**INFANCY * *

Not that a woman would be ashamed of pregnancy, but she became restrained; many, many things for her at this time would become not so important. She would avoid unnecessary exposure to people. It was believed that the fewer people knew about it, the less gossip, and the less gossip, the better it was for mother and child.
    A word or look of an evil person can injure the soul, hence the expression "evil eye" and the belief in "curse."
Nevertheless, women are almost to the last day working in the field and taking care of the animals (still, it is unknown what is more useful during pregnancy: to sit for two months at home or work in the field). Relatives were to protect women from heavy work. Yet children are often born in the fields, under the sheaf, in the hay barn.
     Most women feeling the approach of labour were hiding in another house, behind the stove or oven, in the bathhouse, and sometimes in the barn and sent for the midwife. Men and children should not have been present at labour. The child's grandmother, either her mother-in-law or mother, has helped with delivery. She shamelessly slapped the baby on the tiny red ass, causing it to cry. The baby's screams mean it is alive. The navel was tied with a strong linen thread.
    Prayers, wishes, and various signs accompanied the birth of the baby. Often, if the bath was not ready, grandmother climbed into a large oven. With water warmed in the samovar, she washed the child in a hot oven underlaid by a rye straw. Then the baby is tightly swaddled, and only after all this is delivered to the maternal bosom and put into the cradle. The squeak of the cradle was accompanied by mothers' or grandmothers' lullabies and sometimes even grandfathers'.
Within weeks, a child begins to sing along to his nanny. Falling asleep after eating or crying, he hummed a ditty under the nose in rhythm to swinging and grandmother's song: Ao-ao-ao.
    Milk was poured into a ram's horn with a specially treated teat of cow's udder; the baby was swaddled in long linen tape. Swaddling comforted a child, did not let him mess around and "kick," and was not allowed to harm himself.
    A soft cradle, woven from pine sticks, hung on the elderberry handle to the wooden mast. The mast is a flexible rod attached to the ceiling log. Although the cradle was swinging quite strongly on a good mast, it gently moved up to seven feet from the floor. Such a swing from the birthday gave a special hardening: sailors of peasant origin rarely had sea sickness.
 The cradle served man the very first, the smallest of space; this scope soon expanded to the size of the hut, and suddenly, the world opened once to the baby in all its breadth and grandeur. The village street went far into the green summer or white winter field. The sky, houses, trees, people, animals, snow and grass, water, and the sun were never the same, and their combinations were replaced every hour, sometimes every minute. And how big is exciting, fantastic and varied joy in one, the essential being your own mother! How rich becomes the world with her brief appearance, as infinitely beautiful, calm and happy feels a tiny creature in such moments!
    Father rarely takes the child in his arms; he almost always appears harsh and causes fear. But how memorable is his fleeting, affectionate smile... And what is a grandmother who rocks the cradle, sings songs, spins yarn, who is omnipresent? Almost all the feelings: fear, joy, resentment, shame, tenderness - are already present in infancy and usually contact the grandmother, who "babysits," rocks the cradle, and takes care of the baby. She also teaches order, gives everyday skills, and introduces the joy of the game and that the world does not consist only of pleasure.
First, simple games, for example, "ladushki," or play with her fingers. After "spitting" the baby in the palm, the old woman began to mix "porridge" with her stiff finger:

 
"Magpie cooked porridge, called her children.
Come over, kids, to eat porridge.
To this one by the spoon - the old woman shaking her pinkie -
 to this one by the ladle - begin to "feed" the ring finger
 - To that one, the whole inch.
To this one - the whole pot!"

 
A personal appeal to each of the fingers caused the increase of interest of the child and the very narrator. When it reached the last finger (the thumb), the old woman was plucking at him, saying: "And thou, a finger-boy, did not go to the barn, did not thresh the peas. You get nothing!"
All of this quickly, with the speeding rate, results in a minor butting into the child's arm: "This is a spring (wrist), This is a spring (elbow), this is a spring ... (forearm), etc. And then there is fresh spring water!" Grandma was tickling a child under his arm, and a grandson or granddaughter came to the happy, ecstatic laughter.
Another rhyming game also has an original storyline devoid of adult guile.
"Ladushki, ladushki, where were you? - At grandma's place. What did you drink or eat? - Kasha cooked. Kasha is sweet, Grandma is kind, Grandpa is harsh.
Hit with the ladle into the forehead."
The end of the joke with a light comical clicking on the forehead caused, for some reason (especially after the frequent repetition), children's excitement, laughter and delight. Such game jokes were in dozens and instinctively made more complex by adults.
 As the child grew and developed, games for boys and girls became more and more apart and distinct. Rhymes, lullabies and other songs, jokes, and tongue-twisters were sprinkled with the baby's name, linked to the strengths and weaknesses of the emerging child character and specific conditions in the home, family, and nature.
The children slept in the cradle until they started walking. Then, however, a new baby came, and they were put to sleep "jack-wise" in the same cradle. In such cases, everything got complicated, especially for the babysitter and the mother ... It also could happen that an uncle was born after his nephew, claiming a place in the cradle. So then, before the separation of the young family, the house creaked two identical flying cradles.
Somewhere in the Russian North-West, in honour of the child's birth, especially the firstborn, the father or grandfather planted a tree: linden, mountain ash, usually birch. If the front yard had no more space, the tree was planted near the bathhouse or in the garden. This birch tree grew together with the child. It is known as Sasha's (or Tanya's) birch. Henceforth, a person and a tree care for each other, keeping the secret of reciprocity.

