* YOUTH *

"We obeyed our elders, - says Anfisa Ivanovna," who never read "Youth Honest Mirror," - you cannot visit a nearby village without permission." So you'd say: "But I want to go." My mother and grandmother answered: "Eat yours want with bread!" Or: "Everyone claims to know the girl, but not everybody saw her." And if you go out, you are given an order: "Try to keep your mouth more closed than open." Do not laugh, then.
    Shame is one of the significant moral categories if we talk about people's understanding of morality. This concept is on a par with the honour and conscience, of which Alexander Yashin said:
" In the myriad of riches, our words are precious: Fatherland, Loyalty, and Brotherhood." And there is Conscience, Honour... "

    There was a natural reticence (let's not confuse it with shyness) as an acquired one. At any age, from the earliest, reticence adorned a person and helped to resist the pressure of temptations. It is vital at the time of physical maturation. Lust was quietly restrained by usual shame, leaving the moral purity of even a spiritually immature young man.
  For this, the people did not need a unique rule printed in the printing house like "Youth Mirror." Instead, solid suggestions are interspersed throughout that book with such advice: "And this is a great deal of infamy, often when someone blows his nose, like trumpets into the tube ..." "Obscenely at a wedding to wear boots and bot-forts, so that those boots strip clothes from the female sex, and they to cause great noise, so men are not so hasty in his boots than without them."
     Clearly, the book is not of peasant origin since the peasants did not wear "bot-forts» and did folk dance at weddings, not ballroom dancing. More reveals the basis of "Mirror" advice: "Youths should always speak with each other in foreign languages to get used to it, and especially when they happen to say that the secret is so the servants and maids could not understand and that they can be distinct from blockheads ... " Here, it turns out, for what were functional foreign languages to honourable dudes multiplied under cover of the Tsar Peter's reforms. Possession of "manners" and foreign languages completely separated the upper classes from the people.
    Adolescence grew into youth in a few years. A boy finally developed physically and comprehended traditional agricultural, forest, and household labour skills.
    Only professional skills (carpentry, blacksmithing, and women's "linen" art) required further development. Others mastered these skills their whole lives and could only learn them at the end.
 But is it a disadvantage to him and his close ones because of such a desire? If the guy does not learn how to build dom churches, he will make a house with no problem. If a girl could not understand how to weave in "nine nooks," she would weave a simple canvas.
     Youth is full of fresh energy and creative thirst, and whether in a house, a village, or the country, everything is okay; this time of life is beautiful in itself, and everything in it is happy and harmonious. The girl or guy has time to talk, walk, and work in such circumstances.
But even in the worst times, household responsibilities and age requirements rarely contradict each other. On the contrary, they are mutually supportive.
For example, everyday work for guys and girls has never been a burden. Even the hardships of logging, which began in the late '20s and lasted for about thirty years, people have suffered relatively quickly thanks to this circumstance. Haymaking time, walking to the fence, the spring sowing, carting, and many community help events give young people a unique opportunity to meet and communicate, significantly affecting the quality and quantity of work made. Who wants to pass for a lazy, slob, or ignorant?
    After all, everyone in his youth dreams that someone will fall in love with him thinks about getting married and marriage and tends not to disgrace his family and people.
     Labour and festivities seemed to tame each other. One does not allow the other to transform into ugly forms. You cannot stay up all night until morning if you need to get up before sunrise and go to the pasture with the horses, but you cannot plow till dusk because of the evening festivities at the church. However, it also happens that sleepy bachelors would go into the forest and purposely not find the horses, flop in the shepherd's hut. But those guys were left with the untilled plot that day, and it threatened more severe consequences than the one referred to in the maiden limerick:
"My dear, it is hard to walk around mocked. Every my sweetheart has a non-sown pasture."

