03 CHILDHOOD

After discussing basic child care, Semyonova enters into a discussion of the psychology of peasant youngsters. She sees their attitudes and behavior as conditioned by the promiscuous intimacy of peasant life. The precocious shrewdness of peasant children led her to the belief (so implausible to our modern way of thinking) that children saw the world in the same terms as adults. She also makes some comparisons of peasant children and “our children,” that is, the children of educated urbanized people. While she no doubt idealized the conditions of children in educated families, her attitude reveals the chasm she sensed between the world of peasant family life and that of educated society.

Semyonova seems to have seen the roots of peasant morality in the values instilled in childhood, although she does not state this directly. Deceit to escape punishment was approved, as was the use of foul language or abuse of animals to vent frustration. Patriarchal authority was accepted implicitly; might makes right, and in a sense this brutal fact of life justified deceit and other means of avoidance to escape the dictates of authority and power. Fistfighting among boys was also approved, even encouraged, and we see later on in the descriptions of play the large role that fistfights occupied in connection with children’s games. Fistfights were also an adult male form of recreation; whole villages or factory teams would square off against one another on the ice of a river and slug it out on Sundays or holidays.

The discussion of the different toys and games preferred by girls and boys leads naturally to consideration of sex role socialization. Semyonova sees this as achieved both by the conscious imposition of attitudes by grownups and by the children’s observations of their parents’ roles and power relationship.

Semyonova speaks of the political structure of the peasant world. The land captaincy, established in 1889, was an important new element of this structure. Each rural precinct (uchastok) was assigned a land captain (zemskii nachal’nik), usually appointed from the nobility, to supervise peasant affairs. The land captain had extensive authority of both a judicial and an administrative character, including the right to review all decisions of the village commune (mir) as expressed through the decisions of the village assembly (sel’skii skhod).1 The village assembly was formally an egalitarian gathering of all household heads (but in reality, as we will learn in a later chapter, subject to manipulation by the township supervisor [volostnoi starshina] and his allies). Each township (volost’) was supposed to have a rural police officer (uriadnik).

Questions of political control and punishment suggest issues of religion and ultimate judgment. Semyonova, here and elsewhere, treats peasant views of religion with irony and condescension, pointing out their confusion about the role of God in the world and their mingling of pagan and Christian notions of holy days.

Ivan’s First Year

The food given to Ivan in his first year consists of breast milk, the soska or rag pacifier, kasha, bread, potatoes, and cow’s milk. His mother is about the only person who concerns herself with his upbringing.

As soon as children develop teeth, they begin eating sour unripened apples and cucumbers.

Ivan’s clothes consist of baby shirts. When his mother goes visiting or to mass, she wraps him in a blanket and covers his head with a little cap that she has sewn from scraps of cloth. A little girl would have a bonnet made from the same material.

The illnesses that Ivan is subject to in his first year include diarrhea, umbilical hernia, and scrofula (scabs on the head). Sometimes he suffers earaches, and in the summer he has infectious inflammation of the eyes, which is epidemic. Very small children suffer fevers, not to mention the usual children’s diseases: whooping cough, tonsillitis, or diphtheria, measles, scarlet fever, and rashes. As a result of severe diarrhea, the intestines of small children sometimes extrude. Occasionally even little children have syphilis, inherited from their parents, although they may also acquire the disease through infection.2 Midwives treat diarrhea in children by taking an affected child by the feet and shaking it head down. Women report that “the child screams and screams, but sometimes this method helps.” For an umbilical hernia, the midwife will nibble at the navel of the child over the course of several days, or she might “let a mouse do the work” after she rubs the navel with dough. I know a case of a child dying from such treatment. Alternatively, she will apply wormwood to the navel. Still another way of treating hernia is to stand the child on its legs next to the door jamb and make a mark at the point where the jamb is level with the baby’s navel. Then a hole is bored at that point with a gimlet. Scrofula is treated with bur marigold (Bidens tripartia). It is given to children to drink, and a brew of it is also added to a child’s bath. To stop the recurrent crying of a colicky child, it is carried around the chicken coop.

Often children “dry out” from rickets, which is known as the “English disease.” Another condition, a premature aging in children thought to be a form of rickets, is known to the peasants as “a dog’s old age.” Village healers use two treatments for it: baking the child in dough and giving the child a steam bath together with a dog.

By way of payment for these treatments, the midwife will take nearly anything of value, including bread, flour, groats, money, or soap. Bread dough is about the only thing she will not accept.

The peasants use the term mladencheskaia to refer to symptoms displayed by a child such as convulsions, spasms, and inflammation of the brain. They are convinced that everyone in childhood suffers from this mladencheskaia. Some children are thought to experience it when they are asleep, and so it is difficult to detect. This type is the most fortunate variety. The peasants believe that it is very dangerous to frighten a child when it is in the grip of mladencheskaia, for the child could easily become blind, deaf, or retarded. One peasant woman told me confidently that “it is well known that children die from two causes: diarrhea and mladencheskaia.”