* CHILDHOOD *

Writers and philosophers call childhood the happiest time in human life. Carried away by this assertion, we might think facing an unhappy time in life, such as old age, is inevitable. However, people's views of life do not allow talking about it with such certainty. It would be a gross mistake to judge people's outlook on life from the mind's perspective, by which man is only happy in his childhood, that is, while he does not know about death.
 There was no opposition from one life period to another for a Russian peasant. Life for him was a whole thing. This unity is based not on permanency but on a constant and inevitable change. The boundary between childhood and infancy is unclear, as it is unclear when changing, for example, night and morning, spring and summer, the creek and the river. And yet, despite this uncertainty, they exist separately: the night and morning, the brook, and the river.
     It is best to think that childhood begins when a person can remember himself. But again, when does it really start? Smells, sounds, a play of sun rays recalled from infancy. (Some people seriously claim that they remember how they were born.)
By peasant's ways, you're not a baby anymore if you are weaned from the maternal breast. But some "babies" were breastfed up to the age of five. After that, breastfeeding was interrupted by the prospect of another child.
    Maybe weaning from the maternal breast is the first severe hardship in life. Is it not a tragedy for a little human being when he is full of expectation and confidence to mother, once clung to the nipple, smeared with mustard? The culmination of infancy was considered when the children learned to walk and get their first clothes and shoes. The ability to ignore unpleasant and horrific things (e.g., death) is probably the main feature of childhood. But this does not mean that the grievances of childhood are forgotten quickly. On the contrary, the child's soul absorbs equally greedy the evil and the good, the evil and the good impressions remembered equally vividly for life. But evil and sound do not change places in the peasant view of the world, unlike the yolks and whites in the egg; they are never mixed.
 The atmosphere of kindness around a child was considered mandatory. It did not mean pampering and indulging. The steady, kind attitude of the adult toward a child does not contradict accountability and strictness, which grew gradually. As mentioned, the degree of responsibility before society and the physical load at work and in games depended on age. They grew slowly, imperceptibly, but steadily, not only from year to year but maybe with each day. The didactic and forceful imposition of good habits caused bitterness, resistance, and opposition in the children's hearts. If the boy is being dragged by the hand into the fields, he will obey. But what's the use of such obedience? Nothing is forced to do; the child himself wants to work. Adults just wisely protect him from the crushing workload.
A typical child's desire for imitation immeasurably enriches education more than coercion. A personal example of the behaviour of adult life (grandparents, parents, siblings) stood in front of the child's inner eye. Is that why in good families rarely, very rarely come out bad people? The family has been instilled in childhood immunity to moral artifice.
 The world of childhood has expanded rapidly and every day. Then, a person was finally leaving the lived-in, familiar to the last twig crib, and the whole room became an everyday three-dimensional world.
    Behind the stove, under the stove, in the scullery, behind the cupboard, under the table and under the benches - all were studied, and everything was familiar. You are not allowed only into the trunks, cabinets and the shrine.
    In the summer, you are to new discoveries. The whole house becomes a sphere of habitual, maternal, and usual. The house (summer and winter), hay attic, upper floor, a tower (loft), county, barn, basement and all kinds of nooks and crannies. And after that, the whole street, and the entire village... Field, forest, river, and mill, where kids went with grandfather to grind flour ...
    The first night away from home, finally, the first visit to another village - all this is the first time. In childhood, as in other periods, no spring or fall was like the previous ones. After all, each year of a child's life meant something new. If you were allowed to simmer only in shallow water last year, swimming where deeper water is now possible. Thousands of such changes, innovations, and more complex skills, games, and customs had been experienced in his childhood; everyone would remember them and, of course, become familiar with them in their own children.
     Children's memories are always concrete and shaped, but everybody remembers something more, something less. So, for example, if the talk is about spring, almost all remember the feelings associated with spring tasks.
Take out of the internal window frames, and the house became brighter and fresher. The street is peering directly into the house. Set up the birdhouse with the father, grandfather or elder brother. Drain water (building dams, ditches, toy windmills). Lower the boat on the water. Grease boots with tar and dry them in the sun. Collect ants and distill the ant spirit. Undercut birch bark (for collecting and drinking birch sap). Forage the first mushrooms and crocuses. Harvest sorrel. The first game in the street. The first angling trip…
