind were round “glaciers” — ice with manure frozen in a sieve or basin, special benches on which they sat on horseback — their lower skid was also covered for slipperiness with a mixture of frozen ice and manure, etc.
The famous words of Gogol, spoken about the troika bird: “And what kind of Russian does not like to drive fast!” — can be fully attributed to skiing from high ice mountains. If there were no natural ones, tall wooden ones were built for the holidays, as was usually done in the last century on Maslenitsa in the center of St. Petersburg opposite the Admiralty, on the Neva and in other places. People of all ages rode there.
Having gone through modern St. Petersburg courtyards and playgrounds in search of Russian ice slides, one can sadly testify that there are few of them — much less than it was twenty years ago. They are being replaced by modern structures made of concrete or metal structures, which are also called slides, but are not at all intended for the winter skiing described above. They have a narrow, curving and steep metal descent, raised below the ground. From it you need to go down on your back or squat, holding onto the sides with your hands and jumping down to the ground. It has no ice on it. He, of course, has no further roll on the ground. And most importantly — from such a hill you can not ride standing on your feet. This slide is for summer, it came from foreign countries where there are no cold winters with ice.
The sad thing is that such metal slides are now everywhere replacing Russian ice slides in St. Petersburg. Here is one of the gardens in the city center where I spent many hours last year watching children skate: there was a large wooden ice slide, which was a favorite place for children from all the surrounding neighborhoods. In winter evenings, even their fathers, who skipped them, rode there with their children. Recently, this corner of the garden was reconstructed — they tried to modernize it due to its proximity to the Smolny. Therefore, a strong wooden slide, due to its impressive bulkiness, was demolished, and a light-footed metal structure of the type described above was put in its place.
Now it’s deserted around: mothers are sitting on benches, small children are digging with shovels in the snow, older children are no longer visible, since there is no place to really ride. To do this, you need to go to the Tauride Garden, which is quite far away, and without parents they are not allowed to go there. Why did they do this to the ice slide?
Perhaps because the new type of metal slide seems to the organizers to be more beautiful and modern, “like in civilized countries”. Probably, it seems to them more functional, since it can be used in the summer — although such slides are generally relatively rarely ridden. Partly in this way, the need for additional maintenance of the slide is removed — its filling. Of course, the child will not disappear even with such a slide, he will figure out how to deal with it, but something important for him will disappear along with the ice slide. The object-spatial environment surrounding him will become impoverished — the child will become impoverished.
Like any thing created by people for domestic use, a slide of one type or another carries a constructive idea that did not arise from scratch. It reflects the psychology of the people who created the slide — their system of ideas about what is needed and important for the future user. In every thing initially laid down why and how it will serve people. That is why things from other eras and cultures carry information imprinted in their device about the people for whom they were intended. Using any thing, we join the psychology of its creators, because we show exactly those qualities that were assumed by the designers as necessary for the successful use of this thing. For example, putting on an old suit, a person feels that wearing it correctly involves a special posture, plasticity, pace of movements — and this, in turn, begins to change the self-awareness and behavior of a person dressed in this suit.
So it is with slides: depending on what they are, the behavior of children riding from them changes. Let’s try to compare the psychological requirements imprinted in the slides of the two types we have described.
Let’s start with modern metal slides. The most significant structural element that distinguishes them from Russian ice slides is that the descent ends like a springboard, noticeably not reaching the ground. The child must either slow down and stop at the end of the descent so as not to fall, or famously jump to the ground like from a springboard. What does it mean?
Compared to a roller coaster, the possibility of rolling is reduced here: the slope is curved and short, and therefore the speed must be carefully limited so as not to stick your nose into the ground. In order for the slide to be narrow, to stick to the sides, dosing the speed of descent. Such a slide involves moderation and accuracy: self-restraint and control over one’s actions, which unfold over a short period. There is no contact with the ground in motion at all.
In this regard, the Russian ice slide is exactly the opposite. Usually it is higher, its slope is wider, it takes up more space in space, since a long icy road stretches forward along the ground from it. The design of the roller coaster is adapted to provide maximum path length and rolling speed, which is why they were as high as possible.
Driving down such a hill, you need to leave the desire to hold on to something, but, on the contrary, decide on a bold push or run and rush forward with acceleration, surrendering to the rapidly unfolding movement. This is a swing, roll, expansion into space as far as human capabilities allow.