Up to the time Ivan takes his first steps, he is looked after by his sister, a girl of nine or ten years of age.3 She has difficulty carrying him around and often drops him, exclaiming: “Oops, my goodness! How did I let go of him?” Sometimes Ivan tumbles headfirst down a hillock. When he cries, his baby-sitter uses her free hand to slap him on the face or head, saying, “Keep quiet, you son of a bitch.” Sometimes his sister leaves him on the ground, “at the softest spot around,” and runs off to play with her friends or to catch crawfish in the river. For an hour or more, the child crawls around in the mud, wet, covered with dirt, and crying. To keep him quiet, he might be given a baked potato, an apple, or a cucumber. Sometimes he tries to climb over the high threshold of the house, falls, hurts himself, and bruises his face. Naturally, the baked potato or the cucumber he was given gets dragged through the dirt and thoroughly covered with mud and manure before he starts to eat it, sometimes well mixed with what is running out of his nose. He eats garbage from the pig trough, drinks from this same trough, and grabs hold of anything within reach, including his own feces. Sometimes he stuffs dirt in his mouth and swallows it.

Woman in bast shoes holds hand of one child, while a girl takes care of what may be her younger sibling. Village of Gorodnoe, Spassk district of Riazan province. Courtesy of the Riazan Museum.

The first things Ivan is aware of are, of course, hunger and satiety; later comes affection, indulgence, or whipping. His first words are “daddy,” “mama,” “nanny,” “baba” (grandma). His first strivings are to grab anything that can be eaten. He recognizes his mother more than anyone else, and knows least of all his father, who pays less attention to him than do the other members of the family, except the uncles. I have observed generally that older fathers, though sometimes annoyed by the presence of children, are more affectionate with them than younger fathers. An elderly father or a grandfather is more likely to build a toy for a child or to take a child for a ride in the wagon than is a younger father. Parents, on returning from the market or a fair, usually bring the young children treats such as sunflower seeds or some cheap honey cakes or sugar candies. The children, impatient for their parents to return from the market, may occasionally go in a big group far down the road to meet them.

Ivan’s Childhood to Age Six

When Ivan finally stood up “on his hind legs” and started to walk at about fourteen months, child care continued to be provided by his sister and mother. As before, he was often left in the charge of his sister, and the quality of her care changed only to the extent that she kicked him a bit harder for various offenses, such as screaming and dirtying his clothes. When he got hopelessly dirty, his sister would take off his shirt and send him to a large puddle or pond to wash up. Ivan would go off with the other children as naked as a jaybird and splash around in the water by the shore, the sun burning his back. When he ran naked back to his sister, as a reward for his obedience she dressed him again in his shirt, which had had time to dry out on a pole. When mother was at home, she washed him herself. She would also scrub his shirt, patch it on occasion, pick the lice off his head, and give him better pieces of food than he would receive from his sister. As a result, he naturally clung most closely to his mother.

As far as Ivan’s getting fed on time, the only one who cares about this is [again] his mother, and she cares but little.4 She calls the children to dinner and supper when the grownups sit down to eat, but if the children do not appear, she does not worry much about it. “It’s all the same,” she says, “even if they eat some now, they’ll run off again to play and then come back to ask for food a second time. They eat us out of house and home!” Some mothers report that their children eat on the run; that is, whenever it strikes their fancy, they go to their mothers and ask for a piece of bread to munch on. Consequently, the principal food of peasant children is dry bread and potatoes. When their mother is away from the house, the children go hungry.

It happens that children of about four to six years of age, when unsupervised, will sometimes eat henbane or nightshade (Solanum nigrum), referred to by peasants as bznika [a narcotic and, in large enough doses, deadly plant]. The children may also approach a horse from behind and grab it by the tail or whip it with a twig. This frequently costs them a disfigured face, broken teeth, and injured eyes. The same little children are the cause of fires: in the absence of their parents, they grab a pack of matches and light a bonfire in the yard, or next to the threshing barn, and in no time the whole village burns down.

Children begin to climb from the age of two. At first, they climb on a bench. Later they clamber over the gates and wattle fencing. They fall down headfirst and hurt themselves. The smallest children sometimes crawl from the bench [attached to the inside wall of the house] up to the window and fall out the window. Children who are a little older will climb the threshing barn and the trees, and they do not always escape injury. For this mischief the children are punished by the grownups.

Fistfighting and swearing are learned quite early. As soon as Ivan began to walk, he started fighting with other children. He was actually encouraged to do this, especially if he was able to best another small child. Ivan learned swear words from his older brothers and sisters, even before he could put together a complete sentence. He started to call his mother a bitch whenever she denied him something, much to the delight of the whole family, even the mother herself. They would actually encourage him on such occasions. “You sly little rascal.” “So this is what your mother is when she does not listen to you.” Mothers sometimes naively boast of the talent of their young children, saying, “What an ataman he is, already calling me a bitch!” To be an ataman [literally: a Cossack chieftain] means to lead other children in brawling or starting mischief. Ivan sometimes hit his mother on the apron with a twig, to the amusement of the grownups. As far as swear words go, all the children, beginning with the very youngest, know almost the entire repertoire of abusive peasant words. Needless to say, boys of seven to twelve years of age, and even girls of the same age, swear and use foul language during their play (when they are quarreling). “Cur, bitch, bastard, whore” are swear words frequently used by children.

