Blindfolds what qualities this game develops. Mobile game "Zhmurki

The rules of the game are simple. Several people are playing. There must be at least two people, then the number is not limited, although it is unlikely that more than 10-12 people with one water have ever played blind man's blind man at the same time. Water, the person who drives the game, is chosen with the help of a counter.
For example:
A month came out of the fog
He took out a knife from his pocket.
I will cut, I will beat -
You still have to drive!
Whoever gets the last word is the water.

2 step

For water - the leader is preparing an opaque bandage from a folded scarf, which is tightly blindfolded, so that it is not possible to peep this basic rule of the game. All the rest stand around the driver and turn him around the axis several times so that he changes his idea of ​​\u200b\u200bspace with his eyes closed.

3 step

After that, everyone scatters in different directions. The goal of the driver is to catch or touch all his companions in the game. The same, in turn, should be given sound cues to guide the driver. It can be a bell, clapping, whistling, voice. Players try to trick the driver, attracting him with sounds and rapidly moving in the other direction. In one of the variants of the game, the driver needs not only to touch the player, but also to identify him blindly.

4 step

In the 16th and 17th centuries, blind man's buffs were fun for noblemen, who had so much fun out of boredom. Today it is a children's game that develops coordination of movements, a sense of space and an auditory reaction. But also blind man's buff can also be a pleasant entertainment for adults who will remember their childhood a little or experience new emotions if they bring an erotic moment to this game.

Ekaterina Beloglazova
Mobile game "Zhmurki"

Target: learn to listen carefully to the text; develop coordination in space.

Game progress: Zhmurka selected with a calculator. They blindfold him, take him to the middle of the site, and turn around him several times. Talk to him:

Cat, cat, what are you standing on?

On Bridge.

What's in your hands?

Catch the mice, not us!

The players run away the bug catches them. Caught Player blind man must know, call him by name without removing the bandage. That becomes blind man's blind man.

P / s "Obstacle Course"

When you create an obstacle course, consider the age and number of children, their abilities, and the space you have available. Here are some ideas to get you started. For most children, 10 trials are sufficient.

Crawl under or over a row of chairs.

Crawl under a rope stretched between the legs of two chairs.

Jump in and out of the hoop 5 times.

Walk across the board.

Hit the rattle in the laundry basket.

Run with a rattle on your head.

Somersault.

Jump in place, repeating the counting rhyme.

Make 10 leg jumps together - legs apart.

P / s "Running Trap".

Target: To consolidate the ability to run without falling, without pushing, accepting the rules of the game

Children stand on one side of the hall beyond the line. A line is drawn on the opposite side of the hall. There is a trap in the middle of the hall. After the words: "One, two, three, catch!"- the children run across to the other side of the hall, and the trap catches them. The one touched by the trap before the runner crosses the line is considered to be caught and steps aside. After 2-3 runs, a count of those caught is made, and a new trap is selected.

Related publications:

Mobile game "Butterflies in the Meadow" The author's outdoor game "Butterflies in the Meadow" for the second junior and middle group kindergarten. Purpose of the game: to develop in children the ability to perform.

What is a game (mobile game) and what is its role in the physical development of children? 1. What is a game, an outdoor game? According to the definition of P.F. Lesgaft, an outdoor game is an exercise through which the child prepares.

Mobile game "Cunning Fox" Program content: Educational tasks: -Learn to follow the rules of the game. -Continue to teach children to independently organize acquaintances.

Mobile game "Bus" Mobile game "Bus" Outdoor games are an indispensable tool for the development of children's movements, their sensory, cognitive.

Mobile game "Cunning Fox" Purpose and objectives of the game: Purpose: To form in children the need for mobile activity Tasks: To teach to follow the rules of the game. Develop speed.

Mobile game and its meaning The Federal State Educational Standard (adopted in 2013) defines play as the leading activity of a preschool child.

Mobile game "Kolobok" The game came to mind spontaneously, during the usual private music lesson GCD. This game is more suitable for nursery children.

Works by Konstantin Bogdanov on the site:

Konstantin Bogdanov

Blind Man's Bluff: Plot, Context, Metaphor

Bogdanov K.A. Everyday life and mythology: Studies in the semiotics of folklore reality. - St. Petersburg: "Art-SPB", 2001, p. 109-180.

I'm not a prophet, but I think that we still
we play hide and seek, and this is a dangerous game.
M. Puccini

Blindfolds - "a game in which one blindfold catches others" 1 . The British know the same game as Blindman's buff ("blind man's push"), the Germans like
Blindekuh ("blind cow"), the Italians - a mosca cieca ("blind fly"), the Spaniards - la gallina ciega ("blind chicken"), etc. In historical retrospect, the game of blind man's bluff has been known since antiquity 2 , remaining largely unchanged - and this invariance is intriguing - a stereotype of socio-cultural everyday life. The rules of the respective games differ historically and geographically, but, with all the nuances of specific rules, they are all quite similar. 3 to be united by one easily recognizable plot. In general, this plot satisfies three conditions: 1) the presence of at least two interacting subjects: the one who

110
seeks (catches, guesses), and the one whom they are looking for, while 2) the one who seeks is necessarily limited in the sphere of his vision, but 3) has advantages in any of the other mechanisms of orientation. The one who is being searched somehow makes it known about his whereabouts.

In the totality of the plot elements, the game of blind man's buff is obviously different from other games similar to it in other respects (games of hide-and-seek, catch-up
etc.), allowing one to think that the puzzling stability of a relatively complex plot is determined by the stability of some content corresponding to this complexity. 4 . The question that interests the ethnographer and folklorist in this connection is the question of contexts that set or, in any case, do not violate the rules of the indicated "plot construction". To what extent are these contexts stereotyped and content-invariant in relation to each other and to the plot of the game of blind man's blind man's correlative with them?

A methodologically correct understanding of the context presupposes a verifiable consistency of its limiting elements. 5 . The degree of such a restriction can be different: it is proposed to distinguish between the immediate, mediated and remote context of behavior, depending on the awareness and unconsciousness of the motivations that determine this behavior. 6 ; social and cultural contexts, described in terms of existential "order" and "disorder", explicated with an emphasis on their communicative, significative and generative side, etc. 7 In this case, without setting ourselves the goal of such a strict distinction, we understand by contexts any forms and methods of narrative and actional ordering of the meaning of the game to the extent that they lend themselves to the historical and typological analysis of folklore, ethnographic and literary materials of the European tradition.

111
* * *
In modern everyday life, the game of blind man's buff is perceived as a child's game. Known for its existence as a fun entertainment for adults 8 , but all the same, to talk about the game of hide and seek today means, first of all, to talk about children's play and child psychology. Whether the game of blind man's buff comes down solely to child psychology is another matter. Is it explained only by her? For an ethnographer and folklorist, behind the children's everyday life of blind man's blind people, the context of the "adult" tradition is clearly visible - the practice of figurative behavior and the rhetorical urgency of the corresponding image that determines this practice. The figurative meaning of the game of blind man's buff is thematized as an actional amplification of the plot: the blind seeks the sighted, the dead seeks the living.

It has long been noted that the functional stability of the metaphors prevailing in society not only characterizes the ideas that gave rise to them, but also generates these ideas themselves9. The reality that "precedes" metaphors is complicated by the reality that these metaphors precede. Calling the “first” reality “reality itself” (“Being determines consciousness”), the “second” must be considered the reality of metaphors or the reality of myths regenerated with their help. 10 .In theory, the division into "first" and "second" real-

112
ness is possible. In practice, no. Any reality expresses the reality of the myths that exist in society. 11 . In this context, the meaningful thematization of the game of hide and seek reveals metonymy (ges p. metaphor 12 ), the generating character of which corresponds precisely to such a mythologized - but therefore no less "real" - reality.

The correlation of blindness and death is understandable in the context of the psychophysical experience of vision and the socio-cultural distinction between the visible and the invisible, the manifest and the hidden, the social and the non-(anti) social (see at least the Russian “svet” in the meaning of “ the world”,“ high society ”and phraseological phrases related to this word 13 ). To die means to lose sight: “Close your eyes and lie down on a sled”, “Light rolled out of your eyes”, “The light in your eyes has faded” 14 . Merciless to its victims, death itself seems to be blind: “Death does not look at anything”, “Death blindly rages” 15 . According to a popular belief among the Eastern Slavs, if you do not immediately close the eyes of the deceased, death will take advantage of the open eyes and choose a new victim with them. 16 . The image of blind death, which is stable in the folklore tradition, is also popular in literature. So, for example, in the allegorical "Criticon" by Baltasar Gracian (1657), the eyes of death are described by its minions as "none", because "death does not look at anyone" 17 . Death herself explains her cruelty to people there: “Convinced that there was no way and means to come to an agreement with them, I threw away the bow and grabbed the scythe - closed my eyes, squeezed the hilt and let's mow everything: green and dry, unripe and ripe, even in bloom, even with grain, juicy and hard, I mow anything, and roses and vines.<...>And imagine! Everything went well - and it’s easier for me and for people, because a small misfortune upsets, but a great one humbles. ” 18 .

Historically, the formation of the image of blind death and, at the same time, the idea of ​​the mortal danger emanating from the blind, probably contributed to another important circumstance. Blindness was one of the habitual signs of contagious diseases extremely common since antiquity in medieval Europe, primarily leprosy and smallpox. Before the discovery of E. Jener in the field of smallpox vaccination (1796), the number of people who became blind as a result of smallpox, as well as as a result of leprosy and syphilis, which remained incurable until the end of the 19th century, was, as one might think, very significant, and the idea of ​​the death-bearing blind is quite adequate. historical reality 19 .

Among the words denoting the game of blind man's blind, the Russian word makes it possible to judge the correlation of its meaning with death already on the material of a comparative historical and etymological analysis. The interpretation of the word "blind man's blind man" approved in dictionaries produces the latter from the verb * m uzuriti and noun *m uzura(darkness, darkness), and the alternation of vowels and the initial metathesis make it possible to associate it (within the hypothetically generic basis) with the words "darkness", "moment" ("instant"), "adjacent", and - as a result of folk etymological rapprochement - with the words of the group "I press", "reap" 20 . In the north of Russia, mythological characters are nominatively associated with the circle of the same words, sending night fears and suffocation: zhma, zhmara 21 . Typologically, the latter represent death and unclean

114
a force that can take and to which you can “send” a person (“Hurry take you!”) 22 . About the death - and already in a direct way - they are reminiscent of widespread and having the same root as the blind man's buff, Russian dialectisms and argotisms denoting the deceased, the dead man: "blind man's blind man", "blind man's blind man's eye", "blind man's blind man's blind man's" 23 .

The theme of death, ominous omens associated with blindness, is also read in the West Slavic names of the game of blind man's buff: Czech, Slovenian. slepa baba, Pol. slepa babka (“blind woman”, the same in rum: baba oarba). The common Slavic word "baba" in the context of folk tradition often serves as a taboo designation of mythological characters, spirits, demons, personifying all kinds of dangers and diseases. 24 . The epithet "blind" seems in this case to define and specify the "black", demonic nature of the mythological character: in Russian folklore, smallpox may appear like this - an ugly woman with bull's bladders instead of eyes 25 , fever 26 . Also, judging by some fabulous options, Baba Yaga is blind, listening and sniffing out her victims. 27 . A recording of the fairy tale "Baba Yaga and Zhikhar" is known, where Yaga blindly catches a hero who pretended to be a voice 28 . In other tales, Yaga is blinded by the heroine who escapes 29 . According to V. Ya. Propp, the images of blind old women from American folklore correlate with the blindness of Baba Yaga, just like Yaga, who act in a situation of “meeting” the world of the living and the world of the dead 30 (or at least in situations that are "dramatically" significant for the characters facing them 31 ).

115
In all these cases, blindness is a sign of a different and therefore frightening property. First of all, blindness is a sphere of the socially different (see, from this point of view, the slang use of the word "blind man's blind man" in the sense of "tramp" and "blind" in the sense of "passportless tramp") 32 ). Judging by the texts mediating ideological practice, sight, like a voice and hearing, socializes members of society, blindness desocializes. Historians of the language note the synonymy of blindness and castration observed in the Egyptian and possibly Sumerian languages. 33 . In modern German, the argotism Blindg is known anger- "blind walker" in the meaning of "bachelor" or "childless husband" 34 . Indirect proof of such a synonymy are, perhaps, those mythological plots where blindness acts as a punishment for adultery and incest; so, for violence against his concubine, the Boeotian king Amyntor blinds his son Phoenix 35 ; Oinopion of Chios blinds the giant Orion for the abuse of his daughter 36 ; the king of Epirus, Ekhet, burns out the eyes of his daughter Metope for having a relationship with a certain foreigner, Ekhmodik; Oedipus blinds himself for having a relationship with his mother ("Oedipus the King" by Sophocles); Tiresias is blinded for seeing Athena naked.

It should be noted that the self-evident axiology, according to which “it is better to see once than to hear a hundred times”, is supported in this sense not only - and maybe not even so much - by psychophysiology, but by society, an ideology that knows such a form social punishment, as deprivation of sight (see the semantics of the expressions “an eye for an eye”, “arrange a dark one”, “dungeon”, or, for example, -

116
in the same context, Eugene Sue's reasoning on the benefits of blinding criminals:
“We believe that in serious crimes such as parricide, or other audacious atrocities, blindness and eternal solitary confinement would place the criminal in such conditions under which he could never harm society; and the punishment would be a thousand times more terrible for him and would give him time for complete repentance and redemption. 37 ).

In Greek mythology, famous for the gift of singing, but daring in the language of Famir Kifared, the muses deprive him of hearing and sight. Zeus blinds the Thracian king Lycurgus, who rebelled against the infant Dionysus 38 . The gods blind the cruel king Phineus. According to the Russian epic story, the angels “put clear eyes on a white face” to the innocently slandered and blinded hero, and, on the contrary, to the guilty “for a great untruth”, the Lord “broke darkness on his clear eyes” 39 . The forcible blinding of Vasilko Terebovskiy in The Tale of Bygone Years is described as an act more dishonorable and more terrible than murder 40 . Equally terrifying is the blinding of the Earl of Gloucester in Shakespeare's King Lear. Blindness is not just a reminder of death, in society it is actually equal to death. Among the discussions on this topic, we confine ourselves to the remark of Leonardo da Vinci: “Who would not prefer to lose hearing, smell and touch rather than sight? For one who has lost his sight is like one who is banished from the world, for he no longer sees it or any of the things, and such a life is the sister of death.” 41 . It is characteristic that laughter, which is a familiar symbol in culture,

117
ox of life 42 , in a number of folklore texts it is precisely blindness that opposes - a sign of death 43 . In a Russian fairy tale, the hero who finds himself in the house of Baba Yaga and thus, as if touching death, complains that his “eyes are puffed out”, asks for water to wash them 44 .

