04 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 about the diffusion throughout the world of ancient customs. Not until the 1910s did British ethnographers set up camp in a village for months on end and become “participant observers” of everyday life. The most daring and original of these was Bronislaw Malinowski, whose work set the standard for subsequent generations.1

In this respect, Semyonova was ahead of her time. She and Nikolaevskii began by designing a research program based on an extensive list of questions about the economic, social, and family life of the peasantry. Semyonova then sought answers to the questions in the course of four years of observation (1898 to 1902) in villages close to her family estate in the Dankov district of Riazan province. As her collaborator Nikolaevskii pointed out in a letter written in late 1906, “the aim of the project was to portray a peasant of average intelligence, economic status, and moral character from the Black Earth region of Russia at the turn of the century. The political and social climate of that time (as is still true today) was such that everyone expected that the peasant alone would be able to bring about a new order in Russia, and the pace of this change was also entirely dependent on the peasantry. It stood to reason, therefore, that this average peasant ‘Ivan’ would have been, or better, ought to have been, an object of interest to everyone, whereas in actuality the image of this Ivan remained not merely vague but altogether unknown.” Nikolaevskii went on to say that the project was to encompass the entire life of Ivan from birth to maturity. Their questions “focused chiefly on economic and social conditions and were intended to bring in issues of everyday life only to the extent that they illuminated the economic and social conditions.”2 For them, “social conditions” covered a broad range of topics, including birth, courtship, marriage, mores, religious outlook, and consciousness. By producing a “realistic” portrayal of Ivan, Semyonova and Nikolaevskii hoped to combat the naive but widely accepted ideas of populist writers who believed that Russian peasants were naturally cooperative and communitarian and could therefore provide a native foundation for Russian socialism.

Semyonova failed to provide a clear guide to the villages she was studying and merely refers to one or another of them from time to time. At the center of her study is the village of Muraevnia, known in Russian as a selo, that is, a village large enough to have its own church. Muraevnia was a substantial community, consisting of just over two thousand inhabitants at the turn of the century. Most of its homes were built of brick, and it boasted a “two-class school,” an institution that provided five years of schooling in two classrooms, plus a school for girls and women, which evidently taught crafts such as lacemaking (a local specialty) and some general education. Muraevnia was situated on the Ranova River about one kilometer upstream from Semyonova’s family estate of “Gremiachka.” (See the map on page xvi.) She also mentions events and conditions in other villages in the vicinity: Zabolot’e and Ol’khi, Kobel’sha, Sergeevka, Chernyshevka, and Karavaevo. The first two, which lay close together about four kilometers upriver from Muraevnia, formed a single census unit with twenty-four hundred inhabitants.3 This community, like Muraevnia, dwarfed some of the other villages Semyonova mentions, which she describes as having only fifteen homes (or about one hundred inhabitants).

After finishing her formal field work in 1902, Semyonova continued to rework her notes until her death in 1906, hoping to add observations about the impact on her villages of the civil disturbances leading up to and connected with the revolutionary years of 1905–1906.4 She did not, however, succeed in synthesizing all her materials. She had long suffered from a heart condition, evidently the result of rheumatic fever, for which she took heavy doses of digitalis.5 Her cousin Vera Dmitrievna reported in her unpublished memoirs that in the last months of her life Olga Semyonova was unable to walk because of the swelling of her legs and sat alone in her room, hiding her condition from relatives and doctors.6 The swelling suggests that she was suffering from dropsy and probably died from this condition or its associated infections, pneumonias, septic emboli, and endocarditis.7 She was forty-three years old. At her death, the project remained unfinished, consisting of a first draft of the composite picture of “Ivan” up to the time of his marriage and a series of unconnected field notes and vignettes from peasant life.