At the age Ivan started to walk, his clothing consisted of homespun or linen shirts, worn as a gown or belted at the waist. His hair was blond and, naturally, uncombed, and cut in a circle. His feet were bare, with a caked-on crust of black earth. For Communion his mother dressed him in a cleaner shirt made from domestic linen dyed blue and carefully belted it. On such an occasion, he would wear stockings made of wool and woolen cloth shoes. She also made sure to rub his head with butter or vegetable oil. When a boy turns two, he is fitted out with trousers, likewise made from homespun fabric. But boys begin to wear trousers all the time only at age eight or ten. Little girls are also clad only in linen shirts, but longer shirts than those of the boys, and always belted at the waist. Very early, from about age two, they like to tie a kerchief around their heads. On holidays the girls are dressed in calico sarafans. Girls from the age of about ten usually wear homespun skirts even at home. On occasion, the girls also put on woolen stockings and shoes.

Punishment for mischief consisted of beatings administered by the parents. They beat Ivan for screaming, getting covered with mud, or stealing a piece of food. They did not beat him for fighting, lying, or using foul language. His father most often beat him for screaming, while his mother beat him mainly for screaming or ruining his clothes. They hit him with their hands, with whips, or with switches, and pulled his ears and hair.

The mischief of two- or three-year-old boys amounts mostly to damaging their clothes or stealing pieces of food that they can immediately stuff in their mouths. Ivan would receive a cuff on the back of his head if he got in the way. He was, however, a very good dodger and knew how to jump back in time and scamper out of range of a slap that was intended for him. They beat him if he climbed up to where he might fall and hurt himself. One four-year-old urchin, having gotten the idea that he could take the place of a hen, sat on a hen’s nest with little chicks. When his mother found him there, she had to act so as not to frighten him, for he might smother all the chicks. “What a nice hen I have here!” she declared. Hearing this, the child let her come closer and take him from the nest, after which he was, of course, beaten with a rope and received a few pulls on his hair. In another case, a few children climbed to the very top of a barn. Their father, not wishing to frighten them into falling off, coaxed them into coming down “to drink tea” (a rare treat). When the children were safely down, they were treated not to tea but to a thrashing with leather straps.

Ivan learned to lie as soon as he understood the connection between his actions and punishment. For lying he was not punished at all. So he lied out of self-defense and to gain the time needed to escape his parents’ anger. He might place the blame on a neighbor and so be able to run away, while his mother went looking for the alleged culprit. He knew perfectly well that his parents’ anger would subside if he managed to stay out sight for a few hours. To convince the parents of their innocence, even the youngest children will swear impressive oaths. It is safe to say that children master the art of lying out of fear being beaten.

Ivan during Preadolescence and Teenage

Little children grow up very quickly in peasant life. It is not uncommon for a ten-year-old to reason like an adult. This is mainly because of the uncomplicated nature of peasant affairs, and also the child’s participation in most of the work and in all of the activities of peasant life, in which everything is out in the open. Adults are not constrained by the presence of children from speaking about anything they like, getting drunk, or fighting. Having experienced hunger since his early years, a child soon learns to appreciate the value of things. Little Ivan understands perfectly what it means when his father spends money in a tavern and how it will affect the child’s own well-being. Frequently Ivan will reproach his mother or father in such instances. If he fails to do so consistently, it is only from fear of being beaten.

Seeing that brute force constantly triumphs, Ivan begins very early to recognize that might makes right. If his father beats his mother, then he naturally feels sorry for her, but not in the sense that his father is wrong and his mother is right. He feels sorry for his mother either instinctively or because “daddy may end up killing her.” And to lose a mother is the most terrible misfortune for a child. It is the mother more than the father who rears the children. A mother will give her all to get her children on their feet and bring up her son to be a helper for her. A father, on the other hand, behaves with remarkable unconcern for his orphaned children. No children are more unfortunate than those without a mother. For the father, it is as if the children did not exist, and stepmothers beat and abuse them.

A peasant child’s attitude toward the rural authorities, toward doctors and folk healers, is the same as that of grownups. Children do not have their own special way of thinking about these people. If little Ivan is asked, “Why was the land captaincy established?” he answers, “To keep us peasants down.” In some remote villages, far from the zemstvo station, a child will know personally only the rural police officer, and being well aware of his father’s needs [that is, the peasant’s need to be suspicious of any outsider], the child will perceive the land captain, the district supervisor, and the governor as a single entity.

A child’s conception of the world differs little in essence from that of adults, with the exception that, for a child, parental authority plays a big role. Little Ivan cannot, of course, conceive how he could live without the power of his parents, who at any time can punish or beat him but who also feed him. (Even mothers will beat their sons.) Little Ivans are keenly aware of their dependence on their parents. Our children are no less dependent on their parents than are peasant children, but because they are well fed, they feel it less.