He who does not see the living is “almost dead”, the dead is blind. Judging by some Slavic ethnographic materials, the dead seem to avoid blindness if the living take care of it (they light a candle at the hour of death, “sweep” the coffins of their parents to clear their eyes, observe various kinds of prohibitions: on spinning, sewing; they dress the deceased in light clothes, etc. 45 ), but even then vision is the prerogative of the “good”, and blindness is the lot of the “unkind” dead (in particular, babies who died before baptism 46 ). Ghouls are represented as blind in the folklore tradition. 47 . In Gogol's Viy, a dead pannochka is blind, trying to grab Homa Brutus - the scene is not very funny, but it makes you remember the game of blind man's blind man:

Khoma didn't have the heart to look at her. She was terrible. She struck her teeth with her teeth and opened her dead eyes. But, seeing nothing, with fury - which her trembling face expressed - she turned in the other direction, and spreading her arms, wrapped them around every pillar and corner, trying to catch Khoma.<...>Bursak shuddered, and a chill ran through all his veins. Lowering his eyes to the book, he began to read his prayers and curses louder and heard the corpse again strike with its teeth and wave its arms, wanting to grab it. But, squinting slightly with one eye, he saw that the corpse was not catching him where he stood, and, apparently, could not see him. 48 .

118
It is important at the same time that both the blind and the dead are united by a certain common knowledge for them and distinguishing them, inaccessible to “simply” sighted people (who cost their lives, for example, the same Khoma). In modern popular culture, folklore ideas about the blind dead, dangerous to people and endowed with infernal power, find a popular continuation in the texts of "black fiction", and especially in horror films. Such, among others, is the cinematic image of the monster created by Frankenstein or the image of zombies - the dead, who have risen from their graves and maniacally pursue living people.

The historical and cultural understanding of blindness emphasizes the otherness imputed to blindness 49 . The social and psychophysical inferiority of the blind is compensated by the possibilities of a different experience, a different knowledge, a different power. It is possible that the nature of such compensation, and thus the well-known mythologization of blindness, is explained not only by the obvious isolation of the blind members of society, but also by socio-psychological and, perhaps, neurophysiological factors (the individual tendency of the blind to social overcompensation in general and the functional hypertrophy of the brain, compensating for the lack of vision mechanisms of extraordinary - tactile, mnemonic, verbal, etc. - orientation in particular 50 ; on the other hand, if the blindness is congenital and is caused by damage to the parts of the central nervous system(the so-called "central congenital blindness"), it characterizes a blind idiot 51 ). Be that as it may, the blind, we repeat, are isolated primarily socially.

119
Blind are the prophets and seers (Tiresias, Finaeus, Oedipus in Colon), the forefathers (Isaac), God's chosen heroes (the biblical Samson, in Roman mythology - Tsekul, the son of the god Vulcan, the founder of the city of Preneste), legendary poets (the blind aed Demodocus, to whom the muses "eclipsed the eyes", but bestowed the art of chanting 52 , Homer himself, the Roman censor Appius Claudius, later Blind Harry and Milton). Democritus blinds himself, "thinking that sight hinders the insight of the mind" 53 . Examples in this case can be multiplied and multiplied. The blind are charged with knowing what the sighted do not know. Moreover, he knows the truth about the sighted (thus, the legendary John Fielding recognizes thieves by the sound of their voice, clairvoyant Vanga predicts the future, etc. 54 ).

Representing the other, blindness tempts and frightens at the same time. Something else is more dangerous than usual. The danger emanating from blindness is fraught with the very reminder of something else - that which cancels the reliability of everyday experience and habitual use. Dangerous blind sorcerer 55 , blind sorcerer 56 . Meeting a blind man is a bad omen 57 . In the context of the danger posed by blindness, the motif that is already found in the biblical and mythological tradition of Homer's poems, the motif of deceiving the blind, becomes clearer. Blind Isaac, who refuses to give his blessing to his youngest son Jacob, is deceived by the latter by putting on a goatskin and pretending to be his first-born, “hairy” Esau (Gen. 27:1-40). Odysseus and his companions deceive the Cyclops Polyphemus, blinded by them, and run away from him, hiding under the bodies of rams. Paying attention to the similarity

120
of these two scenes, Rene Girard dwells on the problem of violence and sacrifice, the sacrificial substitution of man for animals 58 . At the same time, it is worth paying attention to another point, not specifically articulated by Girard, but more interesting for us: both blind men are perceived as those on whom the future life of the deceivers depends in one way or another (it could be
say: and beating) their heroes. At the same time, the plot with Polyphemus is literally read as a detailed description of the game of blind man's buff.

The one-eyedness of Polyphemus, it seems, initially makes him related to the mythological characters of the world of death (in particular, with Baba Yaga, as Propp believed 59 ). From Greek mythology, one can recall here the three daughters of Fork (Forkis), old women from birth, Enio, Pefredo and Dino, who had one eye for three 60 , blind Plutos, identified with the lord of Hades Pluto. From the German-Scandinavian - the one-eyed god, the leader of the dead army of Odin, from the Celtic - the demonic opponent of the "shining" god Lug and also the one-eyed Balor 61 . From Caucasian folklore - about one-eyed cannibals extremely similar to Polyphemus 62 . From Russian, in addition to Baba Yaga, personifying evil and misfortune Likho: a one-eyed or completely blind cannibal monster of huge growth 63 . The blinded Polyphemus further certifies this kinship.

Another motif that accompanies the blinding of Polyphemus, repeatedly noted in specialized literature, is the motif of ignorance, ignorance and (which is the same in this context) the stupidity of the bloodthirsty Cyclops. Odysseus deceives Polyphemus with the pseudo-name

121
nurtures as "Nobody" and thereby deprives his opponent of the knowledge that gives him the last opportunity to destroy the hero-deceiver. Odysseus remains salutarily unnamed and, accordingly, inaccessible in the ontological identity of the name and its owner.

The idea that the name has a self-sufficient immanent power, which is generally widespread among the most diverse peoples of the world 64 , in Europe remained ideologically undeniable at least until the Enlightenment 65 . Mythological and folklore sources in this case vividly illustrate the well-known socio- and psycholinguistic paradox (the so-called paradox of singular existence), according to which, what is named begins to exist regardless of whether the named real denotation exists. 66 . Psychologically, the name creates and annexes the name itself (for example, in Russian folklore texts, the devil and the goblin take away what was given to them by a careless word, the Serpent’s careless bragging gives birth to a deadly enemy 67 ), and knowledge of the name turns out to be knowledge of any assumptions of the real world ontologized by this name. 68 . It is interesting that among the folk signs that portend death, one of the most common is to be hailed by name and not see the one who hailed 69 . If the invisibility of the caller is in an understandable way connected in this case with the invisibility for the living of the other world (the reversal of the blindness of the dead in relation to the living 70 ), then it also testifies to the special role of sound (voice) and, in particular, the verbal nature of the linking living and dead communication 71 .

122
Let us now note that the "blind" catcher, according to the plot of the blind man's blind man's game, must not only catch, but also name the one he has caught. According to one version, the rules oblige the players to hit the "blind" who catches them, so that he guesses the hitter. According to others, the “blind man” is asked questions to which he must answer and thereby, as it were, confirm his role as a guesser. Noteworthy in this context is a passage from the Gospels, which describes how the people holding the captured Jesus “cursed Him and beat Him; And covering Him, they struck Him in the face and asked Him, “Prophesy, who struck You?” (Luke 22:63-64). The mockery to which Christ is subjected formally reproduces nothing but one of the variants of the game of blind man's blind man's. This similarity was recognized and emphasized by medieval miniaturists, who equally portrayed the blind man's players and Christ in the indicated scene: blindfolded or with a hooded head. 72 . In the Book of Hours of John Evre (first half of the 14th century), the same version of the game - the so-called game of the frog - is symbolically depicted next to the scene of Christ being taken into custody. 73 . Let us emphasize, however, something else. It is significant that the questions that are asked in this case to Christ are asked precisely to the one from whom, according to the gospel story itself, contextually, one should expect not “profane”, but just the same, special, prophetic guessing. Although mocking, this is the questioning of the otherworldly about the local.

123
The proof that the questioning mentioned by Luke is essentially sacred can be found in the description of the custom, which is a puzzling parallel to the gospel scene. The description of this custom (which existed in the middle of the 19th century in Ukraine) is given by P.P. This game is played only at funerals and consists in the fact that one of the players covers himself with a sheepskin coat so that he cannot see anything. The other player hits the covered one with a tourniquet - “beat the lubok” - and he must guess who hit him. If he guesses, the one who hit him goes in his place, if not, someone else beats him, etc. ” 74

Judging by ethnographic materials, “dramatized games, known in the literature under the term funeral games, constitute the most important element in the complex of ritual actions at public gatherings with the dead” 75 . “Beating a lubok” in this sense is no exception and fits into a number of other funeral games that are contextually relevant to it (researchers associate the word “lubok” itself with grave goods - a piece of wood, a “boat”, on which the deceased goes to another world 76 ). Such games, which also include the motives of beating, guessing, are interpreted as reviving the deceased and ordering his collective send-off.

Like birth, death is considered to have taken place if it is sanctioned by the collective 77 . From an ideological point of view, the power of death over the deceased is consistent with the collective consent to this power,

124
so that the funeral turns out to be a kind of contract - an act of consent in the face of an inevitable, but at the same time completely socialized necessity. As an expression of "realized necessity", such an act can not only be defined, but also appears as an act of collective freedom, as a decision of society itself to dispose of the deceased. It is on society that ultimately depends - "revive" or "death" the object of burial 78 and, in particular, to leave him sighted or not (see above).

Today, the nature of the funeral in traditional society seems paradoxically playful, even farcical (“Why does the funeral ... of a dead person turn into a farce?” asked V. Ya. Propp), in order to assert behind him, if not the legacy of pagan actions of an orgiastic nature 79 , then, in any case, a socially mediated system of apparently communicative relationships between the living and the dead, in general between this and that world. The “farcical” nature of the funeral (which we shall have to say below) seems understandable, if one bears in mind that not only death “plays” with man, but also the society that represents man “plays” with death—not to say: plays death itself. "Beating the lubok", being an undoubted element of this kind of games, is at the same time a fact of mind, to a large - but not exclusively - degree expressed by funeral rites.

125
In children's everyday life, games similar to “beating a lubok” existed at the beginning of the 20th century in the Novgorod region (“kupy-kupy kupanushko”, “bury gold”): one of the players screwed up his eyes and tried to guess which of the other participants in the game had hidden pebble. At the same time, all participants "beat" the guesser on the back and passed the pebble from hand to hand, accompanying their "stab" with "questioning" singing:

Koopy-koupy, kupanushko,
Where did you swim, Ivanushko?
In the middle is a white reed.
I have a white stone!
I have a white stone!

Where did the gold fall?
Where did the silver go?
In Kalinushka
Into the raspberry
In pure silver... etc. 80

Despite the lack of vision, the blind man must “see” something and give the “seen” the status of being relevant for all playing events. Such an event
a word or an action identical to a word can become: in any case, it turns out to be something that sums up the plot of the game and gives an “answer” to a certain “question” posed in the course of this game. If we agree that the blind man in this case represents, as we have already written above, the world of the socially and existentially different, then such questioning seems to correspond to the sacred dialogue between this and that world.

* * *
In the perspective of the historical and cultural spread of the plot of the game of hide and seek, the Homeric story about the stay of Odysseus at Polyphemus opens a long series of texts, on the one hand, articulating the topic of death, nightmare, danger, as if determined by this plot, and on the other hand (which does not contradict the first one) - ridiculing it or at least something compensatory 81 . The literary context of blind man's blind man's play, in contrast to the well-established notion of it as child's play, is almost always associated with the motives of threat, death, and a "decisive" choice. At the same time, this choice itself sometimes turns out to be almost a joke, and the threat is in vain.

In ancient Greek literature, in addition to the Homeric text, the text of Aeschylus' Oresteia, a story about Orestes pursued by the vengeful Erinyes, is an example of contextual mediation of the plot of the game of blind man's blind man. The image of the Erinyes, no less than the image of Baba Yaga, allows us to consider them blind. In the description of Aeschylus, the eyes of Erinyes "weep with vile blood" 82 , "ooze with abomination" 83 . In the Iliad, Erinyes "is running in the dark" 84 . Being the demonic deities of the underworld, the Erinyes are more terrible than the gorgons and harpies, they are

Gray children of the night. Won't love them
Neither god, nor man, nor wild beast of the forest.
Born for evil in the underground Tartarus,
In the darkness nests a pack of evil, vile
And mortal people, and Olympus inhabitants 85 .

Associated with notions of death and fate 86 , they "rule the human share" 87 . In "Prometheus Chained" Aeschylus calls them "all-remembering" 88 . It is worth noting that the possible blindness of Erinyes corresponds to the image of deities typologically close to them.
127

Antiquity, personifying punishment (Themis), fate (Roman Fortune), hope (Elpida), chance (Tyuhe), often depicted with a blindfold (cf. the expressions "blind chance", "blind happiness", "blind fate" 89 , a Russian proverb about a court whose "paths are straight, but eyes are blind" 90 ).

The common denominator of the ordeals of Orestes is the theme of fate, a predetermined fate. According to the text of Aeschylus, the arbiter of the fate of Orestes is the Areopagus of the gods (Chorus, Erinyes, Apollo, Athena), whose brightly socialized character sets off in this case the remarkably interesting circumstance that the question of life and death of Orestes turns out to depend not on one, but on several gods or, speaking in a formalized language, not from one, but from several, moreover, balancing each other, factors. The metamorphosis rationalized by Aeschylus (and after him by generations of researchers), which turns the evil Erinyes into good Eumenides and thereby sums up the salvation of Orestes from death, although it translates the problem of fate into an ethical plane, does not eliminate the impression of the accident of the most “happy” outcome. Determined from above, the fate of Orestes in the course of the tragedy nevertheless (and very revealingly) becomes the object of a possible “revision”. We venture to say that the ancient tradition in this paragraph is most consistent with the attitude to fate that could be called, with all historical reservations, dominating in the folk (“two-faith”, syncretic, etc.) and mass culture of Europe until now days 91 .

128
According to Homer, Zeus distributes good and evil to people "blindly" 92 . Belief in the predestination of fate is belief in certainty a posteriori, not a priori. “You won’t know in advance where you will find, where you will lose,” says a Russian proverb about the same thing. If the theme of death and the theme of fate correlate on the basis of uncertainty and complementarity, then a person opposes both death that corrects fate and fate that corrects death. At the same time, “uncertainty, inaccessibility, otherworldliness of one or those who endow people with fate, their invisibility, inaudibility and incorporeality, the concealment of fate and at the same time its immutability makes people look for and guess their fate, using certain signs of fate and magical techniques that establish contact with the otherworldly world where people's destinies are decided" 93 . The game of blind man's blind, I think, expresses the idea of ​​such contact in the form of a kind of actional psychotherapy (functionally characteristic of the ritual as a whole). 94 ), removing just that reflexive contradiction that usually determines a person's attitude to death and fate.