 Non-spoiled maidens also had to get up early, especially in summer. "In the morning, my mother wakes me up, and I continue to sleep in a hurry." The parents rarely played the same tune. If the father was strict, the mother always guarded her daughter against too hard work. And vice versa. If both parents are excessively hard-working, then the defendant was represented by a grandfather, or older brothers always somehow silently guarded the sisters. The strictness in the family is balanced with kindness and humour.
    Most acquaintances occurred in childhood and adolescence, mainly during visits, because people visited even the most distant relatives. They say " seventh water of a ninth of porridge" but still know each other and walk miles for fifteen or twenty to visit. Practically, if not in every village, then in every parish, there were close or distant relatives. Many would befriend strangers if there were no relatives in the remote town.
    Collective walking to other villages for festivities further enhanced chances for singles. To go for a walk for 10-15 km in the summer was nothing to talk about, especially if the weather permits. The return was the same night if went as guests - in a day or two, depending on the household circumstances.
    In the relations of boys and girls, there was no kind of patriarchal pedantry, as they say, if you take a walk with someone, then take walks till you get married. Not at all…
 From adolescence, acquaintances and interests have changed; young people kind of "grind" to each other, looking for a pair of soul and character. This does not exclude, of course, cases of the first and only love. Evidence of spiritual freedom and freedom of choice in youth's relationships are thousands (if not millions) of love songs and limericks.
    The feminine side does not look passive and dependent. Betrayal, love, break-ups, and interruptions are showered in these often improvised and always heartfelt ditties. Parents and elders were not strict about the behaviour of young people, but only up to the wedding. The newlyweds were deprived of this freedom and the ease of making new friends forever and ever. At that time, an entirely different life began.
Therefore, the wedding can be a sharp and well-defined boundary between adolescence and adulthood. But even before the wedding, freedom and lightness of new acquaintances, infatuations, and "loves" do not mean sexual freedom and frivolous behaviour. You can go for a walk, get to know, but ... Maiden honour is above all. There were apparent boundaries of what was permitted. They transgressed very seldom. Both sides, both male and female, tried to observe chastity.
 It is easy to fall into a gross error if the judge of public morality on separate cases is easily mistaken!
Here are just two: a drunk, a deranged reveller, off all the brakes, starts to sing during the obscene dance limericks, and the audience approves and, most surprisingly, truly supports him. But later, no one will treat him seriously ...
 Latest marvels like the circus and fairground ride with invisible women everyone would perceive with naive, almost childlike delight approving. But overall, the prevalent global attitude to all of this was, for some reason, definitely sarcastic.
    But in some questions of morality, public opinion was cruel, unyielding, and merciless. Bad maiden reputation rolled away very far. It wasn't stopped by any forest or swamp. A sin committed before the wedding could not be whitewashed by anything. But after the birth of an illegitimate child, as a girl would be forgiven her mistake, humanity prevailed over moral principles. Mother or grandmother of out wedlock mother to any attack responded with a proverb: "Whose steer would be jumping, but the calf is ours." It is an erroneous view that the need for chastity applies only to the women's side. A guy who had physical intimacy with a woman before the marriage, too, was considered tainted. A tarnished reputation harmed him, and he was called not a lad but a "dude."
 Of course, each of the two who conspired against chastity counted on secrecy, especially the girl. The secret, however, would come out eventually. The initiative of the sin usually comes from a guy. In itself, it depends on his moral level, which in turn depends on the moral status of his family (village, parish, society). An immoral family did not teach an individual how to spare others and keep the word. The heart of such a dude usually burns a desire to boast, and the secret is gone. A girl's bad reputation also impacted the perpetrator; he would be accused by the same measure.
Moreover, if they were real, all his feelings toward the girl would rapidly disappear, and he would switch to another "object" and eventually get married, somehow, not in a proper way.
With a tarnished reputation, the girl also had difficulty finding a partner. Now, it was not about love, but just getting somebody. Even a guy from a good family, but with the stigma of sin, lost his "prince charming" title, and proud girls avoided such candidates.
The veritable drama of love relationships experienced by most physically and morally healthy people, after even a happy love, does not exclude some drama. The beauty of relations between young people sometimes fed such mutually exclusive properties that coexist within one person as glibness and chastity, modesty and mischief.
     Love meant the same thing as pity; love could be "hot" or "cold." High poetry of the marital relationship is vividly reflected in a folk song:
"Do not sing, sing the little lark. You sing the spring on a thawed trail.
You send your voice through the dark forest, the pine forest, Moscow stone-walled, and a strong fortress!
 There was imprisoned a Good Fellow. He had been sitting there not for a year or two years. He sat there for precisely nine years.
In the tenth year, he started writing a letter. He began to write a letter to his father and mother. Father and mother refused: "Because we never have had thieves in the family. He also wrote to his young wife. Young wife got into tears..."
    But marriage is not only moral or spiritual but a material and economic necessity. Young years were marked by expectation and preparation for this significant life event. It stood on a par with birth and death. The too-late or too-early marriage appeared to people as a misfortune. The big difference in the bride and groom's age also ruled out a whole and beautiful relationship. Unequal and repeating marriages among the peasants were regarded as unhappy and economically disadvantageous from the economic point of view. Such marriages were cruelly mocked by widespread rumours. Beauty and anomaly exclude each other. There was often not only age but also income inequality. But it could not seriously affect the moral code built over the centuries. Pity (love as we call it now) overrode everything else.