As concerns the authorities, the communal organization, and nature, every ten-year-old knows as much about them as his elders, since he is around them constantly and attends their gatherings. As for nature, little Ivans have more leisure time than adults to observe it. From this, it seems easy enough to draw some conclusions about a child’s conception of the world. The world naturally seems scarier and more grandiose to children than to adults. From natural phenomena such as thunder and severe storms to mysterious ones such as God and the prophets, or disasters such as house fires, all appear more terrifying to the peasant child than to an adult. And just as with our children, little Ivans feel relief from their fears when their parents are near. Maybe peasant children experience greater fears, owing to tales about changelings, witches, house-spirits, and wood-goblins, which the adults, too, believe. Nevertheless, when little Ivans are under the wing of their mothers or other protective adults, they feel more or less out of danger. “Hush, hush! Don’t cry—I won’t give you away,” is the constant reassurance offered by a mother or father when a child is terrified and crying. Peasant youngsters with drunken and abusive parents are very frightened children of a kind we do not have. For that reason, peasant children [in this situation] are always mistrustful when someone beckons to them (even their own parents), suspecting a mean trick instead of a caress. I mentioned earlier how parents, fearing that a child might run off, lure him so as to teach him a lesson for some misdeed.

Punishment of children in the seven-to-eleven-year-old age group occurs, as has been mentioned earlier, for theft and other offenses that either threaten the well-being of the child or cause damage to the household (accidental arson, spilled milk, broken dishes, and so on). They are punished mainly with beatings by means of a rope, cattle switch, nettles, fists, feet, or pulling on the ears and hair. Sometimes as a punishment a child is denied lunch or dinner. Very little children (age four) are tied with rope to a table leg or a bench for several hours.

[It is also interesting to observe] when children first learn about God and the saints, and what conception children have of their significance, whether they are good or evil, or frightening, whether they are always interfering in people’s lives and affairs, and how they concern the child. Up to the age of two, or sometimes three, children have no idea about God, but gradually they begin to understand that the icons in the corner of the house are “God.” Imitating their elders, they cross themselves in front of the icons.

By the age of seven a child may learn how to repeat some of the “Our Father” and the “Hail Mary” prayers. There are, however, women who never manage to master the words of the “Our Father.” The first words a child hears about God are, naturally, that “God will punish you.” Therefore, the child imagines God first and foremost as a threatening presence. The first saint that children hear about is Elijah the Prophet. They very early begin to cross themselves when they hear thunder so that Elijah [the Thunderbolt] will not kill them. At confession, to which children go from the age of six or seven, the priest also frightens them with the idea of punishment from God. However, as little Ivan grows up and starts to participate in herding and in pranks in common with other children, or when he enters school, he soon becomes infected with “free-thinking.” Children frequently say, “You never know if God will punish you or not.” Such “free-thinking,” in both children and adults, is surprisingly enough combined with religious faith and superstition. Children hear from their elders about Yegor the protector of the horses; Agrafena-kupal’nitsa [a mythical figure associated with the first summer river bathing in the north on the eve of Ivan Day (June 23)]; Aleksei “s gor potoki” [associated with the spring thaw festival celebrated on March 17]; and John the Baptist. All these stories are fairly well known.

The name day of Saints Cyril and Methodius in May is referred to here as “Tsar-Grad—Cyril and Methodius” [as if Tsar-Grad, which means “imperial city” and is often associated with Constantinople, were the name of a person]. People are not supposed to work on this day, because “Tsar-Grad is a stern father who may destroy the crops.”5 A child, of course, listens to all these tales and repeats them word for word.

The first responsibilities and chores given to Ivan consist of taking care of his younger brothers and sisters. Like a sister, a brother is sometimes required to rock the cradle. Older sisters like to turn their responsibilities over to their younger brothers and run off to their friends. I am familiar with the case of an older sister, a girl about twelve years old, who ran off to her friends and left her sick ten-month-old sister, suffering with diarrhea, in the care of two boys, ages five and six. The boys rocked the cradle so hard that the baby flew out, struck her head on a stone in the earthen floor, and died instantly.

[The actual story of this tragedy, which I found in the archive among Semyonova’s field notes and which also includes observations of theft, is as follows:]6 My painting gives me frequent opportunity to observe various village scenes. The other day I was painting in the gardens of one of the far corners of the village of M. Two peasant women stood by the barn.

“This morning I went out to the garden, dearie, and discovered that someone had dug up my potatoes. They had stolen half of one bed…. Fie on them!”

“All right, then, my dear, I’m going to let you know who did it,” the other woman says, lowering her voice. “I can’t say absolutely for sure, but the day before yesterday I heard with my own ears how Afinia Grynikhina was hitting their Dunka and yelling at her, saying, ‘You can’t even dig up a few potatoes for dinner, for Pete’s sake, you bungler!’ You know what kind of potatoes they have, and so, it’s clear that Dunka went over to your garden. But just don’t tell anyone that I told you about this….”