     In summer, children have faced so many things that some were lost with joy, did not know where to rush, and did not have time to experience all that fun to learn.
The play was alternated with easy work or merged with it, and valuable merged\ with pleasure quietly and firmly. A playful element in the work process, first tested in childhood, remained in many kinds of compulsory labour, if not for life, but for very long. All of these wigwams on the meadows, huts in the forest, fishing, campfires with baking potatoes, mushrooms, perch, horse riding - all of this transpassed to subsequent stages of life with a fair amount of play, child's fun
 A certain intangible edge in the transition from one state to another, sometimes the opposite, is the most exciting thing in childhood. Children are the most refined connoisseurs of such elusive- natural conditions. But even adults know that the most delicious potatoes are slightly crunched on the verge of raw and baked. Okroshka (Cold soup with kvas(a drink from fermented rye bread ) suddenly acquires a unique charm when something hot is dropped. 
    A child feels a strange pleasure, dropping snow into boiling water. A towel brought in from the cold into a warm house smells like something in particular; the blackness of the bath in the oven and the dazzling dawn in the window create an unusual atmosphere. Fractions of a second before jumping over the obstacle, a moment when the swing is moving upward but is about to begin the reverse movement, the moment before a hunter shoots, before falling into water or straw - all this creates a strange rapture of happiness and fullness of life. A sound of cracking and deflection of the thin autumn ice under the ice skates when all passes over again, and no one falls into the cold depths of the pool. 
A premonition of what the suddenly immobile float will just now disappear from the water's surface! This moment is the most beautiful in angling fish. And is not the most wonderful; is not the most thrilling love on the brink of childhood and youth in this brief and too elusive time?
In the autumn, harvest time is particularly pleasing to play hide and seek between sheaves and among the stacks, ride horses, make holes in large piles of straw, heat the barn stove, climb elderberry trees, chew turnips, munch peas ...
    And the first ice on the river opened hundreds of new experiences and opportunities for children. So the winter brings up kids; it's no less fun than the summer.
 After getting frozen on the river or in the snow, how nice it is to climb onto the stove close to the grandfather and fall asleep without hearing his story till the end! And cry if you missed something interesting. And happily calm down after the paternal or maternal affection. The temperature contrast appropriate for a child's body, repeated with the increase, has always been the foundation of physical conditioning; it was nothing for the five-year-old child to jump out of the hot bathhouse into the snow.
But children in good families were also protected from psychological contrasts.
    Tender care was not necessarily explicit, but it manifested itself everywhere. Here are some examples. When the old stove is removed ( to make a new one), someone will make a baby bird out of clay for a child; when slaughtering a sheep or calf, they will undoubtedly condition and blow the animal's bladder, put into it a few peas (a dried bladder turned into a children drum). If the father is carpentering, he necessarily chops small blocks for children. When the kholodetz (calves' foot jelly) is boiled, the boys get particular bones ("babki"), and the girls get ankles. The hunter gives a child a fluffy white rabbit's tail tied to a thread every time.
     When beer is brewed, the children trooped to gnaw stones. At the end of the summer, children have a particular pea lot in the garden. Returning from the woods, everyone tries to bring the kids a gift from a fox, hare or bear.
Giving a ride to a child on a sled or a cart was considered optional but desirable. They were woven, tiny baskets and buckets for children, and made small rakes, scythes, etc.
 In addition to general foods, children's sweets were distributed by age and merit. Some of such homemade, rather than purchased, treats were apples, bones (during cooking jelly), "yagodnitsa" (pressured blueberries or strawberries in milk), and foam from the baked ("roasted," as they say) milk. When oatmeal is cooked on the fire, a delicious crisp foam rolls on a stirring wooden wand and gives it to the children. Grilled potatoes, onions, turnips, carrots, berries, birch juice, peas - all that was available to children, as they say, by an unwritten law. But following the law was not always exciting.
Therefore, stealing vegetables and apples counted first among the classic childish mischiefs. Another grievous sin has been destroying birds' nests; those engaged were rare and incorrigible. Forbidden was thought to watch how people eat or drink tea in somebody's house (such children were called "vislyatyu" (snoopers)). However, giving someone else's child a treat from their table was considered normal.
A special place in the child's soul occupied pets: a horse, cow, calf, dog, cat, and rooster. All except the rooster had different names, characters, and good or bad qualities, in which children were dealt with superbly. Sometimes, adults are assigned to a child an individual animal, so to speak, to take personal care of.

