Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia

Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia

Description

" . . . a marvelous source for the social history of Russian peasant society in the years before the revolution. . . . The translation is superb." —Steven Hoch

" . . . one of the best ethnographic portraits that we have of the Russian village. . . . a highly readable text that is an excellent introduction to the world of the Russian peasantry." —Samuel C. Ramer

Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia provides a unique firsthand portrait of peasant family life as recorded by Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia, an ethnographer and painter who spent four years at the turn of the twentieth century observing the life and customs of villagers in a central Russian province. Unusual in its awareness of the rapid changes in the Russian village in the late nineteenth century and in its concentration on the treatment of women and children, Semyonova's ethnography vividly describes courting rituals, marriage and sexual practices, childbirth, infanticide, child-rearing practices, the lives of women, food and drink, work habits, and the household economy. In contrast to a tradition of rosy, romanticized descriptions of peasant communities by Russian upper-class observers, Semyonova gives an unvarnished account of the harsh living conditions and often brutal relationships within peasant families.

Sujets

• Women's Studies
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Folclore
• General officer
• History of Europe
• General
• Folklore
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 22 mai 1993
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253013330
• Langue: English

Extrait

Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia
Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian and East European Studies
Alexander Rabinowitch and William G. Rosenberg, general editors
Advisory Board

Deming Brown
Ben Eklof
Jane Burbank
Zvi Gitelman
Robert W. Campbell
Hiroaki Kuromiya
Henry Cooper
David Ransel
Herbert Eagle
Ronald Grigor Suny
William Zimmerman
Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia
by OLGA SEMYONOVA TIAN-SHANSKAIA
EDITED BY DAVID L. RANSEL Translated by David L. Ransel with Michael Levine

Indiana University Press
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1993 by David L. Ransel
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No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia, Olga, 1863-1906.
Village life in late tsarist Russia : an ethnography by Olga
Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia / edited by David L. Ransel : translated by
David L. Ransel, with Michael Levine.
p. cm. - (Indiana-Michigan series in Russian and East European studies)
Translated from Russian.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-253-34797-8 (alk. paper). - ISBN 978-0-253-20784-5 (pbk.)
1. Russia-Rural conditions. 2. Russia-Social conditions- 1801-1917. 3. Villages-Russia-History-19th century. 4. Sex customs-Russia-History-19th century. I. Ransel, David L. II. Title. III. Series.
HN523.S46 1993
307.72 0947-dc20
92-28558
8 9 10 11 12 13 12 11 10 09 08
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction

1. I VAN S P ARENTS
2. C HILDBIRTH , C HRISTENING , W IFE B EATING
3. C HILDHOOD
4. C OURTSHIP AND S EXUAL R ELATIONS
5. I VAN P REPARES FOR M ARRIAGE
6. P LEDGING THE B RIDE, THE B RIDE -S HOW, AND M ARRIAGE
7. I NFANTICIDE , E MOTION , S EXUAL D ISORDER , D RINK AND F OOD
8. H OUSING , P ROPERTY , T RADES , B UDGETS, AND R ELIGIOUS B ELIEF
9. P EASANT I DEALS , W ORK H ABITS, AND C AUSES OF P OVERTY