At that moment, Dunka appeared on the street carrying a pail. The woman who had lost her potatoes ran over and started swearing at her. Dunka, a thin girl with a snub nose and tearful black eyes, is never at a loss for words. The noise of their voices alerted Dunka’s aunt, Afinia, who ran out of her house, and a real scrap got going, to the point that it made your ears ring. In the midst of this, a seven-year-old boy all in tears approached the group of loudly cursing women [and said,] “Dunka, come to the house quick; Katka is hurt!” The fight quieted down for a second. From the house came the scream of a child. Dunka took off on a run for the house, from which after an instant she bolted with a howl. “Katka’s dead. Oh, people, how can this have happened!” Everyone streamed toward the place it had occurred. Katka (Dunka’s young sister), an emaciated one-year-old girl who had just recovered from dysentery, had indeed been killed, having fallen from a crib hung from a fairly high spot. She evidently fell headfirst and smashed her temple on a rock lying on the home’s earthen floor and then and there surrendered her soul to God. Her little cousins had gone into the house and seen the child on the floor with a smashed temple. They checked and found that she was dead. Then one of them let out a childish howl; the other went out to summon the warring women.7

Little Ivan is not averse to abusing his younger brothers, whereas he fears his older brothers. He nevertheless feels some sympathy for his youngest siblings, the toddlers, and often shares his apples, cookies, and cucumbers with them.

Also, little Ivan is sometimes expected to perform tasks beyond his abilities, such as fetching a heavy pail of water from the well. He tends his father’s horse. In our village, the peasants do not keep a paid shepherd for all the horses of the community. Each peasant householder sends his young son (age seven to eleven) to graze the family’s horse in a fallow field or ravine, or on the field margins. Naturally, during this type of grazing, all the little boys of the village band together “in a drove” and get into mischief. Their favorite pranks are to find a bird’s nest and bake the eggs from it in a campfire, and to pick mushrooms, nuts, and berries in woods belonging to someone else. Sometimes the whole group will decide to leave two boys to look after the horses while the rest sneak into the landowner’s garden and steal apples or go into the backyards of the villagers and cut off the heads of all the sunflowers and stuff cucumbers in their shirts. On one occasion, the boys stole a goose from the miller, cut it up, roasted it in the fire, and ate it. They often steal ducks and roast them.

Girls also tend the farm animals; they usually are in charge of the calves. Our calves are grazed separately from the cows. Every household in turn must tend to the village calves for one day. Sometimes the women do this work, but in the majority of cases they send a girl, nine to twelve years old, to tend the herd. Since the calves usually graze near the village in a dell or pasture, several of the young shepherdess’s friends will accompany her. The girls naturally behave better than the boys; they might organize a game of jacks or sew something, and sometimes they sing songs. The young, pre-teenage shepherds usually stay away from the girls, except to tease or to frighten them. But if the boys grazing the horses include youngsters fourteen to sixteen years of age, they carry on more outrageously than the younger boys. Their antics make an older girl “ashamed even to walk past them,” for they greet her with quite unrestrained words and jokes.

They smoke “cigarettes” made from scraps of paper. Some of them begin smoking at the age of eight. Boys sixteen and seventeen years old buy tobacco for the cigarettes in a general store or a tavern and pay for it with eggs stolen from their mothers. About twenty-five years ago, the youngsters smoked pipes, but now they smoke “cigarettes.” They smoke the strong, homegrown tobacco known as makhorka, which they buy at the shop in the village for three kopecks per 1.8 ounces. They also buy paper there of various types, which is second-hand, in many cases newsprint. Sometimes paper is obtained, as they say, “around the homes of the landlords.” The average peasant spends three to three and a half rubles a year on smoking.

Boys and girls seven to ten years old are sent to drive the cattle in and to clip grass for the cows. They are also sent to the tavern for liquor. Boys age seven to eleven cart sheaves and harvest potatoes. Girls first work as baby-sitters, then in the field, weeding, digging potatoes, and carrying drinks to the adults during the field-work season. They rinse the linens. They learn to sew and spin, and to scutch the flax and hemp. They fetch water.

Incidentally, in the summer, children love going in large groups for a swim in the river. They pick out a shallow place and stay in the water all day. They begin swimming as early as April and continue right up to September. Girls are just as fond of swimming as are the boys, and they often swim along with the boys, who love to tease them and run off with their shifts and sarafans and hide them in the bushes. Frequently the children play so long in the water that their mothers have to chase them out with nettles or a cattle switch.

Five boys of various ages from Bobrov district of Voronezh province, south of Riazan. Photo by A. I. Prishvits from Rossiia. Polnoe geograficheskoe opisanie, vol. 2, p. 186.

Russian children frolicking in the water of the Volga River. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

In their treatment of dogs, cats, and other animals, Ivan and his family can be rather cruel. They will spare a horse or a cow mainly because it is work power and in this sense an important asset. This still does not prevent a drunken peasant from venting his anger on his horse when he gets mad. He will thrash its side and muzzle if the animal does not have the strength to pull the cart. As for cats and dogs, these animals are not much valued, and so with them peasants are not too particular. Cats and dogs are also less useful than other animals, and peasants will torture them just for the fun of it, just to see what will happen. Little children like to throw cats and puppies, when they can catch them, into the water to see if they can swim. When I ask, “Don’t you feel sorry for them?” the children respond: “Why feel sorry? They’re not people, just dogs.”

