The burning of Ustina's clothes in the stove in Vodolazkin's novel “Laurus” and folk beliefs about the stove

In Evgeny Vodolazkin's novel "Laurus" there is a scene in which a girl, Ustina, who has come from a plague-stricken region, finds herself in the hut of the protagonist, Arseny, and he gives her water "to wash off the grime". And then the following happens:

Ustina's rags lay by the stove, and their proximity to the fire decided the matter. Without a word, Arseny threw them into the stove. It was a natural movement, and he made it. But there was in it also a sign of irrevocability. As in some fairy tale he had heard from Christopher

You, of course, would also do this first of all, having invited into your home a woman who is, in all likelihood, plague-ridden: burn her clothes in the very stove where the food is cooked? It is all so sensible and natural!

There's your brilliant writer for you.

The point is not even that in the Russian tradition the stove was not merely a hearth but the centre of the home, and its use was accompanied by a whole set of prohibitions: do not spit into the fire, do not throw rubbish or anything unclean into it, do not swear by the stove, do not sit on the stove while bread is baking, and so on. From this point of view Arseny's gesture runs counter to folk ethics, of which, admittedly, Vodolazkin may be unaware, the more so as he calls his book an "unhistorical novel".

But where is common sense? The stove is the cleanest and most important place in the hut, and to understand that dirty, still less plague-infested, rags are not thrown into the place where bread is baked, no special knowledge is needed at all; it is enough to have ordinary notions of domestic cleanliness and a pinch of sound judgement.

As for unhistoricity, yes, of course, the usual measures were taken against plague, such as burning things saturated with contagion, and they were burned outside the dwelling: in the yard, in the field, at the town gate, unless, of course, the whole homestead had to be burned together with its property. But in this case the author chose to disregard every facet of logic, merely to tie his narrative to a recognisable fairy-tale plot, in which Prince Ivan burns the frog's skin in the stove so that his wife may remain in human form for ever. But it did not work like that. It did not work like that at all.