* ADOLESCENCE *

What is the difference between childhood and adolescence? They differ in many things, but there is no clear division: all the changes are gradual, and other period features overlap and grow into each other.
 Conditionally, the boundary between childhood and adolescence can be defined as when a person shows a meaningful interest in the opposite sex. For example, one day, when the bathhouse is heated up, the mother, grandmother or sister prepares a boy to wash, and he suddenly begins to act up, hang back and throw out the "tricks." -"Well, now you're going to wash with your father!" - calmly said grandma.
     And, all at once, it falls into place. Sister, and sometimes the mother, did not know what was going on, why the brother or son began to mutter something under his nose and elbowing. The overall moral atmosphere did not require any special sex education. It spared fledgling adolescent self-esteem, encouraging modesty and chastity. Observing the lives of farm animals, people have gradually learned about basic physiology in their childhood.
  There was no need to explain how and why a child was born, what occupied the bride and groom on the wedding night, etc. This was not mentioned because everything that goes without saying and talking about it is unnecessary, indecent, and unacceptable.
    Such modesty from adolescence passes into youth, often maintained for a lifetime. It gave the stability of romantic feelings, which arranges not only sexual but also social relations. In adolescence comes a man's first and most often not the last infatuation, the first love with all its psychological bouquet. Before that, boys or girls were "rehearsing" their first real love by the previous enthusiasm for adult "objects" of the opposite sex. And if such a frivolous infatuation is ridiculed, make fun of both. The first true love is usually spared, and the family tries not to notice. Moreover, a teenager could keep his fiery secret not worse than an adult. The mystery is often revealed only in youth when the feeling is legalized by public opinion.
     The circumstances surrounding the first love explain all the behavioural features at this age. If previously, as kids, people were open, and now they become insulated, the frankness with family and friends has been replaced by silence and sometimes rudeness.
    Streetlife is also imperceptibly transformed. In childhood, boys and girls played the same games together. In adolescence, they often play separately and make fun of each other.
Building a boy's character largely depended on the teenager's games. Relationships in these games were particular. For adults, they sometimes seemed simply cruel.
    If the family was allowed leniency for a teenager, even tenderness, then a Spartan spirit reined in the peer relationship (especially in games). No allowances for age or physical handicaps existed.
Often, testing his physical endurance or being provoked, the teenager enters the game unprepared. As a result, he would "hounded" without pity the whole evening, and if he did not recoup, they moved the game to the next day. It is difficult to imagine the state of a loser, but even more, he would have suffered if peers felt pity for him and left the situation as it was. (This is only about sports and physical competitions, not intellectual endeavours.)
Adults reluctantly tried not to interfere. But nevertheless, it was absolutely fundamental: to break out, win, and win himself without assistance. One such victory while still in adolescence turns a boy into a man.
 Games for the girls did not have a similar focus; they differed by calm, lyrical playing relationship. Of course, a young person's life is allowed to have time to engage freely in games. But they have already been supplanted by more serious business, not excluding elements of the game.
    First, the teenager is increasingly drawn into the work process. Secondly, games are increasingly replaced by entertainment, peculiar to youth. Finally, adolescents of both sexes may have to mow the grass, harrow, pull, cart, hang flax, cut pine twigs, and tear bark.
 Of course, all this was done under the adults' invisible guidance and close supervision. Competition, or working, gaming and other rivalries are especially characteristic of youth. An adolescent sometimes had to hold back because he wanted to learn to plow before his peers, so all the girls, big and small, have seen it. He wants to cut wood more than a neighbour so that no one calls him a little boy or lazy. He wants to catch fish for mother's pies and gather a few berries to treat younger kids.
     Fantastic combination of a child's privileges and the responsibilities of adults observed in this period of life! But no matter how good childhood privileges are, youth were already ashamed of them, and if they used them, then with caution. So, he could still complain and beg his mother for a tasty treat at home, in the family, among his younger siblings. But if in the house turned out to be peers or just strangers, being "a little one" was shameful.
Consequently, for adolescents, an unwritten code of conduct existed. The boy at this age should have been able to (tried, anyway) make a handle, tie fishnets, harness a horse, cut pine twigs, tear bark, herd the cattle to graze, and fish. But, instead, he was ashamed to cry. He knew that fallen is not beaten, and two do not attack one, that, if made a bet, the word must be kept.
Girls at age twelve spun a the lot and well learned to weave, sew, helped to mow, knew how to knead bread and cakes, although they were not trusted with this, as the boys were not charged with such tasks as grinding an axe, killing a cock or a sheep, ride without adults to the mill.
Adolescents have the right to invite their relatives or friends of the same age; visitors could sit at a table like adults, but they could only drink non-alcoholic drinks. They imitated more senior guys who were "having fun" for real at youth gatherings. Time existed to exit the excess energy and meet the needs for self-indulgence and deliberate valour - the Yuletide. Public opinion was not exactly encouraging then, but it condescended to teenage pranks. Have fun for Christmas week, and then please behave like decent people all year. A year is a great deal. So, get used to the festive antics. There wasn't enough time. They are approaching a different time of life.
«An unbecoming girl laughs and talks with everybody, runs around the suspicious places and streets, baring breasts, sits down close to the strangers, elbows and not sitting quietly, but sings profane songs, and gets drunk. Then, gallops on tables and benches, let her be dragged to all corners like a bitch. For where there is no shame, there is no humility. Of which questioning said Lyukretsiya the truth: if a girl loses shame and honour, what else is left?" -" Youth honest Mirror" manuscript from the XVI century.

