Never Shake Hands Across a Threshold

The handshake is ready. The host is in the hall. You are on the landing. If you reach across the doorframe, you have already made a mistake some households still feel in the wrist. Jennifer Monaghan, in the Moscow Times, put it among the superstitions a visitor will actually meet: do not shake hands or kiss across a doorway. In the folklore she summarises, the threshold is where the house spirit is thought to reside, and bridging the gap is bad luck. Wait until you are fully inside, or ask the person inside to step fully out. Wikipedia’s page on Russian superstitions adds passing objects across a door or window to the same ban, and even a state border. The polite move is an invitation: come in, or I will come out.

Makovsky’s kissing custom is a crowded interior, not a landing. Guests have already come in. The greeting, even in this costume dream of boyar rooms, happens on the house’s side of the frame. Olga Golubkova, writing on mythological characters of the domestic space in an archaeology journal, notes that in the common Russian tradition the corners of the house, the stove, the basement, and the threshold were in some way related to burial — a building sacrifice or an ancestor — and that the domovoy was the soul of the house and the family. Linda Ivanits, cited on the same cluster of beliefs, puts the places where the ‘unclean force’ was strongest against the peasant at the crossroads, the threshold, and the bathhouse. A handshake is a small bridge. Folklore does not like bridges at those three points.

Not only a spirit

You do not need to believe in a household gnome to keep the custom. Many urban families will laugh and still not shake through the frame. The laugh is real. The flinch is also real. A 2013 Levada Center survey, cited by Monaghan, found just over half of Russians believed in omens, prophetic dreams, and astrology. Belief had fallen a little since 2000. Practice often outlives creed. People who will not discuss a domovoy will still say that a greeting across the door leads to a quarrel — the milder, social version of the same warning, recorded in popular guides. The quarrel theory needs no spirit. It only needs a body stuck between coming and going, a bag in one hand, a glove in the other, and a conversation that has not yet decided which room it belongs to.

Vladimirov’s postcard, from an early-twentieth-century series of fairy-tale types, is how the spirit was sold as a picture: a shaggy house-being on a stove, the word Домовой written on the card. It is not a manual for a modern lift lobby. It is the face the folklore still had when it needed one.

Among the places where the unclean force was strongest against the Russian peasant were the crossroads, the threshold and the bathhouse.

Ivanits is the English book behind a great deal of this map. The domovoy, in that literature, is the household’s own dead made local: fed, invited to a new house, capable of knocking or of turning poltergeist if offended. Golubkova’s field notes from Novgorod and Pskov regions record people who still put out food for him with a commemoration of parents. That is village speech, not a Moscow office. The office still has a door. The door still has a strip. Crossing it with an outstretched hand looks, to someone raised on the old map, like treating the house as a corridor. The guest who steps in, takes off their shoes, and then offers a hand has completed the sentence. The guest who pumps your arm from the stairwell has left the sentence unfinished.

Guides still remind movers to ask the spirit along when a household changes address. You need not. You do need to notice that Russian space is not a smooth Western open plan from pavement to sofa. There is a hall for the outside. There is a room for the people. The frame between them is thin wood or steel, and it has collected more meaning than its width.

How to hold the door

If you are arriving, come in, then greet. If you are leaving, step out, then say goodbye. Do not pass a bag, a payment, or a child across the sill as if the air there were ordinary. If the lift lobby is freezing and the host is in socks, they should still cross fully or you should. The rule looks fussy until you have watched a family perform it without thinking. Then it looks like what it is: a way of saying that a house is a place, not a gap. Makovsky’s guests can dawdle in a painted room. The door, when it opens, is a decision.