What Is Maslenitsa?

If you arrive in a Russian city in late winter and see round golden pancakes, painted sledges, and a straw figure in brightly coloured clothes, you have walked into Maslenitsa. English sometimes calls it Butter Week, Pancake Week, or Cheesefare Week. All of those names are trying to say the same thing: this is the last generous week before Great Lent, and the table still has dairy in it. National Geographic, writing for a reader who already knows Mardi Gras, calls it a butter-soaked holiday that says goodbye to winter. The comparison is useful and a little too neat. Carnival in New Orleans ends on a Tuesday. Orthodox Lent begins on a Monday. The week is longer than a night of beads, and the church calendar is not a costume.

Gruzinsky’s ice is the public face of the week: horses, speed, a crowd that has come out on purpose. OrthodoxWiki’s account of Cheesefare Week keeps the other face beside it. Meat is already forbidden. Dairy, eggs, and butter are still allowed. Parties, secular music, and dancing will be set aside when Lent begins. The week is therefore a last chance in two registers at once — the last of the rich foods, and the last of the noise. You can come for the pancakes and never enter a church. You will still be eating inside a calendar that was built to empty the table next Monday.

A date that moves

Maslenitsa is not 15 February. It is the week before Great Lent, so it moves with Orthodox Pascha, which can fall weeks away from Western Easter. OrthodoxWiki calls it the seventh week before Pascha and notes that in 2008 the week ran from 2 to 8 March. The numbers change; the logic does not. Meatfare Sunday has already closed the meat. Cheesefare Sunday will close the dairy. Clean Monday is the clean page. Western Lent begins on Ash Wednesday. The Orthodox fast begins after Sunday vespers, which is why a visitor who comes looking for a single Fat Tuesday will find a whole week and then a Monday.

The services during Cheesefare, OrthodoxWiki says, are already similar to Lenten ones, only shorter. The Prayer of Saint Ephraim is said for the first time. The Divine Liturgy is forbidden on Wednesday and Friday, as it will be on the weekdays of Lent. The street festival grew inside that frame. It did not replace it. A person can keep both without making one of them a lie: the sledging is real, and the fast that follows is real for those who keep it.

Why the pancake is round

The food most people remember is блины. They are made from the rich ingredients still permitted: butter, eggs, milk. OrthodoxWiki’s sentence is the one to keep on the table: round and golden, fried from what the fast has not yet taken. Darra Goldstein, a historian of Russian food speaking to National Geographic, gives the older story that visitors always want. Before the baptism of Rus in 988, she says, people practised a cult of the sun; they baked round pancakes on hot stones to welcome its return, near the spring equinox. After Christianity, the Church moved the festival earlier, to sit against Lent, and “allowed blini to morph into the premier symbol of indulgence.” That is one scholar’s through-line. It is widely told. It is not a laboratory result. The honest middle is that a round, buttered pancake at the end of winter was available to both a solar hope and a Lenten timetable, and both used it.

Goldstein’s blini, in the same interview, are dense and yeasty, often buckwheat, “wonderfully porous,” crowned with butter, jam, caviar, or sour cream. No topping, the festival’s English nicknames insist, matters more than butter: масло is in the week’s name. You will be offered sweet and savoury on the same table, which is not a failure of categories. It is the point of a week that has not yet chosen Lent. A tourist menu that prints only caviar has missed the jam and the grandmother. A tourist menu that prints only jam has missed how often the same pan feeds a person who came from church and a person who came from the metro.

“And also a few pancakes?” suggested Madame. For answer Chichikov folded three together, and, having dipped them in melted butter, consigned the lot to his mouth, and then wiped his mouth with a napkin. Twice more was the process repeated.

Gogol is not writing a holiday pamphlet. He is writing a man who cannot stop. Korobochka offers pancakes because there has been dough standing since last night; Chichikov folds three, dips them in melted butter, and asks the britchka to be got ready, then eats a second batch. Goldstein, in another essay, notes that he later goes to a tavern and orders suckling pig. The appetite is the point. Maslenitsa is the week that appetite is still legal. When Forgiveness Sunday ends, the same mouth is asked to wait. Gogol himself, she records, began to refuse food in February 1852, during Butter Festival — a private Lent inside the public one. The pancakes in Dead Souls are comic. The calendar around them is not a joke.

Solomatkin’s street has no liturgy in the frame, and does not need one. OrthodoxWiki lists masquerades, snowball fights, sledding, swings, sleigh rides. In some regions each day had a traditional activity: one for sleigh-riding, another for sons-in-law to visit parents-in-law, another for godparents. Goldstein tells National Geographic that Wednesday, for example, was a day for mothers-in-law to share blini with sons-in-law — pancakes as a way of solidifying a family that marriage had made awkward. Not every town keeps a Monday-does-this script now. She says the week is no longer ritualised as it once was, and is more about eating blini at home or as street food. Both sentences can be true in one city on the same afternoon.