* 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.

* COMING OF AGE *

 Life in reminiscences of old people is invariably divided into two halves: before and after marriage. And indeed, not yet subsided the songs and not got the wedding cake staled as the entire way, all way of life is changing dramatically. In which direction? Such a question would have sounded naive and inappropriate.
In such cases, "bad" and "good" categories retreat to the background. Marriage is not fun (although it is, too). It is not a personal whim but a vital natural necessity connected with the new responsibility to the world and with fresh, not yet experienced joys of life. It's as inevitable as, for example, the sunrise or the onset of autumn.
There was no freedom of choice. Only a physical deformity and mental illness released people from the moral duty to marry. But even a moral obligation is not perceived as a duty if a person is morally sane. It may be the duty only for an immoral person. Because to prescribe genuine people's morality, it did not require any written codes of the said "Mirror" or "Flower Garden," where the monastic rules of conduct are collected.
Finally, the dramatized wedding ritual, which lasted several weeks, was completed. Time has come of age. Time to mature is the biggest time span of human life.
 Time after the wedding is the most exciting and hazardous for a new family. The terms "evil eye" or "spell" are considered in the civilized world to belong to superstitions. But it's not a matter of "black magic." The first threads of weak conjugal relationships are easily broken by one unkind word or an angry, contemptuous gaze.
 The psychological adaption of a bride to the world of no longer a stranger's family is not always quick and smooth. Though based on a common tradition, habits, especially the rules, are different in all families and houses. In some, such customs as pancakes to bake thin; in others, they like them thick; in this house, they saw firewood to one length; in another, they do different because there are different stoves, and the stoves are other because the masters who built them are not the same.
 It is difficult for a young woman accustomed to the girl's freedom, parental care, and affection to enter a new life in a new family. About this, the people have composed countless songs:
"You'll come beyond the irrecoverable line, and from that place, you will never come back. Never put on girl's clothes again. Because flowers don't bloom after fall, don't grow grass in winter's snow. Never will you be a maiden again."

A dramatic change of life state, evident in folk songs, is often taken as evidence of Russian women's terrible family situation, of their inequality and oppression. However, the legend of this inequality is fading away from the light touch of folk and literary monuments.

 "Do not worry, dear ones, I will not stay alone; 

if not you, then your friend will belong to me," - publicly and loudly sings a girl at the gathering if the guy starts to think too highly of himself.
  On a failed marriage, there was such a song:
  "Whatever she was, but got married to such a young man but a boor.
  He does not know how to treat me; he goes to a party without saying goodbye.
  And coming back to the gates, ignorant, screaming, and yelling:
 "Unlock wife, wide gate! "
 Oh, how I, young wife guessed, quietly got up, bare feet shoes put on,
  I have locked the gates tight: "Oh, you go sleep, boor, but outside the gates, your soft bed is yes, white snow, your high pillow is the gateway, your warm blanket is the winds of violent, you coloured curtain are the stars countless, yes you strong guards are gray wolves."