Here is a short, rather typical account that reveals two aspects of the child Ivan. A boy of about eight years of age found a puppy hereabouts, and when his mother, a widow, would not let him keep it, he hid it in a hole in the threshing barn and regularly took it something to eat (he shared his own food with the puppy). In time the puppy, which turned out to be female, came out of hiding. At first the boy’s mother shut her eyes to this, but when male dogs started to visit the female, the mother began to lose patience, and once, when some of the other boys were present, she said to her son, “Go hang your bitch, you fool, before these dogs eat us alive!” The boys picked up on this and discussed the ferocity of dogs during the mating season. Little by little the other boys began to tease Fedka, saying that he could not hang his bitch when she was surrounded by the other dogs, which would, of course, tear apart anyone who got near her. Finally, they drove Fedka to desperation in defense of his honor. “What do you mean I won’t hang her?” he cried. “I’m not at all afraid of those dogs!” “Okay,” said the other boys, “hang her, then, and we will believe you.” Fedka picked up a rope, caught the bitch, and led her to the willows by the river bank, followed by a train of children and dogs. Along the way the boys naturally continued to egg him on. At the river, the boy hung the feeble little dog from a branch. But the rope was rotten and broke, and the dog, which was still alive, fell down and floundered in the river. The children began to laugh. Altogether beside himself because of the laughter and his own failure, Fedka grabbed a handful of stones and used them to finish off the half-dead dog, with which earlier he had shared his bread. After killing the dog, he began to feel bad about it and headed home. “Where are you going, Fedka?” the children asked. “There is nothing to see here!” he replied angrily. The rest of the boys looked on unconcernedly, or, more accurately, with morbid curiosity, as one of the male dogs plunged into the river, pulled out the dead dog, and dragged it through the backyards.

During the plowing, peasants love to swear at their horses. This does no harm to the horses, of course, and so it is comical to hear a stream of foul language pouring out at some poor gelding or mare. “Oh, oh, you louse … move! You devil, you rotter, dog’s shit!” On these occasions, the peasants swear with gusto, with pure joy, with delight, and probably sometimes just for the fun of listening to themselves. To swear at animals is no sin, or hardly a sin.

[Games form an important part of children’s lives.] Up to the age of ten, boys and girls sometimes play together. Their favorite games are catch, “wattle fence,” and “radish.”

In “wattle fence,” children stand in a row and intertwine their arms like a wattle fence. The boy or girl who is “it,” or in this case the “firebug,” approaches the child at the end of the “fence.” “Vanka, give me a light!” Sometimes Vanka refuses. Then the firebug goes to the other end. “Aniska, give me a light!” She holds out a wooden stick, the “match.” The “firebug” then walks along the “fence” pretending to strike the match and light the “fence,” after which he runs off. The “wattle fence” unravels, and the children all try to catch the firebug. When they do, they beat him.

“Radish” begins with the children squatting in a long row, each holding the belt of the one in front of him or her. Someone proceeds to “pull out a radish.” This person goes up to the first child in the row and says, “Give me some radishes, old woman.” The speaker then takes the squatting child by the hand and tries to pull him to his feet while the next child holds on from behind, preventing him from rising. The person playing the radish says, “It is hard for you to pull me out, and so you should dig me out.” The child takes a stick and digs around the radish. But again the radish cannot be pulled out. The “radish” says, “Water me.” The child brings water in some kind of crock pot and pours it on the radish (to the amusement of all). “Shake me,” the “radish” says, and so it goes. Finally, the radish is pulled out, and the child tries the next one. If all the radishes are overpowered, then the boy or girl who did it is “the champ” (although the champ’s arms hurt all day from this exercise).

Boys a little older (ten to twelve) play ball. They stand in a circle holding sticks, and on the ground in front of each player is a hole. One boy stands in the middle of the circle holding a stick and a ball crudely fashioned out of wood. He tries to hit or putt the ball into the hole of one of the boys while the boy being challenged tries to beat the ball away. If the one who is “it” succeeds in getting the ball into one of the holes, he trades places with the boy defending that hole. The bare legs of the boys sometimes become very sore from being hit by the ball and the sticks, and the boys can end up coming to blows, occasionally fighting fiercely and even drawing blood. Girls do not play ball and, of course, do not get into fistfights. They like to play with rag dolls, and they sometimes have the dolls stand for “masters” who beat their workers, or they will marry two of the dolls, and the like.

Peasant children have an excellent ability to imitate, especially other people’s speech and expressions, and in their play they sometimes pretend to be “the little masters” and imitate the children of the landlords. I recall from my childhood how we observed from my garden the peasant children playing “little masters”: that is, they were pretending to be us. They were very good at simulating our voices and even our manner of speaking.8

In the winter, the children’s favorite activities are sledding and skating. They spend entire days running on frozen puddles, ponds, and streams, skating on their feet. If the weather is so cold or their clothes so poor that they have to stay indoors, the girls play dolls and the boys play knucklebones. Given the close confines of the house, this game can lead to the boys’ bumping into and pushing one another, and in the heat of a match they sometimes break out into fisticuffs.9

Children sitting in the yard playing a game of kamushki, in which little stones are cast. Village of Lokash, Spassk district of Riazan province. Courtesy of the Riazan Museum.

