At the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre, a book was presented by Adoneva and Olson on the fate of several generations of village women

MOSCOW. The worlds of a Russian village woman through the prism of this day.

Attempts to study the everyday life of the Russian peasantry have been undertaken before. It is enough to recall the book of the American anthropologist Margaret Paxon, the monograph of Vladimir Bezgin and many other works in this area. But they most often do not reach a wide audience due to the limited circulation, narrowly specialized topics and other reasons. A joint study undertaken by American Slavic professor Laura Olson and anthropologist Svetlana Adoneva, called the Tradition. Transgression. Compromise. The Worlds of the Russian Village Woman ”, has every chance to interest a wide audience.

One of the main advantages of the book is the “sounding” voices of women themselves, representatives of different generations. Not the voice of an outside observer, digging through a variety of archives in search of interesting facts, but genuine witnesses of a bygone era. Stories about everyday life, folklore, holidays, magical practices, relations between relatives clearly demonstrate how the way of everyday life, the hierarchy of family relations have changed. As a change in the political system leveled the previously unchallenged authority of the elders - the "Bolshaks" and "Bolshuh". How to relate to those who allowed themselves to motherhood without marriage. What they sang, how they could pay for the daring ditty, how they said goodbye to the dead. Did the wives of drinking husbands consider themselves unhappy victims, or did this circumstance give them special significance in their own eyes?

The book is worth getting acquainted with those who would like to part with a considerable part of the myths about how people lived in the village before the revolution in fact. And how they would live now, if the revolution had not happened once.

Elena Tanakova © Gallerix.ru