It is remarkable that, while remaining within the narrative contextualization of the plot of the blind man's buff, the ancient tradition provides another example that seems not indifferent to understanding the imagery associated with this plot. In parallel to Orestes pursued by the Erinyes, Io, turned into a cow by Hera, is pursued by a horsefly that stings her. The latter, it seems, personifies the demonic cruelty of "blind" death and "blind" fate (all the more so since even earlier Io was entrusted to the thousand-eyed guardian, and in this sense - the sense of "excessive vision" - also, as it were, "blind" Argus 95 ). Mythological images of a horsefly,

129
cows-Io are interesting in their correlation with the well-known names of the game of blind man's buff in the West Slavic languages ​​(Greek "copper fly", Italian "blind fly", Dutch, German "blind cow"). These names are hardly, of course, connected with the Aeschylean myth (let us pay attention to the etymological "blindness" of horseflies in the Russian language), but nevertheless, I think, they imply a certain symbolic retrospective that cannot be reduced exclusively, say, to the image of a "blindly" flying fly or bitten in eyes of a cow (see, for example, the couplet of the Indian poet Kabir (1440-1518): "Kabir: this world is blind, like a blind cow / There was a calf and died, [and she] continues to lick his skin" 96 ). Recall that one of the cult incarnations of Zeus, who annually received a sacrificial ox in the Akteian temple, is απομυιος , i.e. “fly repellent” (possibly in memory of the deliverance of Hercules from the deadly flies that annoyed him during the cleaning of the Augean stables) 97 . The widespread image of flies in mythology, folklore, and the Christian tradition is also known - an image associated with the forces of an unclean, frightening property, illness, death, etc. flies are associated with the image of Satan and demonic evil spirits 98 , according to Russian sign, "flies in winter in a hut - to the dead" 99 ).

130
* * *
E. Fink wrote about the phenomenology of the game as a meeting with the possible 100 . In this case, this is a meeting with death and (or) fate, but the meeting is in its playful and, therefore, actually ambiguous context. It is significant that in addition to words with the meaning of "death", the Russian word "blind man's buff" is etymologically connected with such words as "haze", "fool" 101 , that is, "deceive", "make fun", "laugh at someone."

Any game, be it a game of children or a game of adults, is fundamentally “serious” in relation to the “plot” of the game determined by the rules. Johan Huizinga emphasized that “within the sphere of the game, the laws and customs of the world of everyday life have no force” 102 , but those that possess this power are serious enough to be questioned. There is nothing “non-serious” in the game, and at the same time, every game remains just a game. “The child plays with complete seriousness, one can rightfully say - in sacred seriousness. But he plays, and he knows what he is playing” 103 . The same can be said about those who play hide and seek. In the words of Sutton-Smith, "although the driver represents a dangerous force, he can be ridiculed and pushed from all sides, as is the case with blind man's blind man" 104 .

The fear of death and the other world is affirmed and phenomenologically overcome by playing blind man's blind man in the unity of the actional and narrative practices that thematize it.

For all its inevitability, death, as it is depicted in Russian folklore, “is not omnipotent, not omniscient; for the time being, it can be fought with one or another means; she can be physically resisted, she can be outwitted, deceived " 105 In general, such an attitude towards death in the history of culture is a form of psychotherapy and, at the same time, a form of socialization of the subject of society.

131
Man and society are necessarily oriented towards life rather than towards death. At the same time, like any form of socialization, the orientation of society “to life” is largely violent, suggesting an ideology that focuses public attention not so much on fear of death as on fear for life (“Be afraid to live, but don’t be afraid to die!” - according to the characteristic instruction of the Russian proverb 106 ). It is clear that the ideological "obsession to death" is detrimental to society, since it is possible to control only those for whom the current priority - that is, "here and now" - is not the other side, but this-worldly existence. Every society, to some extent, “turns away” from death, “hiding” the dead (for the 20th century, the tendency to intensify this process was well described by F. Aries 107 ) and condemning those who seek to join the ranks of the latter without an ideologically legalized sanction (see condemnation of suicides universal in the European tradition 108 ). Society cannot disregard death, but life is the determining criterion for an ideological attitude towards death. 109 . Theoretically, this means that either a) there is no death, or b) being different in relation to life, death is nevertheless a part of it.

132
Ideological practice supports the paradoxical conclusion that follows from this: despite the fact that the dead are dead, they cannot but live. At the same time, ignoring or conflict-free "revival" of death seems to be the higher, the more violent the authoritarianism of the mythologems of ideological (religious, political, technocratic) responsibility that dominate in society 110 . It is not surprising that the “death drive” described by 3. Freud as a fundamental human attraction is either taboo (an example of which is the very history of the Freudian concept 111 ), or suppressed directly in practice (indicative is the violent treatment of the same suicides, in a number of countries, moreover, criminally punishable, or a characteristic discussion of the problem of euthanasia - the legalization of voluntary death in incurable diseases 112 ).

Society imposes on its members the obligation, first of all, to “remember life” and, by virtue of this obligation, not to forget about death. As for the game of blind man's buff, it is a remarkable, albeit very particular, realization of this duty in the realm of actional and narrative experience. In the function of metaphor, the game of blind man's blind expresses the idea of ​​death being incorporated into life as an other that reveals its own non-equivalence.

* * *
In folk culture (based on Slavic material), the strategy of joking, playful "reduction" of the theme of death is clearly manifested in the playful staging of funerals during Christmas time and Shrovetide. The death and funeral of the heroes traditional in this case (Kostroma, Kostruba, Grandfather, Baba, etc.) are played out in such a way as to cause a laughable reaction from the participants

133
staged funerals. The dead person is perceived as the object of obscene jokes, invectives and rather risky hoaxes (when invited to a “funeral”, it is reported, for example, that someone from one of the villagers died) 113 . It is noteworthy that the masks of the respective characters are mostly very simple, often just curtains or blindfolds, which, according to researchers who have studied them, symbolize the blindness of those who belong to the world of death. 114 . The funeral of the imaginary deceased is arranged in an emphatically travesty (and in the conditions of church officialdom - blasphemous and anti-clerical 115 ), moreover, according to the rules of the scenario being played out, the participants had to kiss the disguised dead man, and he suddenly jumped up and rushed after those present, trying to pinch them or prick them with a pin hidden in his mask 116 .

The suggestive analogy in these cases with the game of blind man's buff is supported by a curious custom, where the staging of a funeral rite and the game of blind man's blind complement each other in a direct way. Such is the so-called funeral of a cockroach - a custom that could still be observed in some central and southeastern regions of rural Russia until the 1930s and 40s. "Cockroach" was the name of a stuffed dead man (for example, a men's shirt stuffed with straw, trousers and a bunch of twisted straw instead of a head). Sometimes one of the participants in the gatherings pretended to be a dead man. The “funeral of a cockroach”, which was usually played out at gatherings in a spell for the Nativity Fast, reproduced and unequivocally “joked” a real funeral: as in other

134
cases of staging a funeral, the imaginary deceased is “dressed”, “buried” and “commemorated”, using the turns of the traditional funeral hymn, church memorial service and funeral psalms. The custom of playing blind-man's-blinds ("in sacks") during the corresponding ceremonial was witnessed, in particular, in the village of Nikita-Polyany, Shatsk district, Ryazan region. to bury, tie up your eyes, and even to find out who to paymait. And then yavopanyasut swear - shout, make noise! Ryzbyrut literally, scatter saloma, and go like to remember the truth " 117 . [ R. picture of H. J. Dillens "a. - A.B.]

The semantic juxtaposition of funeral and play symbols in this case is hardly accidental. The dead person evokes fear, but for the same reason finds himself in the center of social "fearlessness". He jokes and "simplifies" in every possible way. In Russian riddles, the deceased is referred to as “meat pie”, “meat pie”, “wooden crust”, “there is a house, and in the house there is a bug, and on the bug there is muchka” 118 . We find the same decline in modern folklore texts, in particular, in the texts of children's folklore, parodying the traditional topic of "terrible stories".

It should be taken into account that the play and narrative preferences of children, according to the general opinion of researchers, are nothing more than “simplified” materials of adult (including ritual) everyday life and express the latter as representative “universals” of collective memory and collective experience. 119 . D. Elkonin, who studied play from the point of view of psychodiagnostics and the psychology of child development

135
wrote that the main unit of children's play is the role of an adult. At the same time, “the more generalized and abbreviated the game actions, the deeper the meaning, task and system of relations of the recreated activity of adults are reflected in the game: the more specific and expanded the game actions, the more the concrete-subject content of the recreated activity appears” 120 . As for the historical and ethnographic context, in order to avoid a possible misunderstanding, it should be emphasized that the “simplification” by children of the ritual everyday life of adults is not necessarily the result of the genetic (or stage) “secondary” nature of children’s games in relation to rituals as such. It's about not about the genetic derivation of "childish" from "adult" (genetically, the situation is probably just the opposite), but about the semantic profanation of "adult" meanings in the practice of "childish" experience. It is clear that such profanation is secondary not genetically, but only ideologically - in relation to the social institutionalization of the "non-profane": sacred, collectively demanded by the world of adults, not children.

“Accompanying” adults, children retain to a greater extent the “form” rather than the “meaning” of adult everyday life, but - both genetically and ideologically - forma dat esse rei: the “reproduction” of the content is unimaginable outside of its reconstructive form. “Everything that should appear in a child already exists in society, including needs, social tasks and even emotions” 121 . This also applies to socially mediated - and genetically definitely "secondary" - concepts of death, fear, fate, etc. 122 According to

136
M. A. Mukhlynin, who devoted a detailed article to the topic of children's “horror stories”, “terrible stories and parodic texts, constantly interspersed, perform a single cathartic function according to the principle of complementarity. The experience of the terrible is just as productive as its symbolic destruction by laughter: scary stories aesthetically “objectify” fears, parodies contribute to the awareness of the full extent of the artistic conventionality of scary stories and affirm them in a new quality. 1 23 . It should be noted that among the motifs that are subjected to such “objectification” in children’s folklore, one can easily find those that could well be attributed to the plot of the game of blind man’s buff (for example, the motif of deadly eyes that “strangle” their victims 124 ).

A remarkable example, equally related to the strategy of making fun of death and to typological parallels to the plot of the blind man's blind man's game, is the children's "game of the dead." According to the description of one of these games (on the material of the Komi culture), several girls and boys of seven to eleven years old gathered in late spring or early summer in a meadow near the village. By lot or counting rhyme, the driver was determined, who was to fulfill the role of the deceased. It is very curious that, according to the informants, there were always a lot of guys who “wanted to play this role. The imaginary dead man lay down on the ground, and everyone else tore the grass and lamented: “Why did you leave us?”, “Why did you leave us?”, “Come back.” When the grass completely covered the “deceased”, a memorial word was pronounced, and then the players, as if forgetting about the recent funeral, moved on to conversations on topics of interest to them. Meanwhile, the dead man abruptly and unexpectedly got up and rushed in pursuit of the fleeing players. The one whom he touched with his hand became the leader, and the game began again. 125 .

137
* * *
One might think that, like "playing the dead man," playing blind man's buff will profane the ritual practice of adults (taking into account the reservations made earlier). Concerning the theme of blindness in a fairy tale. J. Propp hypothetically attributed it to the initiation complex, which he reconstructed and historically determined the fairy tale, in his opinion. If we understand initiation somewhat broader than V. Ya. Propp did 126 , in general, as a social gender and age legitimization of special and in this particularity socially significant knowledge (for example, in the meaning of A. van Gennep’s “transitional rites”), then certain initiatory motives are also seen in that actional and narrative context that accompanies the game of blind man’s blind man’s bluff. Initiatory blinding precedes the new, or at least sums up, the initiate's former status. In particular, we note that it is in the context of ritual blindness that the well-known inversion of black and white colors in funeral, wedding and, more broadly, initiatory rituals receives a satisfactory explanation. 127 . Lacking the visual part of the spectrum and characterized by the psychophysical effect of blinding (the expressions "dazzling whiteness", "blinding darkness"), both of these colors symbolize blindness and thus the actual non-everyday, unearthly, existentially different.

138
On the whole, the initiatory context of the game of blind man's blind to a greater or lesser extent corresponds to the motives of death, fate, the motives of dangerous and at the same time immutable and face-to-face contact with the other world, the motives of recognition and guessing. From the point of view of the closest ritual parallels, the game of blind man's buff in this sense recalls, first of all, the practice of ritual divination characterized by the same motives. 1 28 .

In the calendar rituals of the Slavs, fortune-telling is steadily associated with the most “conflicting” time of the year - with the situation of the border between the old and the new, the known and the unknown, with the beginning or end of production cycles (end of the year, the end of the harvest, the days of the summer and winter solstice, etc.) . It is difficult to overestimate the symbolic role of the border in folk culture. Functionally, the ideological reality of "borderline situations" provides a heuristic alternative to existing existence. A world devoid of borders, devoid of alternatives, secrets 129 , in this sense, he is devoid of illusions that fund human thinking, allowing him to appropriate something else as his own. The complex relationship between the need to preserve the heuristic value of the boundary and the ability to cross it is the reality of any culture. It is clear that this reality is to some extent fragmentary, but the heuristic value of its constituent fragments is the higher, the more obvious their isomorphism to the whole. The social practice of divination is explained, we think, by such isomorphism par excellence. Any divination is an element of collective or individual initiation: the transition from one state to another and the appropriation of another as one's own.

139
The act of distinguishing (another, not yet taken place) realized by divination is at the same time an act of appropriation. By distinguishing oneself in another - in the future - the fortuneteller subjectifies this other, makes it his present. . The blindman's blind man also opposes the other, which, according to the rules, is inverse to himself: the "blind" seeks to become "sighted", the "sighted" risks being in the role of "blind".

It is known that in the function of a physiological prerequisite, any temporally oriented act is initially assumed to be structurally complete, as it were, initially modeling its procedural result. N. A. Bernshtein, dealing with the physiology of activity, believed that this phenomenon of “looking ahead” is a universal criterion of “any act of turning a perceived situation into a motor task”: “A vitally useful or significant action cannot be either programmed or carried out if the brain did not create a guiding prerequisite for this in the form of ... a model of the necessary future " 130 .