 
 That point is that the people to no one had not occurred to oppose a woman to a man, the family to the head of the family, children to parents.
 Neither Avdotya from Ryazan from the epic or historic Martha-Governor's Wife nor Alena (Nekrasov's and Lermontov's) resembles the downtrodden, unequal, or degraded. A historian, Kostomarov, speaking of the "Russian Truth" (the first known set of Russian laws), wrote: "A married woman enjoyed the same legal rights as men. However, for her murder or insult to her, the pay was the equal amount."
 Literacy or illiteracy Rights in Ancient Russia also did not depend on sex. "Princess of Chernihiv Euphrosynia, the daughter of Michael Vsevolodovich, started in Suzdal a school for girls, where they were taught to read, write, and church singing," - said the same Kostomarov, based on the chronicles. Equality and sometimes the superiority of women in the family were due to the economic and moral needs of the Russian national life.
What is the point for the head of the household to beat his wife or keep at bay the entire family? Only a spoiled, stupid man without a king in the head allowed such actions. And if natural stupidity though with a smile but was forgiven, then acquired stupidity (tyranny) was mercilessly derided. A bad reputation of the family tyrant, like the glory of a girl's dishonour, ran "in front of the sled."
 The authority of the head of the family was kept not on fear but on the conscience of the whole family. To maintain this credibility, you must be respected rather than feared. Such respect could be gained only by personal example: hard work, fairness, kindness, and consistency.
 If you remember more about kinship and parent-child love, it becomes clear why younger children "feared" elders. That "fear" for children did not come from fear of physical harm or even punishment but from shame, from the pangs of conscience.
In a good family, one condemning look of a father forced family members to tremble, while in the other, the rod, belt or just his fists were perceived quite indifferently. Moreover, the dominance of brute force and fear of physical pain flourished in deception, the secret mockery of elders and other vices.
     Headship from father to eldest son passes not at once but with the aging of father and son and the accumulation of life experience. So leadership kind of slips bit by bit and is poured down from generation to generation because the nominal head of the family is the grandfather, father of the father. But, still, to all, including the grandfather, it is clear that he is not the head anymore.
 Traditionally, the grandfather still has the first word at the family councils, but it is consultative rather than decisive, and he does not see this as an offence. The owner's father and son clearly show how to share the essence of seniority: one provides a form of rule, the other content. All this is gradually shifted.
 The same goes for the female "half" of the house. Young housewives, with the passing years, become the main hand "at the oven," and hence, "the big one." It happened naturally because the mother-in-law grew old and could not always carry buckets of fodder to the cattle to knead the bread. Once you start to bake bread, you have the key from the flour chest. If you milk cows, you pour milk and churn butter, and the loan must be given out not by the in-laws but by yourself. So, the one who makes better pies will obtain seniority.
For unmarried sisters to stay at home for too long was unnatural. It turns out that marrying younger sons was also necessary, if only because of a crowded house. But is it only a cramped house that shaped this need? Before marrying, the second son's father, grandfather, and eldest son began to think about building a new place for him, but the end of construction would often coincide with the wedding. The two married brothers lived with their families under his father's or grandfather's roof for some time. Women's quarrels, common in such cases, hurried construction.
After gathering help (sometimes double or triple), the father and sons quickly finished building the house for a younger son. The same happened with the marriage of the third and fourth sons unless war or some other scrape with all his impudence was bursting into people's lives.
 Conjugal fidelity was the basis of marital love and the well-being of the whole family. The peasants' wives cried when their husbands were jealous because jealousy meant distrust. It was believed that if a man does not trust, then there is no love. They cried that he did not love, but not because he was jealous.