Boys playing a game of kazanki in the street. Village of Seitovo, Kasimov district of Riazan province. Courtesy of the Riazan Museum.

Children’s toys are very simple. Fathers make the children small wooden carts, with which the older children give the younger ones rides, and in which the girls cart around their rag dolls. Boys have whips to play with. At fairs the children buy clay whistles in the shape of birds. Boys sometimes ride hobby horses. For the girls the best fun is new clothes. A three-year-old girl who has been given shoes or a shawl cannot be separated from them even at night. A girl will always value a new sarafan over an elegantly dressed doll.

Relations between boys and girls and their understanding of the difference between the sexes [are early inculcated by the attitudes of the grownups]. Adults often jokingly refer to very young children as “brides and grooms.” Even the youngest children attend betrothals and weddings. On the other hand, they very early come to understand the material side of their daily life. The father is master of the house and the mother the mistress. The father has command over the mother, and the mother has specific duties and responsibilities. So every child well understands that girls are future “brides” and boys future “grooms.” In some villages, even today the custom exists to promise very young girls (aged twelve to fourteen) to boys of corresponding age (for example, in Ol’khi and Zabolot’e, two villages of the Dankov district of Riazan province). The parents of the children have a drink on the deal, and they begin to refer to one another as “matchmakers” [a term that also connotes in-law status in Russian] and to pay visits to each other. Nowadays betrothals of this type are often nullified when the boys and girls get older. But if not, such fourteen- or fifteen-year-old brides and sixteen-year-old grooms begin to live together before they reach majority. This happens, of course, only after a big party.

Ivan is sent off to school when he is ten. “He’ll be better paid if he can read and write,” say the peasants. Nowadays, in view of the wages paid in Moscow, more and more peasants are endeavoring to have their sons learn reading and writing. They say such things as: “In Moscow it is more important than here to know reading and writing, and you are judged by your knowledge of it,” and “It is harder to cheat a literate person.”

A boy soon finds an opportunity to put his literacy to use. He writes letters for the old folks and often gets awarded one or two kopecks for his service. He may also read the Psalter prayers for the dead for forty kopecks a night. Although the boys do not forget how to read and write after they leave school, their writing may become more illegible and contain more misspellings as time goes on; they naturally tend to lose command of the rules of grammar and arithmetic. The historical or geographical knowledge conveyed in school is quickly forgotten, since it has no application in daily life. I remarked nevertheless that when prompted, the children recall some of this information. They especially like poems and memorize them easily, and seem to be fascinated with rhymes, without giving much thought to their content. This past fall, a book about the end of the world (a collision between Earth and a comet) was widely circulated and much discussed.

For some reason, school fails to change the peasants’ view of the life around them. There is school and then there is life, and in the minds of the peasants a line always divides the two. Our village has a reading room. Boys and young men like to take out books. The biggest demand is for novels (Gogol is very popular) or for anything “amusing.” The demand for historical novels and the lives of saints is not as great, while books about nature and husbandry are never requested.

Our area has only one state school and some parochial schools. The program of the state school is very comprehensive (two grades, five sections, five years of study), and rarely does anyone finish the school. The program of the parish schools (one grade for two years, two grades for four years, and a two-year grammar school) is as follows: Catechism, Church Slavic, choir, Russian, counting, introduction to geography and Russian history. Here are some excerpts from the program (1894 edition):

The very name parochial schools points to the special importance of Catechism in their curriculum. It is the principal subject, and an effort should be made to relate all other subjects to it as closely as possible. In accordance with the goals and the spirit of instruction, Church Slavic language should be taught in conjunction with the Catechism, as its closest auxiliary discipline, and should have precedence immediately after it. In the teaching of Russian, the emphasis should be on study of the language itself and not on other things, such as conveying information about the secular world. Introduction to Russian history, being inseparable from the history of the Russian church, should be taught together with the latter. From the general course of Russian history, the pupils should derive the firm conviction that our motherland has always drawn its strength from the Orthodox faith and autocratic tsarist rule, and that whenever the people’s faith weakened or autocratic rule faltered, the Russian land was exposed to terrible misfortunes and came close to destruction.

Instructors at the parochial schools are priests, deacons, and sometimes lay teachers, the last being peasants who graduated from parish schools. The instructors commonly resort to corporal punishment of their pupils. The schoolboys do not like to study Church Slavic grammar. In schools in which one priest has to handle all the teaching on his own, the business usually goes badly. A school like this in Kobel’sha is worthless, in the opinion of the peasants. “The priest teaches one day, and takes off two.”10

Ivan’s chores after school consist of plowing, learning to mow, transporting sheaves, and looking after the horses; in a word, he already helps his father with everything. He might have to do day labor or work for a neighboring landowner to pay off a debt incurred by his father.

If a young Ivan is not in school, he is often a shepherd on hire. When a shepherd is hired by the village council, the council usually receives a gift from the candidate of a quarter- or half-pail of vodka [from five to ten bottles]. It sometimes happens that the council members drink up the vodka on one candidate’s account and then find some fault for which they can dismiss him, but they actually do it to get free drinks from another fellow.