Semyonova’s study was edited by her friend Varvara Shneider and published eight years after her death by the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, under the title The Life of “Ivan”: Sketches of Peasant Life from One of the Black Earth Provinces.8 Perhaps because of its appearance in 1914, at the start of seven years of war, revolution, and civil war, the work was lost sight of by all but a few specialists in ethnography and the history of peasant institutions. Its neglect may also be attributable to the poor organization of the original text, much of which remained a series of unintegrated vignettes. Even in the composite picture of “Ivan” at the start of the book, materials were introduced chaotically, with observations on a particular subject scattered here and there. Issues were taken up briefly, dropped, and then returned to later for further development. In constructing this translated text, therefore, I have been very free in moving elements of the original around, taking paragraphs and sometimes even sentences from widely dispersed points and patching them into other places in the text, or even building new paragraphs and sections out of scattered remnants. In addition, I have woven into this much-reorganized text a number of long and short passages found in the author’s personal archives (mainly undigested field notes from two St. Petersburg repositories) and from notes of hers published by her friend Varvara Shneider in a eulogy that appeared in 1906 in a periodical of the Russian Geographic Society. All these additions to the original text are signaled in footnotes at the point they appear, and archival or other references are provided. The chapter breakdown, headings, introductory notes, and footnotes in this English version are my own (with the exception of a couple of footnotes by Semyonova, identified by placement of her last name in brackets at their close), as is the title, Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia.

Before reading an ethnography, one should learn about the author. Ethnographers such as Semyonova undertake their researches for a variety of reasons, and the particular stance, or frame of reference, of each researcher bears on the results. The frame of reference is constituted by the researcher’s position in time, professional and political commitments, psychology, training, and other factors. Ethnography begins with the awareness of difference, and the ethnographer, on the basis of his or her frame of reference and available language and images, must decide how to represent the object of study. It is important, therefore, to assess Semyonova’s position in relation to the peasants she tells us about. Unfortunately, the Russian publishers of Semyonova’s original text did not write much about her as a person. What I have been able to learn about her comes from a variety of sources, including the eulogy by Varvara Shneider mentioned earlier, references in a few published and unpublished diaries, and two short conversations with her surviving relatives.

Born in 1863 into a prominent scientific family, Olga Semyonova was the daughter of the famous explorer, geographer, and statistician Pyotr Petrovich Semyonov (later given the addition Tian-Shanskii by the emperor in recognition of his explorations of the Tien Shan mountains of Central Asia). Her father also played a major role in designing the legislation for the emancipation of the Russian peasants from serfdom, a reform implemented in the years 1861–1863. Although Semyonova lived half of her life in St. Petersburg and traveled abroad for a time with her family, she often spent her summers at “Gremiachka,” the family estate in Riazan province close to the villages where she later carried out her study of peasant life. She seemed to have inherited much of her father’s spirit of exploration and inquiry; at the time of her death, her nephew Leonid, a well-known writer and Tolstoyan philosopher, wrote of the aunt “so dear to me”: “She died in the prime of life, not satisfied with anything, hungry for knowledge, seeking [truth].”9

Semyonova’s adult life was marked by personal tragedy. According to her relative Anastasia Mikhailovna, when an “unworthy” young man fell in love with Olga, she dismissed his offer of marriage.10 Subsequently, the rejected suitor shot himself in the head and died.11 Semyonova thereafter refused to consider marriage, withdrew increasingly from the social and intellectual life of the capital, and began to spend more time on the family estate, where she became acquainted with every family in the collection of villages that was associated with it.

Semyonova produced her first important ethnographic study in 1886 at the age of twenty-three—a collection of folk songs from Riazan province, which won her a silver medal from the Imperial Russian Geographical Society.12 She continued collecting peasant songs to the end of her life; brief excerpts of some of them appear in the work translated here. Another major work by Semyonova, done in collaboration with her brother Veniamin, was a statistical and ethnographic survey of the Central Black Earth region of Russia, which appeared as the second book of an eleven-volume series on Russia’s principal geographic regions. She did the ethnographic portions, while her brother (editor of the series) compiled the statistics.13 Semyonova also collected Russian folk costumes, and eventually with her friend Varvara Shneider acquired 1,465 items, subsequently donated to the Russian Ethnographic Museum.14 Finally, Semyonova was an accomplished water-colorist. She received formal training in the 1880s at the School of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts in St. Petersburg and continued to paint throughout her life. Some of her works now hang in Russian state institutions and galleries.15 Her interest in painting was to become an asset in her investigation of village life, for she confessed that many times while working at her easel, she was able to eavesdrop on peasant conversations.

