MOSCOW, 5 Jun. Artists and writers love to work with the theme of fear: now the «Magicians» exposition is being shown in the capital's «GES-2», in 2022 the «Yav and Nav» exhibition was held in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and bookstores are full of horror and mystical fantasy. What Russians have been afraid of since ancient times — in the material In 2023, the Russians are in first place, RBC reports. The roots here are ancient — in Slavic mythology there are many babies and teenagers who die and return to the world as ugly undead.
For example, Igosha is an unwanted child who died without baptism and was not buried in a cemetery. Ancestors represented him as a baby without arms and legs, but with a very loud voice. By the way, in the famous computer game The Witcher, the Igosha is a hideous monster that is extremely difficult to defeat. data-crop-ratio=»1.449275362318841″ data-crop-width=»600″ data-crop-height=»870″ data-source-sid=»» class=»m-vertical lazyload» lazy=»1″ />
The Slavs believed that unbaptized children after death could turn into mavok (mermaids) and goblin. Gogol describes them this way in the story «Terrible Revenge»: «At the hour when the evening dawn goes out, the stars are not yet there, the moon is not burning, and it's already scary to walk in the forest: unbaptized children scratch and grab onto branches, sob, laugh, they roll like a club along the roads and in wide nettles.
Aleksandra Barkova in her book «Slavic Myths from Veles to Mokosh» notes that the fairy tale «Gingerbread Man» is dedicated to the spirit of the unborn child.
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"This is a complex image. He carries deadly forces in himself, being the spirit of the restless dead, and at the same time he is bread — the most holy and pure thing that exists. But he behaves well: he immediately leaves the world of people and rolls into the other world, the symbol of which is the forest,» the researcher writes.
By the way, Gingerbread Man had neither arms nor legs, but he could sing loudly. Another fairy tale about the otherworldly child Barkova calls «The Snow Maiden».
The ancestors had two more original phobias — the fear of a bathhouse and cuckoos. The bath was considered a place unclean, where you can not come after midnight. People left dirt there, and removed the cross in front of the entrance. They guessed and gave birth there. 
that a cuckoo can make a man mad if he sits on his head. This fear has long been forgotten, but the phrase «the cuckoo has flown» is still used in Russian. fear.
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“This is death, hunger and oblivion. People are afraid of what they cannot control. Kikimora, igosha, brownie — they all illustrate death. Everywhere you look, everything depends on trying to defeat her, or at least make her an ally, not an enemy. Now the fear of hunger almost does not bother, it still remains, but pointwise. Much more people are afraid of oblivion, trying to leave some kind of trace, at least in the same social networks,» the writer says.
New ones are added to these basic fears, notes Owl.
Fear of disease
The artist, curator, dean of the College of Journalism and Publishing of the MKIK Evgenia Sterlyagova, in collaboration with Zhenya Sharvina, created a large exhibition project «An Anthology of Russian Chthoni» — more than 40 artists worked with the theme of the frightening, creepy.
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"There were mermaids, werewolves, black fly agarics, various guests from the Navi world. The subtext read the fear of wars, the apocalypse, fragmentation and loss of roots, the fear of losing control over everyday life, impoverishment in the global sense of the word,” Sterlyagova notes.
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The fear of loss of control, loss of will can be traced in the media work of the artist Mikhail Maksimov New Game Is Over (exhibition «Magicians») — this is a computer game, a bad dream from which you cannot get out, but you can only make it worse. The central image is a convulsing puppet, which some people are watching without any pity.
Another fear is the loss of boundaries. It can be read in the work of the artist Slava Nesterov «Torot». In fact, this is a huge wall painting based on Russian fairy tales in the style of illustrations by Ivan Bilibin, where the outlines of human figures turn into the silhouettes of unseen plants and animals.
The fear of disease has only intensified since the pandemic. The Cabinet of Rarities project by artist Ruslan Polanin demonstrates not only ritual figurines of demons and gods, pagan altars, but also huge fungal spores, moss and soil, which has become a receptacle for bacteria and dangerous microorganisms.
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It may seem that new technologies should destroy man's horror of nature and the unknown. But vice versa. The Birch installation by media artist Nadezhda Bakhshieva and composer Anna Pospelova is dedicated to the experiments of a secret laboratory that brings mermaids to life.
Let the gray top come
The poet Alexander Blok said: «The world is terrible — write about it.» Trying to make sense of horror through creativity is a form of psychotherapy.
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"Darkness is ignorance or delusion. Hidden horror, fear of death, underground chthonic gods — something that all «living and thinking» should be afraid of. Art can reveal a secret, making the task clearer, more ordinary. And in the end, it’s more boring, which, in turn, completely eliminates fear,” says artist Yuri Otinov. » media-type=»photo» data-crop-ratio=»1.358369098712446″ data-crop-width=»600″ data-crop-height=»815″ data-source-sid=»» class=»m-vertical lazyload «lazy=»1» />
Creepy stories allow a person to survive a traumatic situation, learn to cope with it, give emotional release without harm to health, adrenaline rush. In this case, you can adjust the «degree of the terrible.» Overcoming the terrible, we become stronger and feel alive, says Tatyana Mastryukova, writer, author of the book «Bolotnitsa» and other works on the mystical theme.
Journalist and researcher, author of the Mordovian Tales channel that scary stories are necessary as an inoculation against phobias.
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“Due to the fact that everyone is already familiar with the feeling of fear from childhood thanks to fairy tales and myths, we learn to overcome them with age. After all, sooner or later you will need to go into a dark room to turn on the light, or lie on the edge, and let this gray top come already,” says Platner.
Art helps to “pull out”, speak and sublimate our emotions and feelings, explains Evgenia Sterlyagova.
By modeling the plot, including otherworldly entities in it, the author can turn hostile forces into friendly ones.
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«I write a lot about death, I try to do the same thing as our ancestors — to translate it from the irrational , uncontrollable fear into allies,” admits Nadya Sova.
The authors of Birch invite the viewer to feel sympathy for the undead. Ruslan Polanin puts the terrible gifts of nature into glass flasks and decorates the interior of the room with them.
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And of course, you can make something beautiful out of the scary and unknown. Slava Nesterov in the project «Songs» turns the images of sinister forest creatures into carved harmonious art objects. data-nosnippet=»true» data-id=»1874201681″ data-url=»https://ria.ru/20230527/peterburg-1874201681.html» data->