As for blind man's blind man's game, such a model is at least the inversion of its role alternatives: the reversibility of the "sighted" into the "blind", and vice versa. As for divination, the “model of the necessary future” is a psychophysiological and at the same time ideological condition that determines the role of divination in the context of

140
his socialization 131 . A fortuneteller is able to see the future with his own eyes. His standing before the other world is a full-time standing, he sees what the "uninitiated" do not see. So, for example, “to find out if the dead man is not a dead man who inspires suspicion, they put the child in a red corner, and then the child clearly sees pewter eyes in the dead man” 132 . In divination, “a kind of window into another world most often serves as a mirror ... as well as an ice hole and, in fact, any objects that have a hole (“eye”)” 133 .

But what does the fortuneteller see? Appropriating something else as his own, the fortuneteller sees what he has already seen, looking for what he already possesses. The future, which is subject to "be seen", with all its uncertainty and, in addition, the danger that is threatened by looking into another world, turns out to be possible and, therefore, in one way or another socially "required future". It seems that the same is the case with the game of blind man's blind, which is equally appropriate for the "initiatory" strategy and tactics of guessing.

Judging by the Siberian materials, blind man's buff (local "blind") was one of the popular games at meetings of single youth. In the middle of the Angara region, such gatherings ("clearings") served as public shows that had pronounced ritual features: like other games (towns, leapfrog, bast shoes), blind man's buffs were included in this case in the structure of an actually ritual event that symbolically separated older youth from other - quite tough - age-related groups 134 and in this respect having a definite “initiatory” denominator. An indirect argument in favor of the ritual connection of the game in

141
blind man's buff and fortune-telling can serve as the above-mentioned connection between the game of blind man's buff and ritual ("mortuary") games during Christmas time and Shrovetide, that is, holidays that, in calendar terms, were also the time of the most intense and "reliable" fortune-telling 135 .In the appropriate context, the game of blind man's blind man is mentioned by the author of the Church Collection of 1754 quoted by F.I. Buslaev; here blind man's buffs are condemned in a number of characteristic "pagan amusements": "if they buried gold with blind man's ears, they play or listen under the door and window ... or they lie around hearing thunder, or a lark, or they listen on the sheets" 136 . In the Belarusian language, the words "zhmur", "zhmurinka" meant a rite of purification of a woman in labor, usually performed immediately after the christening and removing the danger of the evil eye or exposure to evil spirits from the woman in labor and the midwife 137 (cf. with this prohibition to look at the newborn and the dead 138 ).

The wedding ceremony deserves a special discussion in the same initiatory context. Wedding ceremonies not only reveal the semantic relevance of the motifs of death/life (death/birth), guessing, recognizing, naming 139 , but also use the plot elements of the blind man's blind man's game in the structure of their own plot formation. This is, first of all, the staging of "recognition" by the bride of the groom and (or) the groom of the bride. According to the rules of Domostroy, the bride had to hide from the eyes of the groom up to the altar 140 .A contemporary of Domostroy, J. Fletcher, noted that only here the bride lifts the veil so that the groom can see her face 141 . According to the description of the wedding arrangement among the Russians of Ukraine, “the elder friend offered

142
show the groom to the matchmaker. The matchmaker walked the groom around the room, praising his virtues. After that, the older friend listed the virtues of the bride. The groom was obliged to find the bride hiding among other friends and stood next to her. 142 .

In the Orenburg province, the groom also had to “catch” and recognize the bride, while, according to P. Sheina, those girls who “arrange a catch, guess the fate of future young people ... Having taken the bride, they go to a separate hut or a crate for a short time to“ dress up ”, put on the same dresses and uniformly cover their heads with monochrome scarves ... When they return into the hut from which they recently left, the groom is already standing at the threshold with blindfolded or closed (the latter more often) eyes... And as soon as the caravan appears on the threshold, he begins ... to look for or guess his betrothed in it and, grabbing her by the hand, says in a recitative: Here she is - my squad, here she is - my young! This is then repeated up to three times. If in all three times the groom fails to "catch" his bride, then, then, he takes
not his betrothed, and his life in marriage will not be fun, and if he succeeds, then in this case, “his own” and life with her will be fun and happy ” 143 . The customs of similar recognition of the bride by the groom are also known in European wedding rituals. 144 .

The pre-wedding and generally erotic semantics of "blind" recognition are, of course, transparent enough to be reduced exclusively to ritual practice. But it is interesting that it is precisely the game of blind man's buff that expresses in this case the ritual adaptation of psychological stereotypes of erotic and sexual behavior.

143
niya. The erotic nature of blind man's blind man's play was emphasized by the authors of its first mentions in European literature. Most of the information of this kind dates back to the beginning of the 18th century. As far as can be judged from literary and pictorial materials, the game of blind man's buff becomes at this time a fashionable entertainment in the circle of secular society. The game of blind man's buff is portrayed by J. O. Fragonard (The Blind Man's Blind Man, 1775) and F. Goya ("Blind Man's Bluff", 1787). The rules of the game vary: usually boys and girls play it, while the girl caught by the "blind" must kiss the one who caught her. Sometimes it acts as a kind of preference, fortune-telling: to be caught in this case means to be deceived. In this sense, playing blind man's buff gives rise to the corresponding witticisms, for example, in the quatrain of the English poet John Gay
(early 18th century):

As once I play "d at Blindman" s Buff, it hap "t

About my eyes the towel thick was wrapt.

I miss "d the swains, and seiz" d on Blouzelind,

True speaks that antient proverb."Love is blind" 145 .

In domestic science, the first who paid enlightened attention to the game of blindfolds was, apparently, I. P. Sakharov. Sakharov describes this game (in Tales of the Russian People, 1837) as Russian, although it is obvious that in his description he is close not so much to the folk tradition as to the tradition of gallant amusements of the "high society":
“Blind Man's Bluff, or Blind Goat, is a home game, a game of girls and young men, on big winter evenings. Blindfolded girls, as it were

144
deprived of sight, they try more to succumb to the hands of amiable young men, and there is nothing to say about men. There is no doubt that this game was invented by love: after all, our ancestors loved no worse than us. 1 46 .

The perception of the game of blind man's blind man's as a game of love, erotic, "pre-wedding" is very popular (also, for example, the game of blind man's blind man is depicted by a contemporary of I.P. later - by the sculptor M. A. Chizhov (marble group "Blind Man's Bluff", 1873); the same meanings are played out in the plot and musical ups and downs of the eponymous operetta by Johann Strauss "Blindekuh", 1878), and at the same time quite symbolically, supplemented and complicated by the motives of death / birth, recognition, etc. In this case, the ritual practice of the wedding in a remarkable way corresponds to the fairy-tale motivations of the “wedding” plots.

In a fairy tale, the hero searches for and “blindly” recognizes a missing or kidnapped bride 147 ; Elena the Wise wants to marry only someone who can hide from not hiding 148 ; the king marries his daughter only to the one who guesses her signs 149 ; a blindfolded soldier is taken to the count's house on a date with a woman, later he recognizes her by the mark made on her face 150 ; on the way to the groom, the maid blinds the princess and pretends to be the royal bride, the princess returns her eyes and marries her betrothed 151 ; the husband forbids his wife to look at him; when she wants to look

145
at him in the light, the husband disappears, she looks for him and finds him (the plot of Cupid and Psyche 152 ). Obscene travesty of "blind" recognition of a wife by a husband can be found in D. Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" (end of the 14th century). The blinded old man does not let go of his young wife. Walking with her husband in the garden, the wife asks her husband for permission to pick a pear and climbs a tree where her lover is waiting for her. Husband suddenly sees his wife in the arms of her lover, but the wife assures him that he dreamed it 153 .

From the “initiatory” point of view, it seems important that the bride and groom participate in the ritual situation of a visual choice, gaining new knowledge through this choice (cf. Russian: the bride is “unknown” 154 ) and a new social fate, a new birth, a "seen" future. At the same time, the “rebirth” of the initiates, which is equally characteristic of initiation and wedding, is functionally structured as an interchange of roles in the game of hide and seek - between those who seek (catch, find out, guess) and those who are sought. The last circumstance deserves attention.

In general terms, the role-playing reversibility of the game of blind man's buff is reminiscent of inversions of a ritual and festive nature, offering a necessary alternative to the norms of ideological everyday life. The vast literature that exists on this subject testifies that in the “symbolic culture”, in fact, all binary oppositions are subject to “conversion”, inversion: up and down, life and death, gods and demons, shine darkness, day and night, people and animals ... sex roles,

146
differences and signs, from clothing to sexual positions" 1 55 . By changing the game status, the game participant evaluates the latter as normative or non-normative (“good” or “bad”, “correct” or “incorrect”, etc.) in the context of those semantic variations that are already present in one way or another in culture and which, on the one hand, on the other hand, they help him to strengthen his knowledge of the norm, and on the other hand, they draw his attention to the possibilities of its mediation. Gnoseologically, any opposition is conditionally and psychologically contradictory, revealing the subordination of one member of the opposition to another. 156 . In this case, this means that blindness is not only opposed to vision - and death is opposed to life - but also that not a single member of this opposition can be imagined without the other and outside this opposition, and the social (linguistic, in particular) breeding of the semantically derived series "life - death » is complicated by their mutually corresponding complementarity to some common ontological foundation 157 . It is curious that the Indo-European horizon of etymologization brings the Russian “blown-in blind”, “squint”, “gloom” with Lithuanian margas, Latvian margs - “variegated” and, further, with such words (German morgen, Gothic maurgins, other-Isl. myrkvi, etc.), whose semantics is determined, on the one hand, by mutually exclusive, and, on the other hand, by mutually correlated connotations of light and dark, white and black 158 . Continuing the analogy with fortune-telling, let us now say that, like a fortune-teller, the blind man's blind man deals with what is given to him as an object of appropriation, as something else in itself.

147
On the actional side, touch, blow, push, which almost always act as elements of the game of blind man's blind in the course of its plot, correlate with the general dynamics of the plot action, oriented towards "itself", the space limited by it, and, in the end, the reciprocity of the game itself, which, as it were, already cannot be finally completed (cf. with this exchange motif in riddles on the theme of death: "I was what you are today, you will be what you are today" 159 ). Psychiatrists are well aware of cases when the desire for touch takes the form of a painful obsession, a neurotic compulsion aimed at relieving feelings of anxiety, fear, emotional discomfort. 160 . Touching another person or any object prevents the “infection” associated with them, as if “giving away” in advance what could potentially be taken over from the object of contact, and thereby prevents the “infection” of the toucher. So, in the north of Russia it was believed that the fear of the dead is removed if you touch the dead body 161 . A similar custom of touching the dead is known in England. 162 . "Taken" is returned before it was taken. In functional terms, the behavioral fixation of compulsive acts appears (and is terminologically described) as a stereotype of ritual and magical actions of a protective nature, and the symbolism of obsessive touch is positively explained as ritual anticipation, a ritual “anticipation of the future”, in which the real fear of pollution when touched (misophobia) and in this case, the fear of death associated with it (thanatophobia) is deactivated by its effective anticipation 163 . Probably psychologically the act of touch restores

the ontological autonomy of the toucher in that it fixes the mutual reversibility of the given and the given, received and returned, which is basic for this autonomy. 164 . Psychologists and philosophers correlate the role of touch and gaze in this paragraph. 165 . Tactile appropriation is largely analogous to visual appropriation (on folklore and ethnographic material, a strong argument in favor of such an analogy is, in particular, beliefs about the "evil eye" and the role of the "evil eye"). The toucher "appropriates" the touched, the seer - the visible, and vice versa. In both cases, reversibility serves as a therapeutic ontologization of the subject 166 . The psychotherapeutic - cathartic - effect of playing blind man's blind is identical, as I think, therefore, to the effect of the player's self-identification. It can be said that the blind man's blind man plays "in himself." He plays with himself. In the inversion of vision and blindness, life and death, one's otherness, the blind man's blind man's play affirms an appropriation, similar to Narcissus's appropriation of his own reflection and his own destiny (cf. a game of staring eyes, similar in this respect, the winner of which is the one who "revises", and the loser - who look away or blink 167 ).

The actional practice of playing blind man's buff is accompanied by the narrative thematization of its plot. The latter demonstrates an "initiation" event and an identifying assignment situation.

149
* * *
Among the Russian folklore texts that mention the game of hide and seek, the most frequent are texts on the plot "stepmother and stepdaughter" 168 . In general, this plot is the story of a stepdaughter sent by the will of an evil stepmother to the forest and happily escaping from the death that threatens her there. In the forest, the stepdaughter is subjected to trials, one of which, and at the same time, the main one for a significant part of the texts, is the game of blind man's buff. In the forest, the stepdaughter finds herself in a house, with the owner of which she plays hide and seek. Such masters in the fairy tale are called goblin, "a horse (mare's) head." Baba Yaga, and most often a bear, forcing the stepdaughter to play with them on the condition that either they catch and destroy her, or, if she remains uncaught, they will reward her and let her go home. It is worth noting that it is the owners of the forest house who play the role of blind catchers, and their image itself is unequivocally associated with the other world (not excluding the bear, whose appearance, according to popular belief, often takes on the goblin 169 ).So the “blindness” they voluntarily act out seems to confirm them even more in this “otherworldly” connection. The mouse helps the stepdaughter to escape, grateful to her for the earlier service and pretending to be the stepdaughter herself in the game (which, in general, is quite identical to the concealment of the name used by Odysseus at Polyphemus and other heroes deceiving the demons). 170 ). Having received the promised reward, the stepdaughter returns home. After that, the stepmother's own daughter, or the stepmother herself, wanting to be gifted, also goes to the forest, where she dies, unable to withstand the same test and, in contrast, emphasizing the seriousness of the outcome of the game he proposed.

150
Judging by the number of known recordings of this tale 171 , the latter seems to be one of the most popular in the fairy tale tradition of the Eastern Slavs, and given the typological proximity of its main plot elements to the most archaic examples of the fairy tale genre (according to V. Ya. difficult task 172 ), not only the general scheme of this plot, but also its specific details are an expression of a still quite relevant ritual or everyday mythology. First of all, these are the same themes of fate, death, divination, images of a frighteningly different and ideologically necessary future. The same themes are true - regardless of any unity of the folklore typology proper - literary texts that mention or describe the game of blind man's buff.

"Blinding" from love, leading to a comic game of blind man's buff with his beloved, is the plot of one of the short stories of "Pleasant Nights" by Straparola (1550). Unrequitedly seeking a meeting with Theodosia, Carlo forcibly climbs into her house and attacks her beloved. The unfortunate woman offers prayers to the Lord.
“And as soon as she mentally prayed, she miraculously disappeared without a trace, and the Lord darkened Carlo’s light of his mind so much that he stopped recognizing anything and, believing that he was touching the girl, hugging her, kissing and possessing her, pressed him to himself, hugged and kissed nothing more than oven pots, boilers, skewers, cast iron and other objects that were in the kitchen. Having satiated his unbridled lust, Karl felt that a flame was flaring up in his chest again, and once again he rushed to embrace the irons, as if
it was Theodosia. And he so smeared his hands and face on sooty cast-irons that it seemed as if it was not Carlo, but a demon. 173 .