This stratagem employed by Semyonova for overhearing conversations reveals her awareness of her status as an outsider in the village and her ability to devise means of getting at intimate details. She clearly sensed the otherness of the peasant world and regarded the peasants as different from educated, urbanized Russians in fundamental ways. She constituted her own identity as a person of Western scientific culture in opposition to the peasants she studied. For example, according to her, the boundary between childhood and adulthood, so clearly demarcated in educated society, collapsed in village society. Peasant children saw the world very much as did the adults. But instead of viewing this difference through the prism of the elite’s paternalist ideology (which held that the childlike innocence of adult peasants required that they be guided and protected by the landlords), Semyonova stressed another aspect: the early exposure of children to the difficulties and cynicism of adult life. Peasant views of work, morality, and property were likewise quite different from her own, not to mention the treatment of women, whose lot as the brutalized work horses and chief preservers of social bonds in the family and community Semyonova portrays with a vividness achieved in no other study of Russian peasant life.

Since the ethnographer and the peasants shared formal membership in the Eastern Orthodox church, this fundamental social institution and their common faith might conceivably have united them. But here again a divide is evident. Semyonova devotes relatively little space to religion, but it is clear that she did not regard the peasants as Orthodox Christians. She depicts them as confused about questions of ultimate truth and salvation, even on their deathbeds. She tells of old people who in their last hours still wondered whether some dissident religious sects might not provide a better guide to heaven than their own official church. God was a physical reality for peasants, for he constituted a tangible presence, who brought rain or drought, health or illness. In this sense, God was more real than the tsar, who for most Russian villagers was a distant, unreachable figure. But the world of the peasant was populated as well by a wide range of creatures unknown to the Christian church, including powerful water, tree, house, and steambath sprites, and the most mighty and encompassing of all, Moist Mother Earth. We will see in Semyonova’s study examples of people not only placing their hands on a Bible but also eating earth to seal an unbreakable pledge.

Here it is worth pointing out that one of the central issues in the scholarship on Russian religion is the question of syncretism (or dvoeverie, as it is known in Russian), the commingling of elements of local folk belief and the larger structure of Christian doctrine, the “little tradition” and “great tradition,” as the two are labeled in the writings of the anthropologist Robert Redfield. The notion should be familiar in a culture such as ours that celebrates Christ’s birth with the visit of an elf from the North Pole and the Resurrection with an oversize rabbit carrying baskets of eggs.16 In the Russian village, the two traditions merge. Midwives and folk healers in their spells and prayers simultaneously invoke the assistance of Christian saints and nature spirits. Priests perform cleansing rituals to remove “unclean” forces of pre-Christian belief systems. Semyonova describes a scene in which a priest ritually cleanses a tub of pickled apples polluted by a dead mouse. Although her urban, scientific worldview led her to interpret this as a fraud committed by the priest in order to obtain a fee, the priest may well have understood what he was doing as a “Christian” service and not at all in conflict with his religious training.

One important aspect of village life that Semyonova does little to illuminate is kinship, even though conversations she reports by peasants about decision making in the village indicate the prominence of kin ties in local power relations. In this respect, Semyonova treats her subject quite differently than did leading British and French anthropologists in later years; they placed kinship structure at the center of their analysis and deployed it as the principal comparative element, around which they then built their interpretation of the culture as a whole. We do see some of the workings of kinship relations in Semyonova’s descriptions of weddings, christenings, and the like, but she never analyzes them directly or looks for them in specific stories. Possibly, this particular blind spot was a consequence of the similarity in kinship structures of peasant and urban Russian society. The focus on the otherness of an ethnographic subject may make it difficult for the researcher to see the similarities—or at least to rate them as instructive or significant.