10. C OURT C ASES AND P OLITICAL S TRUCTURE
Appendix
Suggestions for Further Reading
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project has been assisted by support from a number of foundations and individuals. A Mellon Grant through the Russian and East European Institute of Indiana University paid Michael Levine for his collaboration in the translation. During 1989-1990, when I received funding from the Guggenheim Foundation, the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), and a Fulbright-Hays fellowship, I was able to devote a portion of my time to this project, in particular the work in Russian archives. I am grateful to the donors and staffs of these funding agencies for their generous support.
Several individuals contributed important advice. Professors Nadya Peterson of the University of Pennsylvania, Nina Perlina of Indiana University, and Yelena Stepanova of Yekaterinburg Technical University helped me understand some difficult phrases in-Russian, especially in the expressions of the peasants. Professor Linda Ivanits of Pennsylvania State University advised on some of the folkloric terms; Olga Melnikova, a curator in the Kremlin museum, provided crucial information on the Semyonov Tian-Shanskii family from archives that I was unable to consult (I acknowledge her help again in the specific footnote references that she gave me). Materials from the Academy of Sciences Archive in St. Petersburg came to me through the mediation of Aleksandr Isupov, an advanced graduate student at St. Petersburg University. Professor Janet Kennedy and Mr. Eli Weinerman, both at Indiana University, helped with references and advice on pictures. Special appreciation goes to T. M. Pankova of the Riazan Historical-Architectural Museum in the city of Riazan for selecting from the museum s photo archive many of the pictures used in this book, and to Ben Eklof and Molly Pyle for facilitating their delivery. Professor Ellen Dwyer of Indiana University took a sharp editorial pen to the introduction, and Professor Steven L. Hoch of the University of Iowa offered a number of valuable suggestions for improvement of both the introduction and the translation. To all these people, and to my wife Terry for her patience and understanding, I am most thankful.
Note on the Text
I have used the Library of Congress system of transliteration throughout; however, some minor modifications have been made in the text so that readers unfamiliar with Russian can approximate the correct pronunciation of names and terms. For example, the Russian letter has been rendered as yo; soft vowels are rendered as ya, yu , and ye at the beginning of a word, and as ia, iu , and e elsewhere. Soft signs have been omitted from transliterated Russian first names in the body of the book but retained in the notes for proper reference.
ABBREVIATIONS
AGO AN SSSR
Archive of the Russian Geographical Society, St. Petersburg
Arkhiv AN SSSR
Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg branch
LGALI
The Leningrad State Archive of Literature and Art
INTRODUCTION
Russia in the late nineteenth century was a society in crisis. For some, the pace of development was too slow. Germany, France, England, and the United States-the countries to which most educated Russians instinctively compared their own-were well ahead of Russia in industrialization and urbanization, and they had a far higher level of general education and culture. For others, change was too rapid. They blamed the government s drive to catch up with the West for the increasingly deep fissures in society, which seemed to threaten the country with revolution. Yet, however educated Russians may have viewed the sources of the crisis, most believed that its resolution depended ultimately on the attitudes and actions of the common people, the peasants, who constituted about 85 percent of the nation s population. Peasants not only were rural dwellers, but they also, as migrant laborers in the cities and factory towns, made up the majority of the industrial working class. As peasants in uniform, they composed the bulk of the armed forces. Curiously enough, both radical critics of the established regime and its conservative defenders, despite their differences with one another and their shared ignorance of village life, were convinced that they knew what the common people wanted and needed and could speak in their name. As a consequence, discussion of peasants and of Russia s future, an important part of public discourse in late tsarist Russia, was filled with a great many myths and misconceptions.
The study that follows was undertaken by its author, Olga Petrovna Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia, and her collaborator, K. V. Nikolaevskii, in the late 1890s in order to meet the need for information about the actual life conditions, attitudes, and aspirations of the peasantry. The two best-known accounts of peasant life then available (both imprints of the 1880s) were A. N. Engelgardt s From the Village: Twelve Letters , 1872-1887 and A. Yefimenko s Studies of Peasant Life . The first was a literary work, a series of letters published over many years in a major Russian magazine, which focused largely on the rural economy and on the relationship of peasants and noble landlords in organizing it. The Yefimenko study went into more aspects of peasant life, including family life and customs, but presented information in a static and abstract form that failed to capture the fluidity and variability of village life. I should add that at the same time that Semyonova (I use the short form of her name for convenience) and Nikolaevskii began their work, a major national survey of peasant life was launched by the private ethnographic bureau established by a wealthy noble, V. N. Tenishev. The bureau distributed a questionnaire with several hundred items to priests, school teachers, amateur ethnographers, and other literate inhabitants of villages throughout the Russian empire. The responses constitute the richest single fund of information on peasant life from the late nineteenth century and have been used in scholarly studies of folklore, language, folk medicine, and other topics. But there is no single work based on this collection or otherwise produced that offers the intimate portrayal of peasant family life, sexual mores, and the treatment of women that we find in Semyonova s study.

Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia
This unusual accomplishment stems from Semyonova s pioneering approach to peasant life through intensive, lengthy study of one community. Even the leaders of the English school of ethnography, the first to develop and codify the practice of intimate field-work contacts in the early decades of this century, still relied heavily in the late nineteenth century on information gathered through questionnaires sent to missionaries and colonial officials. On their few excursions into the field, the ethnographers remained onboard a ship anchored offshore or on the veranda of the local colonial office and made notes on the basis of reports brought to them by local informants. As often as not, the informants were traders or other outsiders in regular contact with native populations, not the natives themselves. Visits were brief, for the objective was to survey a large range of peoples in order to verify hypotheses abo