151
The resemblance to a demon is not in vain. The servants standing at the door, “seeing him in such an ugly and disgusting form, looking more like a beast than a human being, and imagining that the devil himself or some kind of ghost were in front of them, they were determined to flee from him, as from an unprecedented monster. But plucking up courage and rushing towards him, and also peering into his face and discovering how vile and ugly it was, they rained countless blows on him with sticks. 174 . The anecdotal scene turns out to be real: saved by the Lord and faithful to the vow to preserve her virginity, Theodosia goes to the monastery, and Carlo dies deplorably during the siege of the castle.

In The Valencian Widow by Lope de Vega (1621), the play of blind man's buff corresponds to the plot of the widow's symbolically travesty marriage to her late husband. Leonard's young widow meets with the deceased's "deputy" young Camilo. The widow wants to remain unrecognized, "a lady without a face." Camilo himself has never seen the widow in the light, and he is led to her like a "blind chicken" (Spanish name for the game of blind man's blind man). 175 , - in a mask and a hood. Not only the widow, but also the other participants in the play remain faceless and nameless for Camilo (so Camilo himself is forced to assign “guessed” names to them 176 ). He calls himself and behaves like a blind man - in full accordance with the maxim proclaimed by him "love is blind." Events develop in this game unpredictably. The widow, suspecting Camilo of infidelity, makes him believe that the object of his love is an old woman like death.

152
Caught blindly by a stranger, fate threatens to be fatal for him 177 . Ultimately, the misunderstanding is happily resolved. Camilo refuses
from his voluntary blindness and "sees clearly" in order to connect his future with the widow "recognized" by him in a timely manner. The fate of the heroes is realized, in this way, as a kind of overcoming of darkness and the apotheosis of light (mentioned in the course of the play more than a dozen times), which is necessary in this case to separate the future from the “deadly” past (the late husband of the widow and the cemetery fantasy of Camilo 178 ).

The thematicization of the game of blind man's buff in the operaG is interesting. Purcell's "The Fairy Queen" (1692). The libretto of the opera was written by an anonymous author based on Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream and, in general, although in a very abbreviated form, reproduces its plot outline: the story of heroes in love, their misadventures and a happy marriage. In Shakespeare's own comedy, there is no mention of blind man's blind man's play. In the libretto, blind man's blind man's blind man (also absent from Shakespeare) is mentioned at the very beginning of the opera, in a scene that precedes the main conflict of the subsequent action. The poet calls to play the fairies circling around him 179 . The game being played is amusing and symbolic at the same time. The fusion of reality and fantasy, fundamental for Shakespeare, is preserved here, as if even more emphasized against the background of the opposition between the ordinary (the mortal poet) and the magical (fairies), the serious and the funny (the farcical travesty of the tragic story of Pyramus and Thisbe played by the artisans). Ultimately, with all the twists and turns of fate, her "game" is like a game of blind man's blind man - it turns the possible into reality and in this sense justifies the hopes placed on it.

153
We find a terrible scene of playing blind man's blind man in the already mentioned above "Parisian secrets" by Eugene Sue (1843). In the gallery of criminals passing through its pages, one of the most notorious is the killer nicknamed Literacy. A literate man is caught and blinded (and symbolically, as K. Marx and F. Engels pointed out in a lengthy analysis of the “Parisian Secrets”, castrated 180 ) by its main antagonist and corrector of the criminal world, Duke Rodolphe (realizing in this regard the cherished idea of ​​Eugene Sue himself: see above). Blinded Literate imprisoned in the basement by his former brothers in the craft, fearing his repentance and denunciation. These fears are justified. Blinding (ges r. castration) is designed to teach the Literate to pray, "to turn the robber-Hercules into a monk" 181 The literate man experiences pangs of conscience because of the murders he committed and the visions that torment him now. Once in the basement, he manages to find himself face to face with Sychikha, a former companion, now reminiscent of the painful past for the Gramotey. The pathetic description of their meeting corresponds to the romantic didactics of the novel: a person is obliged to confront his fate. Gramotey's belated confrontation with fate is expressed in the blind hunt for Sychikha (which to a large extent acts as the alter ego of Gramotey himself). A literate man catches Sychikha and at the same time threatens to blind her 182 .

“Something terrible happened in the pitch darkness of the basement. From there came only a strange clatter, an incomprehensible shuffling, interrupted from time to time by a dull noise, it might seem that a box of bones is hitting a stone, and this box, which they are trying to split, jumps and falls to the ground. 183 .

154
As a result, having killed Sychikha (and, according to Marx and Engels, having fulfilled his moral duty), Literate is sent to a lunatic asylum, where he worries
the final and predicted rebirth for him by Duke Rodolphe.

The theme of "initiatory" identification of the game of blind man's buff and the "game of fate" also characterizes such a famous work as "Treasure Island" by R. L. Stevenson (1883). In the context of a general pathos novel, with its motives for searching and guessing, the appearance of the terrible blind man Pew, presenting the captain Billy Bones with a “black mark”, serves as the beginning of events that dramatically change the fate of the characters and sum up the social maturation of Hawkins. This appearance itself is described as the blind persecution of a sighted person. 184 ) and, like the image of Aeschylus Erinyes, emphatically “fateful”. Death overtakes the captain immediately after he receives the "black mark". Hawkins narrowly escapes the same fate. At the same time, the image of the captain and the image of Hawkins are interestingly correlated: Hawkins experiences the death of the captain in the same way as the death of his father 185 , and it is about Hawkins that Pugh remembers after the death of the captain - he recalls to regret that he did not "gouge out his eyes" 186 , that is, thereby did not liken him to himself.

155
The image of a blind herald of fate is present in yet another novel by Stevenson - "The Black Arrow" (1888). Here it is the evil genius of the protagonist of the novel, knight Daniel, pretending to be a blind leper (see book 1, ch. 7: "A Man with a Covered Face"). The meeting of Dick and his companion Matcham with Daniel in the forest is described as an ominous game of blind man's buff. Blind Seeker:
“The leper jumped out from behind the bushes with a cry and ran straight at the boys. Shouting loudly, they rushed in different directions. But their terrible enemy quickly overtook Matcham and seized him tightly. The forest echo picked up Matcham's desperate cry. He trembled convulsively and lost consciousness. 187 .

The subsequent events of the novel develop the initiatory nature of this ordeal: having gone through many misadventures, Dick acquires the title of a knight and marries his beloved (who, unexpectedly for him, turns out to be a girl who took the name of Matcham).

Consonant with the themes of fate and death, we find an interesting description of the game of blind man's blind man in Jack London's film novel Hearts of Three (1919). The heroes here fall into the hands of noble robbers and appear before the court of their leader - a blind old man, personifying Harsh Justice (ch. 10, 11). The blind man delivers his verdict, probing the pulse beat at the temples of the heroes, but even he cannot judge two of the heroes. He assigns a test to them, which, in his words, “gives an infallible answer: this is the test of the Snake and the Bird. It is as infallible as God himself is infallible, for in this way he restores the truth. 188 . A divinely infallible and truth-restoring test turns out to be a blind man's blind man's game - with that

156 EVERYDAY AND MYTHOLOGY
modification that the one of the two opponents who is blindfolded (Snake) can make one shot at the other opponent to the sound of the bell (Bird) that he has. In the context of the adventure plot and according to the laws of the genre chosen by London, justice triumphs: the positive hero avoids death, while the negative one loses and eventually dies. The events following the test itself fully confirm the “chosenness of God” 189 the winning hero and, in addition, the miraculousness of the risk that accompanies him and his friends.

V. Nabokov's Camera Obscura (1932) ends with a deadly game of hide and seek. In the closed space of the room, the blinded Krechmar tries to find and kill Magda, who betrayed him.
“Kretschmar, holding a Browning gun in his right hand, felt for the left jamb of the open door, entered, slammed the door behind him and leaned back against it. The silence continued. He knew that he and Magda were alone in this room, from where there was only one way out - the one that he blocked.<...>Straightening his arm, he began to wave the Browning in front of him, trying to force some explanatory sound. By instinct, however, he knew that Magdah was somewhere near a hill with miniatures - from there came the lightest, poisonous, fragrant warmth, and something was trembling there, as the air trembles in the heat. He began to narrow the arc along which he drove the barrel, and suddenly there was a soft creak. Fire? No, it's still early. You need to get closer. He hit the table and stopped. The poisonous heat had shifted somewhere, but he did not catch the sound of transition over the thunder and crackle of his own steps. Yes, now it was to the left, near the window. lock up for

157
a door, then it will be freer. The key was missing. Then he grabbed the edge of the table and, retreating, pulled it towards the door. Again, the heat moved, narrowed, decreased. He forced the door, and again began to drive the Browning in front of him, and again found it in a gloomy trembling point. 190 .

As in the novel by J. London, this is also a scene of judgment and revenge. Krechmar takes revenge on Magda for betrayal, warped life, his own blindness. He thinks that by shooting Magda, he will find "peace, clarity, liberation from darkness" 191 . The desired, however, does not happen. Krechmar dies himself, summing up the story of fate, striking with the tragic fatalism of what is happening,
thoughtless accident of all the actions of the protagonist. His love for Magda is accidental, the collapse of the family paradise, the death of his daughter, a car accident leading to blindness. The very accident of physical blindness in this case “materializes” Kretschmar’s existential blindness (note that phraseologically, the theme of darkness and blindness accompanies the image of Kretschmar from the first pages of the novel: when Kretschmar finds out about the birth of his wife, “a fine black rain appeared before his eyes” 192 ; the place of the first meeting with Magda is the dark hall of the cinema, and the place of the last one is the dark room of the apartment; "dark room" - the Latin name of the novel itself is translated; having rented an apartment for Magda, he pays for it “blindly” 193 etc.). It can be said that for
long before the culminating game of blind man's blind with Magda, Krechmar is already playing blind man's blind with his own fate (despite the fact that the "fatal" image of Magda, of course, is beyond doubt). Plays and loses.

158
Distracting from the plot motivations of the above scenes from the novels of J. London and V. Nabokov, it is interesting to note that the blind players in the blind man's blind of the New Age (relatively speaking) show a curious penchant for weapons. A striking example of this kind of innovation today is not so much literature as cinema. Characteristic is the use of the blind man's blind man's plot, which became the plot basis of the American film "Blind Fury" (1989, dir. F. Noyce). The blind hero of this film, using the skills of a "tough guy" and having developed extraordinary abilities to navigate in the dark, takes revenge on a gang of thugs, who killed his friend. The blind heroine of the Waste Prayer, forced to defend herself against a sighted killer, kills him with a knife. An armed blind man is more dangerous than an unarmed one - such is a rational innovation, a reminder of the mythological danger posed by the blind to the sighted. But it is obvious that the fact of this danger and the mise-en-scene that manifests it remain the same, and in this respect - difficult to explain "trivialities" of arbitrarily non-trivial plots.

The connotations that accompany the thematization of the play of the blind man - even when it seems to be conditioned only phraseologically - are stable enough to limit them to a narrow circle of motives of death, fate and freedom of choice that dominate them. So, for example, as a seemingly only phraseological turn, the game of blind man's blind man is mentioned by the hero of Rex Stout, unraveling a criminal case: “All I could do to solve the puzzle was to blindfold and play blind man's blind man - whoever I catch first, he will There is

159
murderer" 194 . In Russian, this usage is supported by the turnover "play in the dark", in the meaning: to act risky, not knowing the situation, believing random luck 1 95 - and, in addition, the occasional use of jargon "blind" in the sense of: secret agent, spy 196 . The last meaning, as far as one can judge, is typical not only for the Russian language. In the poem of the Salvadoran Heriberto Montano "Senor Namer" (1975), the sinister pursuers of the hero are depicted as such:

being searched and slapped

looking for gun papers or evidence
what they are looking for us
that we are exactly who they are looking for
blind bloodhounds will say: but how
there you are, motherfucker 197 .

Similar connotations of "playing blind man's blind man" are given as a plot motivation in Andrey Gulyashka's detective story The Sleeping Beauty (fourth part of The Adventures of Avvakum Zakhov, 1962)198. The hero of this quite primitive, but once very popular among the general reader of the book, the captain of the Bulgarian state security service Avvakum, accidentally becomes a participant in the game of hide and seek in the house of equally casual acquaintances. The game is offered by one of these acquaintances (Ch. 3). Turning over the page with its description, the reader learns that at the time when Avvakum and his friends are playing hide and seek, a diversion has been committed on the nearby border. Accomplices of saboteurs do not sleep: the head of the house where the game of blind man's blind is played is killed because he helped the Bulgarian counterintelligence agents

160
encrypt the incriminating document. The matter is continued by Avvakum; he deciphers the cipher and finds out who the foreign agent and the culprit of the murder is: this is the nephew of the murdered man, the same one, at the insistence of which, several chapters before the fatal denouement, her heroes played blind man's blind.

At the level of a phraseological - and metaphorical - reflex, the theme of playing blind man's blind man is present in Andrey Voronin's multi-volume tabloid epic about the adventures of Gleb Siverov, a professional killer agent named Blind ("The blind shoots without a miss", "The blind against the maniac", "Labyrinth for the Blind", "Blind in the zone ”, “A load for the Blind”, etc.). emphasized by the image of the hero in constant dark glasses on the covers of the publication, is quite relevant to the self-legality of the "supreme" power, which opposes the laws of the "lower" world. The murderous hero is "blind" in this case to the same extent that fate is "blind", punishing those who unlawfully experience it.

With the probable, as I think, correspondence between the descriptions and references to the game of blind man's buff to the topic of initiatory tests and the practice of ritual divination, which phenomenologically "clarifies" it, the nature of this correspondence seems to be all the more striking, the less conditioned it seems in its genre, lexical-stylistic and rhetorical expression,
the more unexpectedly justifying him - and justifying -

161
the general context he gives them. The reason for superstitious thoughts on this subject is given by N. Berberova, who describes N. S. Gumilyov's blind man's blind man's game with the listeners of the "Sounding Shell" poetry studio on August 2, 1921 - on the eve of the poet's disastrous arrest.
“After the“ lecture ”, Gumilyov suggested that the students play hide and seek, and everyone began to run around him with pleasure, blindfolding his eyes with a handkerchief. I could not force myself to run with everyone together - this game seemed to me to be something artificial, I wanted more poetry, more conversations about poetry, but I was afraid that my refusal would seem insulting to them, and did not know what to decide on. In the end, I forced myself to join the players, although I suddenly became bored from running around, and I was glad when it all ended - that - something was fake here.<...>That night in bed, I made the decision not to see him again. And I never met him again, because at dawn on the 3rd, on Wednesday, he was arrested. 199 .