It is also important to keep in mind that Semyonova was working before the time that kinship became a central focus in Western anthropology. The Russian ethnographic tradition within which she operated had until the twentieth century primarily a literary rather than an analytical orientation. Literature and literary criticism were the favored vehicles of social commentary in Russia from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, and the story of the people naturally was shaped by the powerful literary currents in society, first into a pseudo-classicist idyll of happy villagers dancing through fields of flowers in clean costumes, and later, under the influence of Romanticism and sentimentalism, into a vehicle for either the Official Nationality doctrine of the state, which extolled the greatness and uniqueness of the people, or the critical nativist stance of Slavophilism, which condemned the oppression of the people by the westernizing state bureaucracy. According to the great nineteenth-century historian of Russian ethnography A. N. Pypin (himself a leading literary critic), after the shift in political loyalties in the 1860s (when the Slavophiles turned statist and imperialistic), the Russian and Ukrainian ethnographic movements again aligned with the current literary movements, in some cases with the westernizing and in others with the nativist-imperialist.17 Because Russian ethnographers thought of themselves as writers of literature, the more analytical and quantitative approaches to the peasantry were produced by other researchers, such as statisticians and medical writers. Semyonova clearly belonged to the established ethnographic tradition and saw herself as a creative but objective writer who used words to describe peasant life much as she used water colors to render village scenes and landscapes.

Might Semyonova possibly have felt a bond with the female peasants in their common subjection to the patriarchal authority that permeated Russian society from top to bottom? Semyonova’s own father was said to have been an emotionally distant, patriarchal figure.18 She describes with intensity the brutality with which men enforced their power in the village. But she also notes cases of women who beat their husbands and, more commonly, women who refused to take extra employment even when their husbands had contracted for them to do the work. Most important, her descriptions reveal the ideology and reality of patriarchal power as compromised in several key areas of peasant life. Decisions on whether babies were to live or die were left entirely to women, ensuring their control over family limitation. Decisions about when and whom to marry were also primarily left to women, who thus gained the power to build and shape kin ties, which, as Semyonova points out in another context, were central to village politics. The descriptions of property and the responsibilities of spouses likewise reveal the limits of husbands’ authority to use their wives’ goods or coerce them to perform certain tasks.

Semyonova depicts these cases of female control effectively, but she seems unaware of their subversive impact. Of course, Pierre Bourdieu was not available to instruct her in the creative disjunction between ideology and practice.19 Contemporary readers should also not forget that Russian patriarchal authority (like any enduring system of dominance) owed much of its success to just such surrenders of power. By yielding these spaces to women, men also yielded responsibility for risky decisions (risky in relation to both this life and the next) and preserved for themselves a moral high ground from which they could pass judgment on their wives’ decisions. Not surprisingly, Semyonova does not work at this level of abstraction; nor is she able to transcend the language and attitudes of her day. She sympathizes with the women she observes, but she uses the categories of thought and expression of the time to describe the behavior of her villagers.

Is it possible that Semyonova’s descriptions of peasant women reflect some of her feelings in regard to her own troubled life with men, the dominance of her famous father, the tragedy of her love affair? Men are not portrayed very attractively in her work. With a few exceptions, she depicts them as violent toward women, unconcerned about their children, and satisfied to stand around while women do heavy work. When she explores the affective life of the peasant, whether Ivan was capable of expressing love for his sweetheart or his wife, the findings are not especially encouraging. The primary expression of love, if we are to believe the reports of married peasant women, are the willingness of some husbands to perform needed farm work at their wives’ request and to forbear beating them. Semyonova tells the story of one such man, Petrukha, whose wife was envied by all the other women of the village. He hurried to do whatever his wife directed (even if he had to hide or explain away his submissiveness to his male friends). But Semyonova also adds: “Unfortunately, men such as Petrukha and the type of relationship he has with his wife are rare indeed. To tell the truth, this is the only case I know of.”

The story of the submissive husband is just one of a number of descriptions of actual villagers that were included in the published text of Semyonova’s work, to which I have added several others that I found in her archives. It is these stories of real people rather than her composite “Ivan” and his family that make the study especially vivid and valuable. Her composite descriptions usually show the peasants as brutal, selfish, and unfriendly, whereas her vignettes about actual people give us a more nuanced portrayal, including a glimpse of the peasants’ admirable qualities and the regard they could show for one another.

