Rejected Witch Syndrome, Or What Is Homa Brut's Mistake?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Psychologist, Online Consultant Supervisor

Volgograd

From childhood, each of us remembers one of the greatest creations of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol "Viy". If you have forgotten, let me remind you that the seminarian-philosopher Homa Brut and his friends went on vacation. Having stopped for the night with one granny, Khoma could not even think that in front of him was a femme fatale, a witch …

Remember what happened at that very hour? Having accommodated all the guys, the granny went to the barn where Khoma spent the night.

The old woman walked straight towards him with outstretched arms. thought the philosopher. - No, my dear! outdated . He moved a little further, but the old woman, without ceremony, again approached him.

Here it is, the starting point of the conflict, the outcome of the trauma, so to speak.

Before us is a man and a woman, no matter what age, titles and other regalia. Two natures, two elements.

The rejected woman turns into a wicked, very wicked witch

He only heard the beat of his heart; he saw the old woman come up to him, folded his arms, bent his head, jumped with the swiftness of a cat on his back, hit him on the side with a broom, and he, jumping up and down like a riding horse, carried her on his shoulders.

From a literary point of view, we will never know whether this nightly, crazy flight on a saddled Home was a witch's revenge or a beautifully generated artistic device of a genius writer, but from the point of view of relationship psychology, it is more like the first option. Revenge of a female witch for the trauma of devaluation and rejection

The psychological state of a man with a dominant woman is described brilliantly by Gogol, a subtle connoisseur of human souls.

Such was the night when the philosopher Homa Brut was galloping with an incomprehensible rider on his back. He felt some kind of weary, unpleasant and at the same time sweet feeling coming to his heart. … He felt a devilishly sweet feeling, he felt some piercing, some painfully terrible pleasure

Sexual instinct and fear - everything was confused in the head of the unfortunate Khoma, when the voice of the flesh in a young body strains in a completely not childish desire …

But the moral, socially oriented basis of the young man's personality (persona, social mask) outweighs the emotional response and Khoma begins to frantically read prayers.

The power of prayer worked, Homa freed himself from his rider. However, now he seems to be sublimating his sexual energy, jumped, in turn, on her back. The old woman ran with a small, fractional step so quickly that the rider could hardly catch his breath.

Khoma's pronounced sexual aggression responded in him with a desire to mutilate the woman he had rejected. I would even say that by doing so, beating her with a log, he not only took off his excitement, but also in such an aggressive form tried to supplant the very desire that arose in him during the flight, and, probably, gave him discomfort and a feeling of shame, that he, young and handsome, but nevertheless felt something for this already middle-aged woman. In other words, he took out his anger and auto-aggression on cruel actions towards this woman.

Wild screams she let out; at first they were angry and threatening, then they became weaker, more pleasant, cleaner, and then quietly, barely ringing like thin silver bells, and buried in his soul; and involuntarily a thought flashed through my head: is it really an old woman? "Oh, I can't take it anymore!" - She said exhausted and fell to the ground. He stood on his feet and looked into her eyes: … Before him lay a beauty, with a disheveled luxurious braid, with long, like arrows, eyelashes.

And again, an incomprehensible psychological state took possession of Homa. From which he cowardly ran into the city, leaving the unfortunate woman to die.

The metamorphosis associated with the transformation of an old woman into a beautiful woman is a kind of an act of establishing or even triumphing the rules of Homa's sexual play.

"As long as she dominates, I do not see a woman in her."

"When I dominate, brutally suppressing her, she is Beauty to me."

This is partly consonant with the rules of sex-role play between a man and a woman. For a man, a woman is more attractive when he is a hunter and vice versa, the more active a woman is, the more likely it is that disgust will arise.

Homa's personality is very unattractive: beat a woman to death, ran away in a mean way, turned out to be selfish and petty. His whole personality was reflected in one capacious phrase after the will of the deceased was voiced to him:

“I’ll work out three nights somehow, but the pan will fill both my pockets with pure ducats.”

With his talented hand, Gogol paints absolutely stunning mystical pictures that arise in Khoma's mind. But sick, disturbing, ghostly visions are nothing more than an echo of conscience, reminiscent of a smoldering ember in his soul.

Thus, it was not terrible visions, not the notorious evil spirits that ruined Homa, but his ignorance, irresponsibility, anger, despotism, sexism and greed. This is a qualitatively new rethinking of the legendary work of Gogol. It took many years to comprehend the real picture, I'm not afraid of this word, an arrangement that does not fit into the framework of the stereotypical understanding of the story, which allows you to impartially look at the images and find them in our reality.