This appears to be a village school, judging from the urban dress of the woman on the stairway, probably a teacher. Photo is identified only as a group of peasants from the village of Fedot’evo, Spassk district of Riazan province. Courtesy of the Riazan Museum.

The peasants hire a boy of ten or twelve years old as their shepherd or, better, herdsboy. Hiring a herdsboy for the common herd involves the following conditions: the shepherd pays the boy from his own salary seven to nine rubles for the whole summer (six months), and during this period all the households take turns feeding the boy. A household that has “one share” provides board for one day, those with “two shares” provide board for two days, and so on. A cow is considered “one share”; ten sheep likewise constitute “one share.” A heifer in the first field counts the same as two sheep, while a heifer in the second field equals four sheep. The shepherd himself receives thirty-five rubles for the whole summer if the herd is not very large and needs only one herdsboy, and fifty to sixty rubles if the herd is large and requires the services of two herdsboys. Before the cattle are put out to pasture, the shepherd collects eggs from the peasants, two eggs and a handful of soaked hemp per share. Twice a year, on Coronation Day and Christmas, the shepherd collects one pie (pirog) from each household. He gets his board in the same way as the herdsboy, by going from house to house.

Landowners hire herdsboys for the summer at eight to twelve rubles plus board. A boy who herds cows receives eight rubles, while one who looks after horses earns ten to twelve rubles.

[Now let us look at Ivan’s earnings and terms of work if he hires on not as a herdsboy but as a farm worker.] Both peasants and landlords pay a farm worker from twenty-seven to thirty-five rubles plus board for a summer, i.e., from March until the Advent fast beginning on November 15. A year-long worker is paid between forty and fifty-five rubles and free board likewise. Women farm workers are paid from twenty-four to thirty-six rubles a year. Each farm worker makes a contract with the landlord, which is signed in the presence of witnesses in the district office. The contract is kept by the employer, while the worker has a booklet in which the payments and fines he or she has received are entered.11 Workers are fined for drunkenness, for unauthorized absenteeism on a work day, or for damage to the farm’s property (horses and equipment) resulting from carelessness on their part that can be confirmed by eyewitnesses. They are also fined for rude remarks to the boss.12 Merchants more often than others fine workers for rudeness. Daily pay varies widely. In years with good crops, men are paid twenty-five to fifty kopecks per day during the field-work season, and women are paid twenty to forty kopecks. In poor years, men are paid twenty to thirty-five kopecks per day, women fifteen to twenty-five kopecks. In the winter, for one working day men are paid fifteen to thirty kopecks, women ten to twenty-five.

[Some idea of the purchasing power of these wages can be obtained from the following list of prices for basic items of clothing:] woman’s shift, 1.8 to 2.5 rubles; warm cloth shoes, 3 rubles; woman’s shirt, 1 ruble; stockings, 30 kopecks; long-waisted jacket for women made of homespun, 5 rubles; man’s shirt, 50 kopecks; man’s jacket, 5 rubles; felt boots, 2.2 rubles; leather boots, 7.5 rubles.

1. The powers of the land captains were considerably curtailed in 1906, following the revolution of 1905 and the granting to the peasants of civil rights equal to those of other classes.

2. Or so doctors at the time believed. Whether syphilis can be passed on in the promiscuous mingling of food and everyday living of the peasant household is a disputed question, but for an interesting discussion of its coded meanings for the moral outlook of Russian doctors, see Laura Engelstein, “Morality and the Wooden Spoon: Russian Doctors View Syphilis, Social Class, and Sexual Behavior, 1890-1905,” Representations, 14 (Spring 1986), 169-208.

3. We are back to a composite picture of the peasant child Ivan now, for the excerpt on Ivan’s real family does not speak of an older surviving sister.

4. This paragraph is from Semyonova’s field notes in Arkhiv AN SSSR, f. 906, op. 1, d. 26, 1. 305.

5. The phrase contains a pun so obvious in Russian that Semyonova does not need to explain it. Grad in Russian (besides being an archaic form of the word for city) means “hail,” as in the destructive weather phenomenon. “Emperor Hail” would naturally pose a threat to crops.

6. Arkhiv AN SSSR, f. 906, op. 1, d. 26, 1. 308.

7. The field note, which ends here, evidently gives the boys’ version of what happened and does not square with the story in the published study of the boys’ rough rocking of the cradle. Did Semyonova learn the true story later, or did she perhaps embellish the story in her finished draft?

8. The above paragraph is from Semyonova’s field notes in Arkhiv AN SSSR, f. 906, op. 1, d. 26, 1. 304.

9. The above paragraph is from an unpublished typescript of Semyonova’s work in AGO, f. 109, op. 1, d. 170, ch. 5, 1. 4.

10. It is clear from Semyonova’s notes about her project that she intended to describe peasant schooling and its impact in great detail, but she was evidently unable to do this before she died. See Zapiski RGO, 122. A recent, very thorough study of Russian peasant schools in this era is Ben Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture, and Popular Pedagogy, 1861-1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

11. See the appendix for an example of such a work contract.

12. See below an example of litigation over this issue (p. 162).