* * *
Examples of narrative thematization of blind man's blind man's play can undoubtedly be multiplied. For our purpose, the above examples are sufficient to at least assert behind them a certain interconnection of the contexts that accompany them. Metaphors, like the books that preserve them, have their own destinies. The preference shown by one book over others is identical to the choice of individual ideas and, therefore, metaphors or figures of speech expressing these ideas, carrying out, according to Aristotle, the transfer of an unusual name or “from genus to species, or from species

162
by genus, or from species to species, or by analogy" 200 . At the same time, we repeat, the history of ideas cannot be considered the history of metaphors that is primary in relation to the history of metaphors, which are as resultant as they determine the ideological strategies of human thinking, behavior, everyday life, and culture in general.

The history of culture is “spoken out” with favorite metaphors, gravitating towards whimsically alternating units of metaphorical worldview and revealing historically changing patterns of meanings explicated by metaphors and immanently permeating culture. To some extent, the nature of such “pronunciation” is similar to speech, burdened with accidental unconscious reservations, if not changing the meaning of what was said, then letting you know what can be added to this meaning. 201 . From this point of view, the meaning supplemented by metaphor tempts to turn out to be precisely that “real” and “full” meaning that clarifies both what is said and what is silent, synthesizes the everyday and the mythological. Unable to give up the idea that this kind of temptation is a propaedeutic condition for social self-identification, we note, of course, that the latter seems to us not indifferent to the frequency configurability of metaphors “cultivated” in society. In other words, from a social science point of view, metaphors are the more interesting, the thicker they are. presented in a particular culture, the higher the degree of their discursive (narrative and actional) presence and ideological (for example, ritual) mediation. In the function of metaphor, the game of blind man's buff fits, I think, into the history of enduring mythologemes.

163
language and consciousness. The confrontation between the blind and the sighted in itself seems quite absurd to be either ridiculed (remember Aristotle’s definition of funny: “Funny is some mistake and ugliness, but painless and harmless” 202 ), or, on the contrary, not taken too seriously - due to the other that admits this absurdity. In terms of composition, such an admission is effective already because it is effective. However, in terms of explanation, this is not so much a subject of historical and philological as of psychological analysis.

164
Notes

1 Dal V. Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language.T. 1. St. Petersburg; M., 1882 (reprint 1955). S. 546.
2 Grasberger S. Erziehung und Unterricht in klassischen Altertum. Stuttgart, 1864. 8. 40-42.
3 Pokrovsky E. A. Children's games, mostly Russian. SPb., 1994. S. 204-213; Games of the peoples of the USSR. Sat. materials. M.; L., 1933. S. 391-400.
4 On the concepts of plot and content in applications to games, see: Elkonin D.B. From scientific diaries // Elkonin D.B. Selected psychological works. M., 1989. S. 324; Putilov B. N. Folklore and folk culture. SPb., 1994. S. 185,187-188.
5 Levin Yu. I. Russian metaphor. Synthesis, semantics, transformation // Proceedings on sign systems. IV. Tartu, 1969.S. 290.
6 Scheflen A.E. Communicational Structure: Analysis of Psychotherapy Transactins, 1973. R. 201; Smirnov I. P. The place of the “mythopoetic” approach to a literary work among other interpretations of the text (About V. Mayakovsky’s poem “That’s how I became a dog”) // Myth. Folklore. Literature. L „1978. S. 186-187.
7 Putilov B. N. Folklore and folk culture. pp. 108-114, 117
8 Hazlitt W.C. Dictionary of Faiths and Folklore. L.,1905. R. 56.
9 Cassirer E. Language and Myth. N.Y., 1956. P. 8-9; Burke P. Strength and weaknesses of the history of mentalities (abstract presentation by E. M. Mikhina) // History of mentalities, historical anthropology. Foreign research in reviews and abstracts. M., 1996. S. 59.
10 Dyakonov I. M. Archaic myths of the East and West. M., 1990. pp. 31-42.

165
11 See K. Huebner's criticism of R. Barth, which is fair from this point of view: Huebner K. The truth of the myth. M., 1996. S. 334-336.
12 D'konov I.M. Archaic myths of the East and West.S. 41.
13 Mokienko V.M. Images of Russian speech: Historical, etymological and ethnolinguistic essays on phraseology. L., 1986. pp. 223-224.
14 Dal V.I. Proverbs of the Russian people. M., 1957. S. 281,283. See also the motif of stealing light from the eyes by death in the funeral lamentations: Lamentations. L., 1960. S. 256, 265; Baiburin A.K. Ritual in traditional culture. SPb., 1993.S.106.
15 Dal V.I. Proverbs of the Russian people. S. 283.
16 Nikiforovsky N. Ya. Common signs and beliefs, superstitious rites and customs in Vitebsk Belarus. Vitebsk, 1897. No. 2210; The life of the Great Russian peasant farmers. Description of the materials of the orthographic bureau of princeV. N. Tenisheva. (On the example of the Vladimir province). SPb., 1993. No. 233.
17 Gracian B, The Pocket Oracle. criticism. M., 1982.
S. 471.
18 There. S. 476.
19 See, for example, the Georgian belief, characteristic from this point of view, about the mother of Smallpox, bringing into the house the eyes of people struck by him: Gagulashvili I. Sh. On the symbolism of color in Georgian conspiracies // Folklore and Ethnography. At the ethnographic origins of folklore stories and images. L., 1984.S. 216. About the familiarity of these diseases in the life of Russian peasants at the very end of the 19th century: Life of the Great Russian peasant farmers. No. 473; Makarenko A. Materials on folk medicine of the Uzhur volost, Achinsk district. Yenisei province. // Living antiquity. 1897. Issue. 1. S. 66-69, 72.
20 Fasmer M. Etymological dictionary of the Russian language: In 4 volumes. T. 2. M., 1986. S. 60; Etymological dictionary of the Russian language. / Ed. N. M. Shansky. T. 1. Issue. 5. M., 1973. S. 295; Chernykh P. Ya. Historical and etymological dictionary of the modern Russian language: In 2 vols. T. 1. M., 1994. S. 304. Probably, the same verb series underlies the words that develop the meaning of “reap” - “clamp / not to give, to be stingy” (“zhmot”, dialect. “zhmor”, “zhmyr”. In the Olonets dialects, the word “zhmur” is known in this meaning). See: Lebedeva A. I. Words with the root zhm- in the meaning of “a miserly person” in Pskov and other dialects // Questions of theory and history of language. L., 1969. S. 258-263.
21 Cherepanova O. A. Mythological vocabulary of the Russian North. L., 1983. S. 25.
22 There. S. 62, 74.
23 Dal V.I. Explanatory Dictionary. T. 1. S. 546; Fasmer M. Etymological dictionary of the Russian language. T. 2. S. 60; Mitrofanov E., Nikitina T. Youth slang: Dictionary experience. M., 1994. S. 63; Kozlovsky V. Collection of Russian thieves' dictionaries: In 4 vols. Milyanenkov L. On the other side of the law: Encyclopedia of the underworld. SPb., 1992. S. 121.
24 Slavic Antiquities: Ethnolinguistic Dictionary: In 5 volumes / Under. ed. N. I. Tolstoy. T. 1. M., 1995. S. 122-123.
25 Popov G. I. Russian folk medicine. According to the materials of the ethnographic bureau of the book. V. N. Tenisheva // Toren M. D. Russian folk medicine and psychotherapy. SPb., 1996. S. 303.
26 Afanasiev A. N. Poetic views of the Slavs on nature: In 3 vols. T. 3. M., 1994. S. 81.
27 Potebnya A. A. O mythological significance some rituals and beliefs // Readings in the Society of Russian History and Antiquities. 1865. Prince. 3. V. Ya. Propp considered the blindness of Baba Yaga to be primordial (Propp V. Ya. Historical roots of a fairy tale. L., 1986. S. 72-73).
28 Afanasiev A. N. Folk Russian fairy tales: In 3 vols. M., 1958. No. 106.
29 Khudyakov I. A. Great Russian fairy tales. Issue. 1-3. M., 1863. No. 52.
30 Propp V. Ya. Historical roots of a fairy tale. S. 73.
31 Cistow K. W. Baba-Jaga // Märchenspiegel. November 1996 S. 39-41.
32 Kozlovsky V. Collection of Russian thieves' dictionaries.T. 3. S. 121, 141.
33 Dyakonov I. M. Archaic myths. S. 131.
34 Devkin V.D. German-Russian dictionary of colloquial vocabulary. M., 1994. S. 127.
35 Homer "Iliad", 9, 447-461; Apollodorus, 3, 1, 1.
36 Apollodorus, 7, 4, 3.
37 C / o E. Parisian secrets. / Per. Y. Lesyuk and M. Treskunov. T. 2. M., 1989. S. 582.
38 Homer "Iliad", b, 130-140.
39 Songs collected by P. N. Rybnikov: In 3 volumes. T. 1. Petrozavodsk, 1989. No. 44. Cf. with this legend about the blinding of the tsar who tortured St. Christopher: Zhdanov I. To the literary history of Russian epic poetry. Kyiv, 1881. S. 173.
40 The Tale of Bygone Years // Artistic prose of Kievan Rus of the XI-XIII centuries. M., 1957. S. 134.
41 Zubov V.P. Leonardo da Vinci. M.; L., 1961. S. 157.
42 Propp V. Ya. Ritual laughter in folklore (About the fairy tale about Nesmeyan) // Propp V. Ya. Folklore and reality. Featured articles. M., 1976.
43 See, for example, the motif of blinding as a punishment for irreverent laughter in German folklore: Veselovsky A. N. Research in the field of Russian spiritual verse. (Notes of the Imperial Academy of Sciences. T. 45.) M., 1883. S. 119. About the symbolic connection between laughter and the eye: Karasev LV Philosophy of laughter. M., 1996.S. 105-109.
44 Afanasiev A.N. Folk Russian fairy tales. No. 93, 303. Compare: Propp V. Ya. The historical roots of a fairy tale. S. 75.
45 Tolstoy N.I. Language and folk culture. Essays on Slavic mythology and ethnolinguistics. M., 1995. S. 189-194.
46 There. S. 194.
47 Afanasyev A.N. The origin of the myth. Articles on folklore, ethnography and mythology. M., 1996. S. 292.
48 Gogol N. V. Sobr. cit.: In 6 volumes. T. 2. M., 1959. S. 184.186.
49 Wanecek O. Der Blinde in der Sage, im Marchen und in der Legende // Zeitschrift fur osterreichischen Blindwesen, 1919.
50 See: Krogius A. A. The sixth sense in the blind // Bulletin of Psychology. 1907. Issue. 1; Vygotsky L. S. Blind child // Vygotsky L. S. Sobr. cit.: In 6 volumes. T. 5. M., 1983; Ivanov Vyach. Sun. Higher forms of human behavior in the light of the problem of dominance of the hemispheres // About the human in a person. M., 1991.
51 Ivanov Vyach. Sun. Even and odd: Asymmetry of the brain and sign systems. M., 1978. S. 54.
52 Homer "Odyssey", 8, 63-64.
53 Cicero "Tusculanae disputationes", v. 39, 14; cf.: Plato "Phaedo", 65c-67.
54 Evans I.H. The Wordsworth Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. L., 1993. P. 122. About John Fielding, “a story, or perhaps a legend, tells that by the end of his life (Jonumer in 1780) he could distinguish 3,000 criminals by their voices” (Torvald Yu. One Hundred Years of Forensic Science. Ways of Development of Forensic Science Moscow, 1975, p. 45). About Vanga, see: Stoyanova K. Bulgarskata prophetess Vanga. Sofia, 1990. Compare: Borges X. L. Blindness // Borges X. L. Works: In 3 volumes. T. 3. Riga, 1994. S. 403-404.
55 Afanasiev A. The origin of the myth. S. 237.
56 Mythological stories and legends of the Russian North. /Comp. O. A. Cherepanova. SPb., 1996. S. 165.
57 Afanasiev A. The origin of the myth. S. 249.
58 Girard R. La violence et sacre. P., 1972. R. 18-20.
59 Propp V. Ya. Historical roots of a fairy tale.S. 73-74; see also: Neklyudov S.Yu. On the Crooked Werewolf: On the Study of the Mythological Semantics of the Folk Motif // Problems of Slavic Ethnography. To the 100th anniversary of the birth of D.K. Zelenin. L., 1979. S. 133-141.
60 Apollodorus "Mythological Library", 2, 4; 2.
61 New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology. L., 1974.R. 255, 227.
62 Semenov L.P. On the issue of world motives in the folkloringush and Chechens // Academy of Sciences of the USSR AcademicianN. I. Marru. M.; L., 1935. S. 556-558.
63 Novichkova T. A. Russian demonological dictionary. St. Petersburg, 1995. S. 340-343; Vlasova M. New ABEVEGA of Russian superstitions. SPb., 1995. S. 220.
64 Zelenin D.K. Taboo of words among the peoples of Eastern Europe and North Asia. Part 2. // Collection of Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography. T. 9. L., 1930. S. 118, 139; Kagorov E.G. Verbal elements of the rite // From the history of Russian-Soviet folklore. L., 1981. S. 68-69.
65 Foucault M. Words and Things: Archeology of the Humanities. St. Petersburg, 1994. S. 79, 92-96.
66 Rudnev V. Fiction and modal logic // Daugava. 1989. No. 7. S. 105-106; Tselishchev VV The logic of existence. Novosibirsk, 1976.
67 Mythological stories of the Russian population of Eastern Siberia. / Comp. V. P. Zinoviev. Novosibirsk, 1987, pp. 36-50,165, 196; Afanasiev A.N. Folk Russian fairy tales. No. 560,568. Compare: Zelenin D.K. Taboo of words. pp. 123, 126, 129, 136.
68 See, for example, the development of the theme of name-wording in philosophy: Florensky P. Names. Kostroma, 1993; Losev A.F. Philosophy of the name // Losev A.F. From early works. M., 1990.
69 Radford M.A. Radford E. Encyclopedia of Superstitions. M., 1995. S. 349.
70 See: Propp V. Ya. Historical roots. S. 72; Tolstoy N.I. Language and folk culture. S. 195.
71 Agapkina T. A., Levkievskaya E. E. Voice // Slavic antiquities: ethnolinguistic dictionary. T. 1. S. 512-513.
72 Darkevich V.P. Folk culture of the Middle Ages: secular festive life in the art of the 9th-16th centuries. M., 1988.S. 140, 141, ill. tab. 70 and 71.
73 There. S. 141.
74 Chubinsky P.P. Proceedings of an ethnographic-statistical expedition to the Western Russian Territory. T. 4. St. Petersburg, 1877. S. 705-706. Other examples (“shovel games”): Bogatyrev P. G. Games in the funeral rites of Transcarpathia // Sex and erotica in Russian traditional culture. M., 1996. S. 489-490.
75 Beletskaya N. N. On the rudiments of pagan ritual actions in the Slavic-Balkan funeral rites // Macedonian folklore. XV. Issue. 29-30. 1982. S. 101.
76 Beletskaya N. N. Pagan symbolism of Slavic archaic rituals. M., 1978. Sec. 1; Fasmer M. Etymological dictionary of the Russian language. T. 2. S. 526-527.
77 Nisbet R. Prejudices: a philosophical dictionary. L., 1982. R. 90.
78 Compare: Baiburin A.K. Ritual in traditional culture, p. 101, 111-112.
79 Beletskaya N. N. Pagan symbolism ... S. 102-105.
80 Zilotina E. A., Smirnova O. V. Materials on children's folklore (From the collection of the Folklore and Ethnographic Center of the St. Petersburg Conservatory) // World of Childhood and Traditional Culture. M., 1994. S. 174.
81 For the distribution of the plot itself as a fairy tale, see an old study: Grimm W. Die Sage vom Polyphem. B., 1857; Yavorsky Yu. From the collection of Galician-Russian fairy tales: the tale of Polyphemus // Living Antiquity, 1898. Issue. 3-4. pp. 441-442.
82 Aeschylus "The Choefors", 1058.
83 Aeschylus, The Eumenides, 54.
84 Homer "Iliad", 9, 571.
85 Aeschylus, The Eumenides, 69-73 (translated by S. Apt).
86 Goran V.P. Ancient Greek mythology of fate. Novo-
Siberian, 1990. S. 152-153.
87 Aeschylus, The Eumenides, 952-953.
88 Aeschylus "Prometheus", 516.
89 Mikhelson M. I. Russian thought and speech: one’s own and others. Experience of Russian phraseology: a collection of figurative words and expressions: In 2 vols. T. 2. M., 1994. S. 277.
90 Dal V. Proverbs. P. 172. A possible addition to the same series is productive. See, for example, a poem in prose. S. Turgenev “Necessitas, Vis, Libertas”, where sighted Freedom is described as caught by blind Necessity and blind Force (Turgenev I. S. Complete collection of works and letters. T. 10. M., 1982. S. 149.
91 Compare: Zaitsev A. I. Cultural revolution in ancient greece VIII-V centuries BC e. L., 1985. S. 70-73; Klochkov I.S. Spiritual culture of Babylonia: man, destiny, time. M., 1983.S. 43-46; Vezhbitskaya A. Fate and predestination // Path. International Philosophical Journal. No. 5 (1994). pp. 92-93; Tsivyan T.V. Man and his fate - a sentence in the model of the world // The concept of fate in the context of different cultures. M., 1994.
92 Homer "Iliad", 24, 527.
93 Tolstaya S. M. “Verbs of fate” and their correlates in the language of culture // The concept of fate in the context of different cultures. 146.
94 Cm.: Homans G. Anxiety and Ritual. The Theories of Malinowski and Radcliff-Brown // American Anthropologist. 1941.N0. 43.
95 Golosovker Ya. E. The logic of myth. M., 1987. S. 52; Ivanov V. V. Eye // Myths of the peoples of the world. Encyclopedia: In 2 vols. 1. M., 1991. S. 306; Kerlot X. E. Dictionary of symbols. M., 1994. pp. 141-142.
96 Kabir. Granthawali: (Collection) / Trans. with braj and commentary. N. B. Gafurova. M., 1992. S. 104.