Many things about the peasants nevertheless seemed to perplex and even anger Semyonova. Despite her genuine interest in and concern for them, she remained fixed in her own cultural frame. Her stance was that of a progressive, westernizing member of the Russian intelligentsia. She wanted the peasants to share her respect for private property, her values of thrift and hard work, and she believed that without these values they could not become enlightened and productive citizens of a modern society. Yet she recognized that her values might seem useless to the peasants, given the social and economic constraints under which they lived. And she was able to grasp and convey some of their deeply felt grievances. She sensed their contempt for the enfeebled landlord class (which was passing from the scene, unable for the most part to compete, and selling out its property to merchants and wealthy peasants). She also saw the peasants’ powerful desire to wrest from the landlords the land that they felt was rightfully theirs—and their equally strong urge to hide from people like her the knowledge of that impulse. While able to glimpse such peasant attitudes, she was unable to enter the peasants’ mental world. Instead, she remained mystified and annoyed that they rejected her values, did not respect private property, stole from landlords, and assaulted their better-off neighbors.

The work of modern anthropologists may be of help in making sense of the views Semyonova describes. Peasants often seem to think of the world (or at least their world of the village) as constrained by a “limited good,” that is, a space containing only a fixed amount of all goods worth having, including land, wealth, respect, and friendship. The idea of an expanding economy, an enlarging pie that will bring more benefits to everyone, is alien, or at least was so until recent technological breakthroughs. This way of seeing things may have arisen out of the circumstances of a fixed land base and low technology that constrained the growth of productivity in peasant societies before the twentieth century.20 If “Ivan” was able to purchase more land and put more food on his table, it was food taken out of the mouths of the rest of the community. In this view, the assaults on and robberies of a better-off peasant’s orchard, to select an example used by Semyonova, were efforts to get back a (wrongful) private appropriation of a community good.

Semyonova laments the peasants’ habit of immediately spending any money that came their way and of spending their last kopeck on weddings and harvest festivals. Yet from the point of view of “limited good,” these expenditures make sense. If private accumulation of wealth was understood as a form of robbery, it would naturally have engendered resentment. Large outlays for weddings and parties served as a form of redistribution and at the same time allowed the donor to acquire “symbolic capital,” respect and status, personal leverage. Chapter 10 contains a story about a peasant who returned to the village after many years of work in town and won a share of the family property in a lawsuit against his brother. He then threw a big party for the community. His hosting of the other villagers would be labeled by us (as by Semyonova) as a bribe to ensure the community’s ratification of the decision of the township court. Yet the villagers may have seen the man’s behavior as a proper reallocation of some of the goods he had acquired through the lawsuit, and they would then have understood their ratification of the court’s decision as justified by virtue of his good-neighborliness.

Semyonova tells in chapter 7 of the ridicule with which peasants greeted one of their fellows who thought too highly of himself, a story that reveals how even a good such as respect cannot be freely appropriated. She describes how the man, on approaching the other male peasants, was “met with shrieks of laughter,” for peasants do not like “uppityness” and an air of self-importance. The ridicule is evidently aimed at restoring a balance in status allocation among the peasant men. One who takes too much respect for himself, in view of the “limited good” notions of the peasant mental world, is robbing from the others and needs to be reduced to the general level.

By the same token, villagers had to be concerned about attacks on their character. Where material goods are scarce, the symbolic capital of personal honor plays a large role in ensuring a person’s ability to participate fully in community affairs, make contracts, be listened to. We see how the question of personal reputation affected women in Semyonova’s report on a court case brought by a woman who was accused of being a “slut.” She demanded and received retribution from her false accuser, whom the court sent to jail for this crime.