* OLD AGE *

Sometimes, there is no sharp boundary between the time of the blooming of all forces of man and old age. Smoothly, slowly, and quietly, a man approaches his old age. Time moves at different speeds in all seven periods of life. Years of maturity are most numerous, but they fly faster than years of childhood or old age. How can this be explained?
    "Life is not only for youth, but death is also not only by old age"—as the saying goes, but it is not entirely comprehensive to a modern man. So much can be said to decipher this proverb. For example, youth cannot be considered a period of monopoly with the possession of happiness and joy unless you see happiness as something fixed and unchanging throughout life…
     People believe the essence of happiness is different in different periods of life.
    "Sasha sat down on the sleigh, flying like an arrow fast, full of happiness, from the mountain of ice," wrote N.A. Nekrasov about childhood. But how can you experience the same happiness, sliding from the mountain, for example, at an age when Sasha or Masha says, "She will pass by and like the sun shines on! She will look at you, and you feel like a million rubles!"
And at the time of old age, not any peasant woman in her right mind would dream of going to the rye and seriously expect from the fate of ... "the whole piece of calico, a scarlet ribbon to braid, belt, white shirt, belted in the hayfield." All of that, she wishes no longer for herself but for her daughter. Her daughter's happiness is the happiness of her own.
    Does this mean the daughter's happiness is greater than the mother's? A question again needs to be corrected. You cannot compare the joy of youth with happiness in old age. It is quite different both in form and content. The same can be said about love or "pity." A child loves his mother and other relatives. A boy suddenly begins to feel sympathy toward a stranger of the other sex. Finally, the sympathy goes into either an incomparable feeling of love or an irresistible desire into something sublimely tragic. The complexity and drama of this moment are in a fierce conflict between the spiritual and physical, high romance and mundane reality. This contradiction is resolved with a long, almost ritualistic premarital period and the wedding ceremony.
After the wedding, love (compassion) is reborn naturally and becomes qualitatively different, less vulnerable and more thorough. From unfathomable celestial heights, the romantic feeling was tearing down, falling on hard ground, but the marriage bed, prudently stockpiled by life, softened the blow.     
    The birth of children has almost always completely dispelled a sublimely romantic haze. Compassion (love) between the spouses of each other became rougher and more profound. It was fastened to the overall responsibility for children and universal love for them.
 After the birth of children, the couple sometimes kept some of an adolescent's lofty attitude that was not condemned but not very much encouraged by public opinion. Families without children are no families. Life without children is no life. If one year after the wedding, in the house does not yet creak the crib and slatted swinging cradle, the house is considered unlucky. The wedding, in such circumstances, remembered with some bitterness and then tried to quickly forget about it. Childlessness is the greatest misfortune, entailing humiliation of women, fake relationships, rudeness of men, and adultery. Childlessness upsets life harmony and throws off the rhythm. One unnatural causes another, and the house gradually becomes a scourge.
     Nevertheless, childless families are only sometimes destroyed. On the contrary, spouses honouring the sanctity of marriage either adopting children (orphans or from large distant relatives) or bravely bearing "the cross," getting used to the grave and single lobe.
 In a typical peasant family, all children were born primarily in the first ten or fifteen years of married life. "Pogodki" were called children to be taken with a year difference. Thus, even in a large family with ten or twelve children when the last was born, the eldest has yet to emerge from adolescence. This was important because pregnancy, when an adult child is still at home, was not very appropriate. And while no one directly blamed parents for the birth of a sudden "late child," spouses with the maturation of their first child and getting older, the rest of the children were not in such a hurry to enjoy the marriage bed ... They both have gradually returned to youthful chastity. Old age marked not only that.
Even the songs sung at adulthood and maturity were replaced by other, more appropriate meanings and forms. If, during a visit, joining the ring, the mother of an adult son sings about "boyfriend" or "betrayal," no one will take it seriously. Human behaviour is changing with the maturation of children, but physical aging is still very far away. Even a mature woman gets a girl's cheeks to blush during the holiday feast, but she cannot dance the old way when looking at her daughter-bride. Father, who just turned forty, still wants to compete or play dice seriously, but he never will because his sons should do it for real.
Under cover of futility, to defend them by a semblance of a joke, and in old age, he can still go to games, go fish perch, and buy his wife fairground candy. But marital status has moved you to the other cases and brings different, diverse entertainment. Love (compassion) for the wife or husband loses something appropriate or needed in their youth but becomes something new and unexpected for both spouses: tenderness, affection, and fear of losing each other. All this is carefully clapping for external roughness and feigned indifference. The couple even slightly criticized each other, and outsiders sometimes need to understand the essence of their genuine relationship.
Only the most talkative and straightforward laid out in conversations all the ins and outs of the family. They often ratted their "half," but it was generally innocuous. Self-irony and a joke rescued people this age, protecting their family affairs from unwary influences. "We sleep together, but money keeps separate" - with a severe look told a man about his relationship with his wife. Of course, everything is just the opposite.