In terms of meaning, this is one of the ways of experiencing a special state of expanse, which is so important for the Russian worldview. It is determined by the latitude and longitude of the potential turn of the internal forces of a person in the space of the surrounding world. In our culture, it traditionally belonged to the category of the highest experiences of a Russian person in his relationship with his native land. (footnote: Thirdly, a metal slide takes away the basic prerequisites for the social interaction of children: it is no longer possible to slide down together or arrange a «bunch» because the slope is short and narrow, with a sharp push there will be a strong blow to the ground.
Interestingly, in neighboring Finland, ice-filled mountains are practically unknown, especially those specially built, from which they would ride on their feet. And this despite the similarity of the climate (cold winter) and the fact that Finland has long been part of the Russian Empire. Finns love their natural snow slopes, from which they sled and ski, sometimes on their backs, on plastic linings. For the spring-summer amusements of children, there are small plastic slides of the type that we described above as “newfangled”.
The same picture in Sweden, my informant — a forty-year-old Swede, who knows the history and culture of his homeland very well, traveled it far and wide — testifies that they have plenty of natural snowy mountains. They go skiing and sledding. But it doesn’t occur to anyone to fill them up, turn them into ice and move out of them on their feet. Moreover, to build artificial ice slides.
Interestingly, the subculture of Swedish children contains many of the forms of interaction with the landscape described in this book. Like Russian children, they make «secrets» and «hiding places», in the same way boys hunt for girls’ «secrets». (Which, according to a sixty-year-old American, is also typical for rural children in Canada). Like Russian children living in the Urals and Siberia, little Swedes make themselves “shelter houses” in winter, such as the igloos of the Eskimos or Laplanders, and sit there by lit candles. Such a similarity could be assumed in advance, because both the making of “secrets” and the construction of “headquarters” are due to the psychological laws of the formation of a human personality common to all children, which find close forms of external expression in different cultures. Even the desire to move down the mountains makes children from different countries related, but skiing down the icy mountains, especially on foot, seems to be really the ethno-cultural specificity of the Russian way of interacting with their native land.)
Let’s go back to the short metal slides. Their second difference is that they do not involve riding while standing, but only on the back or squatting. That is, the training of the legs as the main support is turned off, which, on the contrary, is especially important for a younger student on the Russian ice mountain.
In general, we can say that all the main features that distinguish the Russian ice slide are blocked on the new metal slides. There really is a different psychology here.
On the newfangled slides, it is assumed that the degrees of motor freedom are limited, self-control, the dosage of one’s actions, pure individualism, the quality of foot contact with the ground does not matter.
On the Russian ice slides, an interest in the speed and scope of movement in space, the value of experimenting with the posture of the body, the reliability of contact of the legs with the soil are assumed, and ample opportunities are given for social interaction in the process of skiing.
It should be noted that the play potential of ice slides not only corresponds to the traditional Russian mental make-up, but also determines its formation through the bodily-psychosocial experience acquired by children while skiing. It is no coincidence that the icy mountains played such an important role in the calendar winter holidays and traditional amusements.
The ice slide embodies the Russian style of man’s relationship with space and speed. It unfolds the Russian type of social interactions with other people. It fully expresses the idea of the symbolic unity of man with the earth.
It can be said that the appearance of flooded (i.e., artificially created) ice mountains in traditional life is a cultural result of the spiritual and mental living and understanding of the native landscape by the ethnic group. Therefore, skiing from an icy mountain had such a deep and diverse symbolic meaning in folk culture. The mountain was a sacred «place of power» — a kind of «navel of the earth.» Riding from it, people entered into magical contact with the earth, exchanging energy with it, filled with the power of the earth and at the same time testified to the human world their latency and ability to perform life tasks.
In the minds of modern people, the ice slide has lost its magical meaning, but remains a significant, powerful place for children. It is attractive in that it allows the child to satisfy a large complex of vital needs of his personality. At the same time, the ice hill turns out to be one of the important places of ethno-cultural socialization, where the child experiences what makes him Russian.
As long as parents have contact with their body and soul, remembering their own childhood experience, as long as there is a connection with their native land, as long as there is an inner feeling of the inadmissibility of their children not knowing what skiing from a real ice mountain is, adults in Russia will build ice slides for their children.