To sum up, even though Semyonova renders marvelously detailed and striking portrayals of peasant behavior, she makes little effort to enter the peasants’ cultural frame. She remains outside and is entirely confident of her superiority to the peasants. Unlike some populist writers who extolled the wisdom of the folk, she is not inclined to celebrate or to romanticize them. Clearly, a central purpose of her study is to counter naive views of the peasants as naturally cooperative, communitarian beings who will provide the foundation for a new order of social peace and harmony. She hoped that a more realistic understanding of the peasants would facilitate their transformation into a modern educated citizenry.

Semyonova’s friends wrote about her “love for the people,” a remark that I found puzzling because it is usually associated with populist thinkers who idealized villagers. Love is not the emotion that dominates her study, marked as it is by anger and condescension as well as understanding and sympathy. In my conversations with her relatives, I asked about this puzzle, noting that “the picture she paints of peasant life is done in very dark colors.” Anastasia Mikhailovna brusquely responded: “Regrettably, such was their life.” When I then inquired how Semyonova expressed her love for the people, I was told that she worked with them to improve their lives. Among other things, she established a school for peasant girls in which they learned craft work in addition to general education, and she helped the villagers to organize means for preventing and fighting fires.

Finally, one clue to Semyonova’s sometimes bleak view of peasant life might be found in her own experience as revealed in her autobiographical notes, a few of which were published in the introduction to the Russian edition of this study. They are dreamy and sad, much concerned with mortality and immortality. “I have long been troubled,” she writes, “by my desire to give a part of me to other people. This desire sometimes reaches a glowing heat, but then, oh so often, I get to thinking about my insignificance, the complete emptiness of my existence, and it gives me pause. What does it matter that from time to time there comes this bright, burning sensation, when next to it, I feel the dreary, heavy burden of my long years of useless existence? True, fate has shaken me rather roughly, but what of those who have suffered even worse grief and not sat with hands tied? But I merely sat and cried, wept through all the best part of my life, day after day dulling in me the awareness that you only live once, and that unused powers do not become invigorated or revitalized as years go on, that the sun does not stand still if toward evening you take up some lengthy labor.” And in reference to her decision to write, she continues: “All this is associated with me personally. But life threw me together with many people; many of them have already gone, never to return, and others will gradually depart as well…. And so I want to imprint, if only dimly, their dear shadows on paper. Perhaps, sometime in the future, passing by chance through someone’s vivid consciousness, my pale images will blaze forth and spring to life for at least an instant. For the sake of this ‘perhaps,’ for this small deferral of oblivion and the impenetrable shadow, I have decided to take up the pen.” Semyonova’s inclination to see her own life as sad, a series of personal losses, isolation, and weeping, may have caused her to think of life in general as unhappy and therefore to miss seeing the moments of joy and contentment that her peasants undoubtedly experienced. In viewing the life of this community, we can see only what Semyonova was willing to see for herself, and in the way she was able to see it.

I have found little more about the elusive person through whose lens we view her peasant community. She led a secluded life among a small circle of friends, but she managed nevertheless to produce a priceless record of peasant life, a record that offers us insight into the lives and attitudes of Russian villagers on the eve of a revolution that would demand their participation in the building of a modern socialist state.

—D.L.R.

1. For background, see the essays in Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (History of Anthropology, vol. 1) (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983).

2. K. V. Nikolaevskii to Varvara Petrovna Shneider (December 2, 1906), AGO, fond 109, opis’ 1, chast’ 1, delo 170, 11. 1–2. The letter was written just after Semyonova’s death, evidently to provide information for Shneider’s published eulogy (cited in footnote 4), in which a portion of the letter was quoted.

3. V. P. Semenov, ed., Rossiia. Polnoe geograficheskoe opisanie nashego otechestva, vol. 2: Srednerusskaia chernozemnaia oblast’ (St. Petersburg, 1902), 407.

4. V. P. Shneider, “Pamiati Ol’gi Petrovny Semenovoi,” Izvestiia imperatorskogo russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva, vol. 43 (1907), 48.

5. A surviving relative, Anastasia (“Stana”) Mikhailovna Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia (1913–1992), with whom I spoke in 1990, told me that it was this medicine that finally killed her. But, as noted below, the reported symptoms could support a number of diagnoses.

