Semyonova begins her story with a description of the peasant Ivan’s parents at the time they married and began their family. By contrasting the customs at that time (about 1863) with the time of her observations of Ivan the adult (about 1900), she is able to illustrate the rapid changes that were taking place in Russian peasant society in the late nineteenth century.
Ivan’s parents were known as Stepan and Akulina. Stepan, a peasant of average means, was born under serfdom. Ivan was his third son and was born a year or two after the emancipation of privately owned peasants in 1861. Stepan and Akulina’s livestock at the time of Ivan’s birth included three horses (one of which was a yearling), fifteen sheep, one cow, a heifer, and a pig. Their hut, which was wooden, had three windows and an enclosed entryway (sentsa). Nearby were a workyard, a small granary, and a threshing barn.
Farm tools included two wagons, two wooden, wheelless plows, one harrow, two types of harnesses, two scythes, two rolls of sackcloth (veret’ia), a sleigh, an ax, two spades, and two flails.
Household utensils consisted of a cabbage cleaver, four castiron kettles, seven tubs, two buckets, a ladle (korets), a churn, six earthenware pots, four dishes, a trough, a lamp, one size-four bottle, a scutch (for flax and hemp), two spinning wheels, two hackles with boards (dontsa) to brace them, two hand grinders, one table, two regular benches, a sleeping bench and a counter, a washtub, oven prongs (which are called a “stag” [rogach] because of their resemblance to antlers), a loom, three frying pans, two rakes, a sifter, and two sieves.
Peasant married couple hauling goods in a cart. Village of Murmino in Riazan district. Courtesy of the Riazan Museum.
The young married couple harvested eighteen shocks of rye from their acres of land, or about twenty-six hundred pounds of rye. In addition, they produced about six hundred pounds of millet (proso), thirty-five hundred pounds of potatoes, and eight shocks of oats.
When Stepan and Akulina married, Akulina’s family had to provide a trousseau. In those days, a dowry of money was never used. It was customary to supply the bride with clothing: linen cloths (from five to twenty pieces about twenty-five yards each), two to five checked skirts, four to six shirts, one or two cotton sarafans, bedding (a feather pillow, a thick unquilted coverlet, i.e., a blanket). Other types of women’s household goods were accepted, such as a spinning wheel or a hand grinder—although in general the dowry was a minor consideration. The groom’s family focused mainly on the physical characteristics (health) and aptitude for work (abilities) of the prospective wife.
The groom would give his bride-to-be a brideprice, which consisted of about ten or fifteen rubles, a sheepskin coat, a light coat made from coarse peasant cloth, fur slippers, felt boots, between 75 and 150 pounds of flour, a measure of groats, and several gallons of vodka.1
Nowadays linen cloths are no longer included in the dowry. As the people explain, “The flax crops have been poor in recent years,” and brides “are not the good spinners they were in the old days.” Instead people focus mainly on whether the bride is well dressed, whether she has woolen sarafans, a shawl, shoes, a coat made from fine cloth, and the like. (In some villages, shifts and woolen skirts of the old type are going out of style and being replaced by sarafans. In these villages, women’s everyday apparel consists of skirts, stockings, tight-fitting long-waisted jackets, sheepskin coats, and shirts made from homespun cotton; the rest of their clothes are made from manufactured cloth.)2 Villagers demand just as many shirts for the trousseau now as they did previously, and the bedding is better than it used to be: two pillows, one made with feathers, the other with cotton wadding; two blankets, one an unquilted coverlet filled with wadding and one a quilted cotton blanket. The groom’s family gives less and less for the brideprice. Sometimes only one fur coat, sometimes only about seven rubles—and that is all.
In recent times, a money dowry has been given to the groom (about five to ten rubles), especially if his betrothed is known to have some failing, such as being hard of hearing or cross-eyed, or being “oldish” (i.e., considerably older than the groom), or if a rumor has spread that she has been “fooling around.”
When Stepan and Akulina married about thirty years ago, the average age of marriage was sixteen to nineteen years for girls, eighteen to twenty for boys. In relatively rare exceptions, a family might ask the bishop for permission to marry a boy not quite eighteen years of age.3 Even more rarely were fifteen-year-old girls given in marriage. Although it was considered dangerous for a girl to stay unmarried until she was twenty (because eligible bachelors would start to pass her by), a girl’s family viewed her as a source of labor and consequently valued her, and they were not in a hurry to get rid of her. Yet they were eager to marry off a boy young and thereby obtain his wife as an additional worker for the family. As a result, marriage between an eighteen-year-old male and an eighteen-to-twenty-year-old female is not uncommon even today. There are still cases of seventeen-year-old boys marrying. Every married woman eagerly awaits the opportunity to be relieved in her work by a young daughter-in-law. [Mothers express this wish in the lullabies they sing to their infants.]
I’m rocking my son
I hope for a better life for myself.
I’m rocking my daughter
For her, I hope but for a kind household.4
About fifteen or twenty years ago, a man with a mustache and beard was considered old. A girl who married such a man would be a laughingstock. Of course, people also made fun of a man who married a spinster. Women over twenty frequently married widowers, although in general it was considered more suitable for widowers to marry widows. Such weddings took place very simply; they were small family affairs without much merrymaking and were jokingly referred to as “cuckoo’s weddings” (a widow is known as a “bitter cuckoo”). People would say, “Our widower is taking in a housekeeper for the work season.”
Now women marry in the age range of sixteen to twenty-five, and men from age eighteen to twenty-seven. More commonly, women marry in the seventeen to twenty-two age range, and only rarely at sixteen and at twenty-three to twenty-five. Men very often marry only after completing their military service.
It is also considered no disgrace for a widower to marry a girl “with a past,” as we say.
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Although Semyonova writes that the brideprice was given to the bride, it would normally go to the father of the bride (or the head of her household, if it was not her father) in compensation for her lost services.
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The parenthetical material comes from a much later point in the published study, where it appeared unconnected to surrounding material. In inserting it here, I deleted from the original paragraph an inconsistency: Semyonova had noted baldly that “woolen skirts are not worn anymore,” without the qualifier “in some villages.”
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The civil law set the minimum age for marriage at eighteen for males and sixteen for females. Ecclesiastical officials were nevertheless permitted to lower the age by six months in individual cases.
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That is to say, in-laws who will welcome her as a guest and not treat her as a slave. [Semyonova]