Snow as a playground

Surikov’s Taking a Snow Town (1891) is a Siberian game painted like a storming. A fortress of snow, a charge, colour against white. National Geographic, following Goldstein, puts fist fights, bear shows, sledding, troika rides, and ice skating among the week’s entertainments, some of them cousins to other Carnivals, some of them simply what you do with a Russian winter when the church has not yet asked you to be quiet. The snow fortress is the week’s argument in a physical form: winter is still here, and you can take it by running at it. Officials in modern cities, the same article notes, try to curb public fist fights and the burning of effigies in hazardous places. The game remains even when the blood is removed.

A straw woman, then a fire

The week has a leading lady. Goldstein describes her being dressed in old clothes, placed on poles, carried on a sleigh, greeted with folk songs. OrthodoxWiki’s Sunday night is the culmination: Lady Maslenitsa is stripped of her finery and put to the flames. Remaining blintzes go on the fire. Her ashes are buried in the snow, “to fertilize the crops.” Goldstein adds that after the effigy burned, ashes were scattered on fields and gardens to ensure a harvest, and that some communities drowned her instead, as a symbolic end to cold. Historians can argue how directly a modern municipal bonfire continues a medieval or pre-Christian rite. The honest statement is the one this site already needed: the week is both a church preparation for Lent and a folk festival whose symbols have accumulated. You may find the fertilising-ash story beautiful. You will not have understood the week if you hear only a pagan survival or only a parish timetable.

After the effigy had burned, her ashes were scattered on fields and gardens to ensure a fruitful harvest.

Forgiveness before the quiet

The last day is Forgiveness Sunday. At vespers, OrthodoxWiki says, all the people ask forgiveness of one another, and thus Great Lent begins. For devout Orthodox Christians it is also the last day on which dairy may be consumed until Pascha. Fish, wine, and olive oil will be forbidden on most Lenten days. The next morning is Clean Monday: sins confessed, pardon asked, a clean slate. National Geographic describes the same Sunday as confession in church and pardon asked of friends and family — atonement after revelry, a hinge into piety. A visitor who only came for pancakes may find this sudden. It is the point of the week. The noise was never the whole of the holiday. The quiet was waiting in the next room.

What was paused, and what came back

OrthodoxWiki is blunt about the twentieth century. During Soviet times Maslenitsa, like other religious holidays, was suppressed. After perestroika the celebrations resumed. National Geographic softens the same arc without cancelling it: the early Soviet era largely pushed the week from public life; some people kept it privately; by the collapse of the Union, folk customs had been revived. Diaspora communities, OrthodoxWiki adds, often reduce the week to one day, and may not hit the exact liturgical date. The holiday is portable. It is also thinner when it is only a pancake fair.

Moscow still knows how to make it large. National Geographic records that in 2018 more than 4.75 million people attended the capital’s Maslenitsa events — hundreds of occasions, pancake fairs, concerts. Treat the figure as a city’s count of a week, not as a single square. Goldstein’s other observation sits beside it: the week is no longer ritualised as it once was. A municipal stage and a grandmother’s frying pan are both Maslenitsa. The first is easier to photograph. The second is how most people still meet the word.

If you are not Orthodox, and not Russian, the week will still feed you. OrthodoxWiki notes that countries with a large Russian diaspora treat Maslenitsa as a day to celebrate the culture, usually shorter than seven days, and not always on the liturgical date. That reduced form is how many Western cities first meet the word: a square, a pan, a costume, a straw figure if the fire department allows it. It is not a fake. It is a portable piece of a longer week. The longer week is still there, in Moscow and in a kitchen that does not post a poster, whenever Forgiveness Sunday is approaching and someone has already given up meat.

How to hold the week

A visitor who wants a single origin will not have read the sources. Goldstein’s sun-cult pancakes and the Church’s Cheesefare can share a plate without one devouring the other. OrthodoxWiki’s vespers of pardon and Surikov’s snow fortress are the same winter in two weathers. Kustodiev, painting in 1916 for a museum that still holds the canvas, put sledges and a crowded town under a bright sky: a festival remembered as colour, not as a pamphlet. You may come only for the blini. Come, then, knowing what the butter is for. It is the last of the richness before a fast some people still keep, and a way of saying to winter, in a climate that has earned the right to say it, that the sun has a shape you can eat.