concept
Hydrophobia (vodobyazn')
hydrophobia
also: водобоязнь, rabies, бешенство
The period Russian term for the symptomatic, terminal stage of rabies -- 'fear of water' -- understood in the 1880s countryside as an agonizing and universally fatal disease with no medical cure; the object of Nilov's escalating dread throughout the story after he is bitten by the wolf.
Reading notes
- The Wolf §12 hydrophobia
Vodobyazn' -- literally 'fear of water,' the period Russian term for rabies in its symptomatic, human stage (named for the spasms the disease causes on attempting to swallow liquid). In the 1880s, before Pasteur's rabies vaccine had reached rural Russia in any practical way, a confirmed case was understood as both agonizing and always fatal; Kupriyanov's opening speech lays out exactly that folk-medical consensus, which drives the story's entire arc of dread.