6. I am grateful to Olga Melnikova for giving me this reference and the information about Olga Semyonova. The memoirs in question are held in LGALI, f. 116, op. 1, ed. khr. 11.

7. With regard to the link of rheumatic fever and dropsy and their fatal effects, see Ann G. Carmichael, “The Health Status of Florentines in the Fifteenth Century,” in Life and Death in Fifteenth-Century Florence, ed. Marcel Tetel, Ronald Witt, and Rona Goffen (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989), esp. 39, 42-43.

8. Zhizn’ “Ivana”: Ocherki iz byta krest’ian odnoi iz chernozemnykh gubernii, published as volume 39 of the Zapiski imperatorskogo russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva po otdeleniiu etnografii (St. Petersburg, 1914).

9. L. D. Semenov Tian’-Shanskii, “Zapiski. Greshnyi greshnym,” Uchenye zapiski Tartuskogo universiteta, vol. 414 (Tartu, 1977), 136.

10. Anastasia Mikhailovna refused to explain more about the man in question and indicated that no one in the family was permitted to talk about the affair.

11. This information comes, again, from the unpublished memoirs of Vera Dmitrievna, cited earlier, thanks to Olga Melnikova.

12. Information on Semyonova’s life comes chiefly from the previously cited eulogy by Varvara Shneider published in Izvestiia imp. Russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva, vol. 43 (1907), 41-62. A portion of Semyonova’s study of songs was published in the journal Zhivaia Starina under the title “Pesni Riazanskoi gubernii,” 4:2, otd. 2. Two other of her works appearing in the same journal are “Prazdniki (Riazanskoi gub. Dankovskogo u.),” 1:4, otd. 5; and “Smert’ i dusha v pover’iakh i rasskazakh krest’ian i meshchan Riazanskogo, Ranenburgskogo i Dankovskogo uezdov Riazanskoi gubernii,” 8:2, otd. 2.

13. Rossiia. Polnoe geograficheskoe opisanie nashego otechestva, vol. 2: Srednerusskaia chernozemnaia oblast’ (St. Petersburg, 1902).

14. The collection is mentioned in AGO, f. 58, op. 1, d. 36 (Kartoteka kollektsii, sobrannykh V. P. Shneider i O. P. Semenovoi Tian’-Shanskoi), 1. 20. The bulk of the collection is now in Riazan province, and other portions are in Tambov and Orlov provinces.

Personal correspondence of Semyonova in regard to the costume collection can be found in Arkhiv AN SSSR, f. 906, op. 1, d. 26, 11. 213-14 and elsewhere.

15. At least one of her paintings is in the Riazan Art Gallery, a gift from her brothers Veniamin and Andrei. Others are in the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, and I saw two hanging in the Geographic Society building in St. Petersburg. On the Riazan gallery and her schooling, see Riazanskii oblastnoi khudozhestvennyi muzei, Russkoe iskusstvo 19–nachalo 20 v. Katalog (Leningrad, 1982), 219. I am indebted to Olga Melnikova for this reference.

16. A point made by Donald W. Treadgold, “The Peasant and Religion,” in The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Russia, ed. Wayne S. Vucinich (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968), 72-107, in which he also develops Redfield’s notions of the two traditions.

17. A. N. Pypin, Istoriia russkoi etnografii, 4 vols (St. Petersburg, 1890-92).

18. See portrayal by W. Bruce Lincoln, Petr Petrovich Semenov-Tian-Shanskii: The Life of a Russian Geographer (Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1980).

19. See his Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), especially chapter 4.

20. I am relying here on the work of Edward C. Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (New York: The Free Press, 1958), and George M. Foster, “Peasant Society and the Image of the Limited Good,” American Anthropologist, vol. 67 (1965), 293-315. See also the symposium on this topic with contributions by Foster, Oscar Lewis, and Julian Pitt-Rivers in Human Organization (Winter 1960-61), 174-84. I want to thank Steven L. Hcch for directing me to this literature.

Village Life
in Late Tsarist Russia