97 Pauluy Real-Encyclopadie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft. Stuttgart, 1895. S p. 171.
98 Jobes G. Dictionary of Mythology, Folklore and Symbols. P.1. N.Y.., 1962. R. 588.
99 Dal V. Proverbs. S. 926.
101 Otkupshchikov Yu. V. To the origins of the word. M., 1973. S. 93-94.
102 Huizinga I. Nom about Ludens. In the shadow of tomorrow M., 1992. S. 23.
103 There. S. 30.
104 Sutton-Smith B. The Games of New Zealand Children. Berkeley, 1959. R. 57.
105 Vinogradov G.S. Death and the afterlife in the views of the Russian old-timer population of Siberia. Irkutsk, 1923.S. 23. See also: Usacheva VV Ritual deception in folk medicine // Living antiquity. 1996. No. 1. S. 29-30.
106 Dal V. Proverbs. S. 281.
107 Aries F. Man in the face of death. M., 1992. S. 506-507.
108 Durkheim E. Suicide: a sociological study. M.,
1994. S. 318-325.
109 Cm.: Baudrillard J. L "echange symbolique et la mort. P.,1976.
110 Wed: Bowker J. Die menschiche Vorstellung vom Tod // Der Tod in den Weltkulturen. S. 409-418.
11 1 Laplanche J., Pontalis J.-B. Dictionary of psychoanalysis. M., 1996. P. 94.
112 Lavrin A.P. Chronicles of Charon: Encyclopedia of death. M., 1993. S. 286-291
113 Ivleva L. M., Romodin A. V. Maslenitsa funeral game in the traditional culture of the Belarusian Lakeland // Spectacular and game forms of folk culture. L., 1990. S. 196-198. See also: Bershitam T. A. Spring-summer rituals of the Eastern Slavs: Shrovetide and the “funeral of Kostroma-Kostrub” // Ethnographic Science and Ethno-Cultural Processes: Methods of Interaction. SPb., 1993. S. 55; Gusev V. E. From ritual to folk theater (Evolution Christmas games in the deceased) // Folklore and ethnography. Rites and ritual folklore. L., 1974.
114 Ivleva L. Riazhenie in Russian traditional culture. St. Petersburg, 1994. S. 190. Note. 164. The author sees the peculiarity of such “pictorially neutral” masks in “producing the impression of a terrible on the verge of ridiculous”, and quotes the words of an informant: “At first they will be frightened, and then it will become funny” (p. 191).
11 5 Propp V. Ya. Russian agricultural holidays. L., 1963. S. 70.
116 Ivleva L. Riazhenie in Russian traditional culture.S. 85.
11 7 Morozov I. A. From the Ryazan ethno-dialect dictionary: "The funeral of a cockroach" // Living antiquity. 1996. No. 4. S. 4.
11 8 Puzzles. / Comp. V. V. Mitrofanova. L., 1968. No. 1655, 1659, 1665; see also: Volotskaya 3. M. The theme of death and burial in riddles // Small forms of folklore. / Sat. articles of memory L. Permyakova. M., 1995, S. 251.
119 Kapitsa OI Children's folklore: songs, nursery rhymes, teasers, fairy tales, games. L., 1928. S. 213-218 (bibliography); Bernshtam T. A. To the reconstruction of some rites of adulthood // Soviet ethnography. 1986. No. 6; Korshunkov V. A. Ritual whipping in a nursery rhyme // World of childhood and traditional culture. M., 1994.
120 Elkopin D. B. Psychology of the game. M., 1987. S. 27.
121 Elkopin D. B. Selected psychological works. M., 1989. S. 494.
122 Cf., for example: Berndt R.M. Berndt K.X. World of the first Australians. M., 1981. S. 114; Mid M. Culture and the world of childhood. M., 1988. S. 214.
123 Mukhlynin M.A. Parodying scary stories in modern children's folklore // World of childhood and traditional culture. S. 43.
124 Loiter S. M., Neelov E. M. Modern school folklore: Reading aid. Petrozavodsk, 1995. S. 19-20.
125 Nesanelis D. A., Sharapov V. E. The theme of death in children's games: an experience of ethno-semiotic analysis (based on the materials of traditional Komi culture) // Death as a phenomenon of culture. Syktyvkar, 1994. P. 125.
126 Propp V. Ya. Historical roots of a fairy tale.S. 53-56, 73-74.
127 Compare: Serov N. V. Chromatism of the myth. L., 1990. S. 147-148,156-157, 159.
128 See: Smirnov V. Folk divination of the Kostroma region. Kostroma, 1927. S. 19-20, 60, 63, 71; Tolstaya S. M. Mirror in traditional Slavic beliefs and rituals // Slavic and Balkan folklore. M., 1994. S. 123-124; Vinogradova L. N. Fortune-telling // Slavic Antiquities: Ethnolinguistic Dictionary. T. 1. S. 482-483.
129 Smirnov IP Genesis and creativity. SPb., 1996. S. 13.
130 Bernshtein N. A. Essays on the physiology of movement and the physiology of activity. M., 1966. S. 280, 308. See also: Anokhin P.K. Selected Works. M., 1987. S. 45-48.
131 Bogdanov K. A. Conspiracy and riddle (On the formulaicity of a conspiracy) // Russian folklore. T. XXIX. SPb., 1996. S. 7-8.
132 Karnaukhova I. V. Superstition and byvlytsin // Peasant Art of the USSR. T. 2. L., 1928. S. 129.
133 Baiburin A. K. Ritual in traditional culture. P. 205. A “non-blinking” look is contrasted with blinking, as vision is opposed to blindness.
134 Mukhamedshina L.A. Traditional gatherings of bachelor youth in the Middle Angara region (end of the 19th-20th centuries) // Spectacular and game forms of folk culture. pp. 55-56.
135 Zelenin D. K. Description of the manuscripts of the scientific archive of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society. Issue. 1. Pg., 1914. S. 162; Baiburin A. K. Ritual in traditional culture. S. 125.
136 Buslaev F.I. Teaching the national language. M „1992. S. 324.
137 Zelenin D.K. East Slavic ethnography. M., 1991.S. 326.
138 Tsivyan T. V. Linguistic foundations of the Balkan model of the world. M „ 1990. S. 181.
139 Compare: Eremina V.I. Ritual and folklore. L., 1991. S. 83-95.
140 Domostroy according to the list of the Society for the History and Antiquities of Russia. M., 1882. S. 170, 179.
141 Rabinovich M.G. A wedding in a Russian city in the 16th century. // Russian folk wedding ceremony. L., 1978. S. 21. See also: Kostomarov N. I. Historical monographs and research. T. 1. St. Petersburg, 1872. S. 158, 159; Mylnikova K., Tsintsius V. Northern Great Russian wedding // Materials on the wedding and family and tribal system of the peoples of the USSR. M., 1926.S. 128.
142 Chizhikova LN Wedding ceremonies of the Russian population of Ukraine // Russian folk wedding ceremony. S. 163.
143 Shane P. V. Great Russian in his songs, rituals, customs, beliefs, fairy tales, legends, etc. T. 1. Issue. 2. SPb., 1900.S.753.
144 Eremina V.I. Ritual and folklore. S. 90.
145 Cit. By: Hazlitt W.C. Dictionary of Faiths and Folklore.R. 56-57.
146 Tales of the Russian people, collected by I. P. Sakharov. M., 1990. S. 155.
147 Comparative index of plots. East Slavic fairy tale. / Comp. L. G. Barag et al. L., 1979. Type. 400, 401, 533.
148 There. Type 329.
1 49 There. Type 850.
150 There. Type 8 51 IV.
151 There. Type 437.
152 There. Type 425 A.
153 Chaucer D. The Canterbury Tales. M., 1988. S. 418-420. See the same story in "Russian cherished fairy tales" by A. N. Afanasiev (M., 1992. No. 28. S. 41-42).
154 Fasmer M. Etymological dictionary of the Russian language.T. 3. S. 54.
155 Kon I. S. Child and society (historical and ethnographic perspective). M., 1988. S. 185
156 See in Aristotle's Metaphysics: “In each pair of opposites, one is deprivation, and all opposites are reducible to the existent and non-existent, to the one and the multitude, for example: peace - to the one, movement - to the multitude; on the other hand, all , perhaps, they recognize that existing things and essence are made up of opposites ”(Aristotle. Works. T. 1. M 1976. P. 123).
157 Compare: Kon I. S. The child and society. S. 125; in philosophical discourse: Derrida J. La dissemination. P., 1974. R. 144-145.
158 Nevskaya L. G. Motley in Balto-Slavic: semantics and typology // Folklore and ethnographic reality. St. Petersburg, 1992. P. 97.
159 Puzzles. No. 1669.
160 Bleikher V. M. Disorders of thinking. Kyiv, 1983. S. 78.
161 Zelenin D. K. Description of the manuscripts of the scientific archive of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society. Issue. 1. S. 260; Mythological stories and legends of the Russian North. S. 115.
162 Encyclopedia of superstitions. S. 260, 261-262; see Russian material in the same place: S. 263.
163 Compare: Bleikher V. M. Thinking disorders. S. 80.
164 In the context of funeral rites, as an example of such reciprocity, O. A. Sedakova calls a memorial meal (Sedakova O. A. Ritual terminology and text structure. Funeral rite of the Eastern and South Slavs. Dis. Candidate of Philology. Sciences (typescript). M., 1983.C .117). On linguistic material, in the same connection, the semantic reversibility of donation and bestowal is remarkable: the presence of the original Indo-European root * d O - derivatives with the meaning of "give" and "take": Benveniste E. Dictionary of Indo-European social terms. M., 1995.S. 70-73; Ivanov V. V. The origin of the semantic field of Slavic words denoting gift and exchange // Slavic and Balkan linguistics. M., 1975. S. 51.
165 “The language of vision turns out to be possible to translate into linguistics and vice versa” (Shifman L.A. On the question of the relationship between sensory organs and types of sensitivity // Studies in the psychology of perception. M .; L., 1948. P. 60). We note that in the context of philosophical and psychological disputes about the consistency of types of sensitivity, we also find such reasoning that can be directly read as comments on the "experimental" game of blind man's blind man's. Such, in particular, are the corresponding passages in the "Experience of a New Theory of Vision" by J. Berkeley, in the correspondence between Molinet and Locke, "Letter on the Blind" by D. Diderot, "Emile" by J.-J. Rousseau (see: Shifman L. A. Cited. Op. P. 46-
58).
166 Cm.: Merleau-Ponty M. Le visible et l "inicible. P. 1964. In justification of the “mirror stage” he defended in the development of the child, Lacan wrote about the dramatic nature of the experienced identification of oneself with the other, and the other with oneself, about the alienation of the subject from the “I” identified by him and overcoming this alienation: Laplanche J., Pontalis J.-B. Dictionary of psychoanalysis.S. 498-499. See also: Podoroga V. Phenomenology of the Body. An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology. M., 1995. S. 39-40,127-130. To the topic of “mirroring”, phenomenological “reversibility” of blindness, let us also recall Vladislav Khodasevich’s poem “Blind” (1923): “Probing the road with a stick, / A blind man wanders at random, / Carefully puts his foot / And mutters to himself. / And on the eyes of a blind man / The whole world is displayed: / A house, a meadow, a fence, a cow, / Shreds of the blue sky - / Everything that he does not see ”(Khodasevich V. Poems. L., 1989.S. 157).
167 Baiburin A. K. Ritual in traditional culture. P. 206. In the same context, see the poetic motif from the poem by Cesare Pavese: “Death will come, and it will have your eyes” ( Pavese C. Poesie edite e inedite. Torino, 1962. R. 182).
168 Comparative index of plots. Type 480.
169 Mazalova N. E. ethnoscience local groups of the Russian North // Russian North. On the problem of local groups. SPb., 1995. S. 94. In the Ryazan province they believed that “all unclean demonic power was conquered by the bear” (Zelenin D.K. Description of the manuscripts of the scientific archive of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society. Issue 3. S. 1163, manuscript of 1867). About the bear as a demonic creature that requires a sacrificial offering to him of a village girl's wife: Krinichnaya N.A. Characters of legends: the formation and evolution of the image. L., 1980. P. 80 (newspaper report of 1925 about the case of such a sacrifice in the Voronye Field of the Olonets province.).
170 Zelenin D.K. Taboo of words among the peoples of Eastern Europe and North Asia. Part 2 // Collection of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography. T. 9. L., 1930. S. 123, 126, 129, 136.
171 See: Comparative Plot Index. Type 480; besides: Russian folk tales about a stepmother and stepdaughter. / Comp., intro. article and note. E. I. Lutovinova. Novosibirsk, 1993. No. 22-26.
172 Propp V. Ya. Historical roots of a fairy tale. S. 352-353.
173 Straparol. Pleasant nights. M., 1993. S. 67.
174 There.
175 Vega L. de. Sobr. cit.: In 6 volumes. T. 2. M., 1962. S. 697.
176 There. S. 710 et seq.
177 There. pp. 764, 765.
I78 Compare: Eremina V.I. Ritual and folklore. pp. 179-180 (where the collision is analyzed in the aspect of "paleontological" reconstruction of the rites of "co-dying" of a husband and wife, the symbolism of "life born of death").
179 See the text of the libretto in the booklet to the CD of the opera( Purcell Henry. The Fayry Queen // Harmonia Mundi 901308.09. P. 33)
180 Marx K., Engels F. The Holy Family // Marx K., Engels F. Chosen. op. in 9 volumes. T. 1. M., 1984. S. 190. See above for the connection between blindness and castration.
181 There. S. 191.
182 Xu E. Parisian secrets. T. 2. S. 254. Cf. interpretation of this desire as a desire to become like Rodolphe: Marx K., Engels F. The Holy Family. S. 193.
183 Xu E. Parisian secrets. T. 2. S. 254.
184 Stevenson R. L. Sobr. cit.: In 5 volumes. T. 2. / Per. M. and N. Chukovsky. M., 1967. S. 30.
185 There. S. 31.
186 There. S. 38.
187 There. S. 242.
188 London J. Works: In 7 vols. Vol. 8 (additional). Moscow, 1956, p. 439.
189 There. S. 443.
190 Nabokov V. V. Novels. Stories. Essay. SPb., 1993. S. 132.
191 There. S. 133.
192 There. S. 9.
193 There. S. 33.
194 Stout R. Wanted a man // Stout R. Full. coll. soch.T.b.M., 1996. S. 114.
195 Phraseological dictionary of the Russian literary language. T. 1. S. 216.
196 Collection of Russian thieves' dictionaries. T. 3. S. 121, 172.
197 Montana E. Senior Namer. / Per. from Spanish V. Krasko // Foreign Literature. 1981. No. 11. P. 6.
198 Gulyashki A. Adventures of Avvakum Zakhov. M., 1966.
199 Berberova N. Italics mine: Autobiography. M., 1996. S. 150-151, 152.
200 Aristotle "Poetics", 1457 b, 5.
201 Cp.: Rogers S. Metaphor: A psychoanalytical view. Berkeley etc.., 1976.
202 Aristotle "Poetics", 1449a, 32. Cf. jokes about the blind: A comparative index of plots. Type 1698D; Apperson G.L. Dictionary of Proverbs. word worth reference. 1993.R. 54, 55.

