“O mother Dawn, bless me with thy red sun, with thy bright moon and with thy bright stars. The dawn is dawning for me. Father drives me away. The lovely sun is rising; my freedom disappears.”
After this they proceed to the neighbour’s, and, when the sun is fully up, the bride and her friends return home.[1] Her mother receives her, seats her at table, and offers her pancakes. The bride and her friends then start off to visit all her relations and friends in rotation. At each place she is treated to spirits, beer, and pancakes. When the visits are finished, she is carried home by her friends to be dressed. Her mother again meets her, sets a loaf, a salt-cellar, a pot of groats, an egg-cake and a baked egg on the table, and lights a candle before the holy pictures, to which she makes three bows down to the floor. The bride approaches the table weeping; her father offers her beer in a ladle which must not be full, and says: “Look! here, my child, is something for your work; take and drink as much as you like.” She laments with tears that a full ladle has not been offered her, praises her work and her submissiveness, and requests to be allowed to entertain her friends, “who had carried her in their white arms.” She will not drink the beer proffered by her mother, as to do so would be “like tearing out her own heart”. Her father meanwhile advances to the table, presses his hand to his breast, and breaks out in tears. Her friends take her up under the arms and carry her to him. She now recites:
- ↑ Elsewhere in Simbirsk, the bride—apparently alone—starts at dawn for the house of some relation, and sitting at his gate, says: “My mother’s brother (or my brother)! let me in, my beloved, for a moment to warm myself. A thundercloud rolls above my head, wets my beautiful white shirt, wets too my silk kerchief. Conceal me, dear, from the thunderclouds. I am no longer in father’s favour he has driven me from home.” She is usually admitted and entertained with pancakes, after which she returns home.
