How peasant women lived in pre-revolutionary Russia, and why they looked 40 at 30, and at 60 also 40

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

There are two stereotypes about the appearance of peasant women before the revolution. Some imagine them all exactly the same as in the movie about heroes - curvy, dignified, white-faced and ruddy. Others say that a woman in the village was getting old before our eyes and sometimes a thirty-year-old woman was called an old woman. What is it really?

Peasant Russia was very large. Villages are spread across all climatic and time zones; in many primordially non-Russian places there were also Russian villages. The peasants made up the majority of the population; women - slightly less than half of the peasantry. Girls and boys were born approximately equally, lived to adulthood too.

Complications of pregnancy and childbirth, as well as fatal beatings, carried a number of adult women to the grave. However, men also had reasons to die - for example, fights with other men, accidents on long journeys, poisoning. In general, there were plenty of peasant women in Russia. And there is evidence of them: drawings, photographs and texts written by landowners.

Why can't all paintings and texts be trusted?

Very often, only pleasant-looking peasant women were allowed into the houses of large landowners. Sometimes in case the master wants to choose a concubine or have fun on the spot. Sometimes from a general idea of what the bar should surround. Many landowners lived their lives in the belief that the majority of peasant women were young, cheerful, ruddy and quick-footed. They sang this image in diaries, memoirs, poems and stories of varying degrees of talent.

It's almost the same with artists. Before the fashion for realism and the search for harmony, even in rags, wrinkles and, most importantly, in the individuality of faces, artists carefully selected peasant women worthy of being in their paintings. Often these were maids from the noble house - of course, young and handsome, not knowing the scorching sun and hard manual labor.

Sometimes the maids were not allowed to pose. It is believed that the artist Venetsianov often took prostituted young women from the city as models, and his famous Russian peasant women, for the most part, do not know how to cut ears with a sickle, they never walked in bast shoes, and sometimes even of non-Russian origin - Petersburg Finns, Izhorians, and German women.

Not all postcards and photographs of women in peasant costumes, Russian or Finougorsk, are also real. At the end of the nineteenth century, there was a fashion for patriotic fitting of "folk", that is, peasant, costume in different circumstances. Including - specifically in order to get a self-portrait in the desired image and distribute copies to young people. Soviet specialists had to do a good job determining who on the cards that had survived and fell into their hands was in a real folk costume, and who was posing in imitation. And the watershed did not pass through the wealth of clothing, since the peasant women were also filmed in an elegant version of their clothing - the shooting was a rare, expensive, solemn event.

Did Russian peasant women get old early?

In neighboring villages - literally a couple of miles from each other - there could be radically different customs. In one, the husband and wife addressed each other to "you", and in the other - obscenely. In one, the life of the family revolved around the elder daughter-in-law - after all, she became the mother of the first-born of a new generation, in the other, each daughter-in-law was like a farm laborer. In one, the pies were baked this way, in the other that way. What can we say about the traditions of caring for the exterior.

The Cossacks, whom some consider Russian, others a special case, surprised the visitors by the fact that their faces were covered, like those of eastern women. This was not an imitation of the Caucasians - just many Caucasian women did not hide their faces. It was a beauty care product. Cossacks hid their skin from the scorching sun. But on holidays and to church, they went, opening their faces so that everyone could see both a gentle blush and white foreheads.

Most of the other peasant women did not protect their faces from the sun - unless they tried to make masks while resting after a bath, or to wash themselves with some special water. At the same time, they spent a lot of time in the cold, in the wind and in the scorching sun. A modern city dweller, far from the idea of village life, usually imagines a Russian woman all day fiddling around the oven with pies. In fact, the picture was completely different.

During the harvest, women actively participated in field work, for many hours every day - as the sun rose and until it went down. The sun's rays did not just cover the skin with a tan - it dried out, quickly wrinkled, became dense and dark at the same time. The hands had a lot of work to do, and it affected their skin. The rest of the year, the women did most of the work at home. Except for the one related to water. It was the woman who carried heavy buckets of water, going after them sometimes half a village or further - how often one could find a well, depended on the area. It was the woman who went to wash and rinse the laundry by the river, no matter whether it was cold or windy.

Washing was not a quick exercise, putting a lot of stress on the arms and back. The skin of the face was often chapped or dry from frost - this accelerated the aging process. The skin and joints of the hands were also rapidly aging from the cold water and work in it. So it turned out that often at twenty-five the peasant woman looked so that the city dweller gave her both thirty-five and fifty. Especially if at work the woman tore her back and began to slouch, making the image even more “senile”. Or if from pregnancy, lack of calcium in the diet or beatings, she lost part of her teeth, which affected the oval of her face and speech.

Sixty from forty is indistinguishable

However, those who tell how the grandmother from the village did not change at all in their memory are not dissembling. After the first set of signs of active aging of the skin appeared on a woman's face by the age of twenty-five, very often it seemed to be preserved outwardly. There were several reasons for this.

Firstly, most often, initially very strong, "successful" human specimens survived to old age - those who survived a childhood full of mortal dangers, depleting the body of pregnancy, all physical activity, were so strong that it would be strange to expect that they will quickly turn into the ruins. Work turned for them, rather, to support the body with movement and practically sports loads.

Secondly, it was not customary for the Russian peasants to actively move their faces. Mimicry was valued sparingly - they twitch their faces, they say, idiots. From an early age, the girl (and the boy) got used to wearing her face motionless, albeit tense (probably to protect her eyes from the wind and sun). This prevented the formation of expression lines in adulthood. Faces were worn so still that many modern users are jarred - they can write under photographs that women are gloomy, hold their faces with a brick, and so on, while it is clearly visible that they just stand calmly.

Thirdly, the sun, of course, caused photoaging of the face, but it also tanned the skin of the face with a tan. The skin became denser, it could even become smooth, glossy, with only a certain amount of wrinkles - creases from the need to squint against the sun and move the jaw to eat and speak. Such skin was less prone to inflammation, often (depending on other circumstances) looked taut, rather tough than flabby. It looked bad at thirty, but great at sixty.

Fourth, women in many villages ate a lot of collagen. It was not accepted to choose only fillets from cow or pork carcasses. All the details of the cow were used, including those that are suitable only for jellied meat or soup. In poor families, the chicken was often divided like this: the most meat parts - to the father and adult sons, and the women caught paws and pieces of skin in the cabbage soup. In general, with food, a woman sometimes received more collagen, which is necessary to maintain skin elastic, than modern lovers of dietary breasts. The skin was nourished in approximately the same state for most of its life.

It is also interesting How our ancestors were treated 200 years ago: Smoking, spitting and more tea were practically universal recommendations.