Illustrations:

Target: to teach children to run around the playground in all directions, to move blindfolded, listening to warning signals. Develop the ability to quickly move around the hall, dexterity, speed of action.

Game progress:

The driver is chosen - blind man's blind man. He stands in the middle of the room, they blindfold him, turn him around several times. Then all the children run around the room, and Trap tries to catch someone. At the sight of any danger to the blind man's buff, the children should warn with the word "Fire!". Having caught someone, the blind man passes his role to the one who is caught.

Option 2:

If the game takes place on the street, then the boundary is outlined, beyond which the players do not have the right to run. Crossing the agreed border is considered burnt and is obliged to replace the blind man's blind man's buff.

Mobile game "Talking with a rope"

Target: to teach children to run in pairs, threes around the playground, holding on to the rope, trying to taunt the children running in all directions. To develop the ability to act in concert in pairs, triples, coordination of movements, dexterity.

Game progress:

Two children take an ordinary short rope by the ends, run around the playground, trying with their free hand to taunt the rest of the children running away from them. The first one caught stands between the leaders, takes the middle of the rope with one hand and joins in catching. In order for the three drivers to be freed from their duties, each of them must catch one player.

Complication: include 2 pairs of traps in the game.

Mobile game "Change the subject"

Target: to teach children to quickly run across to the opposite side of the site, take an object and betray it to their friend. develop the ability to act in a team, follow the rules, dexterity, general endurance. Cultivate perseverance in achieving positive results.

Game progress:

Players stand behind the line on one side of the court, forming 4-5 columns. On the opposite side of the site opposite each column, circles with a diameter of 60-80 cm are outlined. each first in the column holds a bag of sand, a cube or other object in his hands. The same object is placed in the center of each circle. On a signal, the players run to the mugs, put an object and take another, then run back to their place and raise the brought object above their heads. The one who did it first is considered the winner. Those who came running pass objects to those standing behind them, and they themselves run to the end of the column. When everyone completes the task, the column with the most wins is marked.

Complication: run after the object with a snake between the pins without dropping the pins.

Mobile game "Catch up with your couple"

Target: teach children to run fast in a given direction, trying to catch up with their pair. Develop the ability to act on a signal, agility, speed of movement. Promote endurance.

Game progress:

Children stand in pairs on one side of the playground: one in front, the other behind - retreating 2-3 steps. At the signal of the teacher, the first ones quickly run across to the other side of the site, the second ones catch them - each their own pair. When the game is repeated, the children change roles.

Option 2

Stain your pair with a ball.

Mobile game "Second Extra"

Target: teach children to run quickly in a circle, getting ahead of the child. Develop attention, reaction. Raise interest in outdoor games.

Game progress.

Children stand in a circle, the distance between them should be at least 1-2 steps. Behind the circle are two drivers. One of them runs away, the other tries to catch up with him. The fleeing child, escaping from the catcher, stands in front of some child. If he ran into the circle and stood up before he was tarnished, he can no longer be salted. Now the child who turned out to be the second should run away. If Trap managed to touch the evader, then they switch roles.

Run only outside the circle, do not cross it, do not grab the children standing in the circle, do not run too long so that everyone can join the game.

Option 2:

You can stand in pairs in a circle, then the game will be called "The Third Extra".

Elena Anokhina

RUSSIAN FOLK GAMES WITH CHILDREN (4-7 years old)

Elena Anatolyevna Anokhina

The Russian people reflected many processes of their life activity through the game. Folk games relevant and interesting at the present time, they can be used in work with schoolchildren and preschoolers, a health camp and in your free time with your family.

The game "Zhmurki with a bell"

Game progress. By lot (counting) they choose the "blind man's blind man" and the player who

he will search. "Zhmurka" is blindfolded, and another child is given a bell. The participants of the game stand in a circle. "Zhmurka" must catch the driver with a bell. Then a new pair of players is chosen.

"Zhmurok" can be several. The children standing in a circle warn the "blind man's buff" against meeting each other with the words: "Fire! Fire!"

The game "Zhmurki"

Jump-jump, jump-jump,

Bunny jumped on a stump,

He beats the drum loudly

Invites everyone to play blind man's blind man.

The game "Zhmurki" is being played.

Game progress. The player is blindfolded, taken away from the players to the side and turned around several times. Then they talk to him:

Cat, cat, what are you standing on?

At the pot.

What's in the pot?

Catch the mice, not us!

After these words, the participants in the game scatter, and the blind man's blind man catches them.

Playing with the Sun

In the center of the circle is the “sun” (a hat with the image of the sun is put on the child’s head). The children say in unison:

Burn, sun, brighter -

Summer will be hotter

And the winter is warmer

And spring is sweeter.

Children go in a round dance. On the 3rd line they come closer to the “sun”, narrowing the circle, bow, on the 4th line they move away, expanding the circle. To the word "I'm burning!" - The "sun" catches up with the children.

Game "Drag the rope"

2 hoops are placed on the floor and a rope is pulled from the middle of one to the middle of the other. The participants of the game are divided into 2 teams. The hoops include one person from each team. On a signal, they run and change places. The one who ran first into the opponent's hoop and pulled the rope out of another hoop is considered the winner. After the first pair, the second runs, the third, and so on until the last.

Game "Burners"

The players line up in pairs one after another - in a column. Children hold hands and raise them up, forming a "gate". The last pair passes "under the gate" and stands in front, followed by the next pair. "Speaker" stands in front, 5-6 steps from the first pair, with his back to them. All participants sing or say:

Burn, burn bright

To not go out!

Look at the sky

The birds are flying

The bells are ringing:

Ding dong, ding dong

Get out quick!

At the end of the song, two guys, being in front, scatter in different directions, the rest shout in unison:

One, two, do not crow, but run like fire!

"Burning" is trying to catch up with the fleeing. If the players manage to take each other's hands before one of them is caught by the “burning one”, then they stand in front of the column, and the “burning one” catches again, that is, “burns”. And if the “burning” catches one of the running ones, then he gets up with him, and the player who is left without a pair drives.

Game "Merry Musicians"

Game progress. To any melody of two parts, children, standing in a circle, play musical instruments (rattles, rumbas, bells, etc.). Petrushka stands in the center of the circle, conducting. With the end of the first part, the children, putting the tools on the floor, easily run in a circle. Parsley stands in a general circle and runs with the children. With the end of the music, the players quickly take apart the instruments. The conductor becomes the one who did not get the instrument.

Game "Carousel"

We continue the fun

Weight running on a carousel.

Ribbons are tied to the hoop. Children take the ribbon with one hand and go first in one direction, and then, changing their hand, in the other. The hoop is held by an adult. You can “ride” on the carousel under the traditional text:

Barely, barely, barely, barely

The carousels spin

And then, then, then

Everyone run, run, run.

Hush, hush, don't rush

Stop the carousel.

One-two, one-two

And so the game began.

Game "Ring"

All players line up. The buffoon has a ring in his hands, which he hides in his palms and then tries to quietly pass to one of the guys, while saying:

I'm burying gold

I bury pure silver!

In a high tower

Guess, guess girl.

Guess, guess, red!

The one standing last is looking for the ring, and the buffoon says: "Guess, guess who has the ring, pure silver." If the participant guessed who has the ring, then he becomes the leader.

Game "Baba Yaga"

A rooster sat on a bench, counting his pins:

One, two, three, in this account you go out!

(Baba Yaga stands in a circle drawn on the floor, on the ground. The guys run around the circle and tease Baba Yaga, and Baba Yaga tries to reach the children with a broom, whom he touches stops and freezes in place, the last of the children becomes Baba Yaga).

teaser

baba yaga,

bone leg,

Fell off the stove

Broke my leg

I ran to the garden

Scared all the people

Ran to the bathroom

Scared the bunny!

The game "Dawn-Dawn"

Game progress. Two leaders are selected. Both the drivers and the players stand in a circle, holding a ribbon in their hands (ribbons are fixed on the carousel according to the number of players). Everyone walks around and sings.

Zarya-zaryanitsa, Red maiden,

Walked across the field

Dropped the keys

golden keys,

Painted ribbons.

One, two, three - not a crow, but run like fire!

At the last words of the driver, they run in different directions. Who will take first

vacated ribbon, he is the winner, and the remaining one chooses

next partner.

ROUND GAMES

Game "Karavai"

Probably the most famous dance game in Russia! It is almost an obligatory attribute of any birthday of children from the year to the end elementary school. Such a Russian analogue of the American "Happy birthday!". The chorus is very simple. Everyone stands in a circle and holds hands. The birthday boy stands in the center of the round dance. The round dance begins to move in a circle, accompanied by the words:

How on ... name day (they call the name of the birthday child)

We baked Karavay.

Here is such a height! (hands raised as high as possible)

Here is such a bottom! (squat down, hands practically put on the floor)

That's the width! (they diverge to the sides, trying to make a round dance of as large a diameter as possible)

Here's a dinner! (the round dance converges, shrinks, comes close to the birthday man)

Loaf, loaf, choose whom you like! (the round dance comes to its "normal" size and stops)

The birthday man says: I love, of course, everyone,

But here ... most of all! (calls the name of the selected child, takes him by the hand and leads to the center of the round dance)

Now the birthday boy becomes a round dance, and the child he has chosen becomes the “birthday boy”.

The game "Boyars, and we came to you"

The players are divided into two teams that line up against each other in a chain. The first team goes ahead with the words:

Boyars, we have come to you! And returns to its original place:

Dear ones, we have come to you!

Another repeats this maneuver with the words:

Boyars, why did you come? Dear, why did you come?

The dialogue starts:

Boyars, we need a bride. Darlings, we need a bride.

Boyars, what do you like? Dear ones, how do you like it?

The first team confers and chooses someone:

Boyars, this sweetheart is for us (they point to the chosen one).

Dear us, this is sweet. The selected player turns around and now walks and stands in a chain, looking the other way.

The dialogue continues:

Boyars, she is a fool with us. Dear, she is a fool with us.

Boyars, and we whip it. Dear, and we whip it.

Boyars, she is afraid of whips. Darlings, she is afraid of whips.

Boyars, and we will give a gingerbread. Dear, and we will give a gingerbread.

Boyars, her teeth hurt. Darlings, her teeth hurt.

Boyars, and we will reduce to the doctor. Dear, and we will reduce to the doctor.

Boyars, she will bite the doctor. Dear ones, she will bite the doctor.

The first command completes:

Boyars, don't play the fool, give us the bride forever!

The one who was chosen as the bride must scatter and break the chain of the first team. If he succeeds, then he returns to his team, taking with him any player first.

If the chain is not broken, then the bride remains in the first team. In any case, the losing team starts the second round. The task of the teams is to keep more players.

The game "Kalachi"

Children stand in three circles. They move, jumping in a circle and at the same time pronouncing the words:

Bai - swing - swing - swing!

Look - donuts, kalachi!

From the heat, from the heat, from the oven.

At the end of the words, the players run scattered one by one around the court. To the words "Find your kalach!" return to their circle. When the game is repeated, players can change places in circles.

Thank you for your attention!