* * MEAT AND DAIRY**

 The connection of all the phenomena of work and life illustrates even such a primitive example. If the meat is on the table, not the mushroom soup, then there is a strength in the hands and feet, and if there is a strength, then more you will till the soil and mow. In such a case, there will be grain for themselves and straw and fodder and chaff for cattle, and if there are cattle, there will be soup with meat again. The circle is closed ...
    However, it is closed on a higher level: on the table, for example, would not be only cabbage and meat soup but oatmeal, and this, in turn, gives more strength, which let people work better and faster, so they can have free time from fieldwork and go foraging.
Where do people go in the fall when there is free time? First, of course, they go into the woods to pick mushrooms and berries. Thus, a good meat soup entails other, also nutritious but not the main fare. The abundance of meat and dairy foods depends entirely on the arable field's success and hay meadow.
    For lazy, it was advantageous to be superstitious, they say, the cattle are not becoming to the yard. But it was rather not because the hay was dusty, but because the owner is too lazy to shake it because he would take extra oats without hesitation to the fair, while at the strong household, oats will be left for the horses. Either way, the cattle in some homes did not take root, litter have been weak and small, one failure necessarily followed by another.
    Probably, to work with animals,s you need exceptional talent, associated with love for all bellowing, neighing, bleating, grunting, and clucking. Those who during the morning sleep frowns from mooing cows or pulling on a blanket on her head because of the cock's singing will not be good farmers. Even an animal whisperer will not help them.
During summer and fall, the cattle got fat, and with the first frost, the shepherd stopped taking cows to graze. The family council had to decide which animals and how many to let go through the winter. To save the hay with the first heavy frost in the country, cattle got decimated. Nothing beautiful in this scene ... Many women could not tolerate the view of slaughter. Some men drove the children away, while others taught children to the sight of blood. Meat carcasses hung on the poles (higher from cats) and froze. The meat was cut off periodically in winter, and between the fasts were cooked daily soups.
    When a substantial thaw came, the meat had to be pickled in tubs. Meat in brine was not even during the hay harvest a preferred meal.
Beef in the Northern peasant household was preferred to lamb. Almost everything was used. The skins are stored with salt or just made a sheepskin from it. The skin of the calf was used for making boots. The hostess washed in the river intestines of the slaughtered animal up to five times, of which was prepared excellent food, not to mention the liver. The feet and the animal's head were fired on coal and stored for the holidays for cooking jellied meat.
    Meat jelly was a traditional snack on holidays, but it was gulped with kvas for the usual dinner table. A vast iron pot in which cooked meat jelly was taken out from the oven in the evening before the holiday. It was always a sweet moment, especially for children. While the mother (or grandmother) was poured on the dishes liquid broth and cut the content, we could eat cartilage and bone marrow. Children received bones - items for their games, girls were given the ankles bones, and the boys - knees with great delight. Unfortunately, there were not enough bones, so the turn was established, for St. Nikola some, on the day of the Assumption - the others.
 The hostess made of sheep innards lard, stored by cylinders in the chests. Cooked and fired with the lard potatoes served at the table in the morning or at lunch, after the cabbage soup, with added oat cereal. Crispy fried in fat lamb innards were called bacon bits. They are also reputed to be a delicacy, but drinking cold water after them was dangerous. Meat is eaten only in the jelly, in soup, minced and baked in pies. In many homes, if the beef didn't last till haymaking time, usually mutton or sheep were slaughtered in the summer amid a harvesting campaign. So the fresh cabbage soup was cooked twice, and the rest of the meat dried in a hot oven and stored in rye flour. Soup from a dried lamb takes on an entirely different taste.
For those engaged in hunting - hare, grouse and hazel grouse were unavailable only in the spring and early summertime. At this time, the hunters tried to restrain their ardour.
More extensive and complex is the tradition of women's approach toward dairy. In terms of importance, calving was tantamount to such events as the Patron's feast day, moving to a new house, the arrival of the boat-haulers. The hostess knew the time of calving up to three or four days precision; she kept walking into the pen around this time. The expecting cow was visited at night, and if this event were going to happen just about, the whole household would stay awake. The first few days, milk was milked only for the calf. But now, the milk pail is cooked, washed, dried, and inserted a sprig of juniper in the mouth. Brought in and roasted a couple of dozen clay jugs (for some reason, they called "kashniks"). A cat with a loud mewing meets the mistress, who is bringing into the house white-foamed liquid, this childish grace, the personification of health and family harmony.
Milk was used sparingly, and this underlies that only babies drank it. The others gulped it with spoons. As the proverb says, milk is slurped with the awl in the autumn. Milk was poured into a large communal bowl, in which it was crumbled rye bread, and the children ate it between meals as a supplement. Yogurt was eaten with bread crumbs, not only by children but also by others. Such a meal could be a third lunch dish. Sour milk, mixed with sour cream, was served less often because sour cream was supposed to be saved. Women were churning cream in unusual pots in the evenings, called "relics." After a long and very tedious churning appeared first clots mixture of raw butter. Gradually they huddled together in one chunk. Water was added into the pot, the liquid was poured out, and butter was melted in a warm oven. Then it was cooled. It turned as amber-coloured Russian melted butter.
 The remains after such melting called "podeniye" were used with potatoes, eaten with pancakes.
     With Kolyaka guy who "burned" the neighbour's bread happened once this story. When the house was empty, it came into his head to have some cream. So he got up and brought down the entire shelf with pots. Then, not knowing what to do, he enticed the cat. He put the cat's paw into the cream and printed traces on a bench and floor. And with peace of mind, he went outside to chop wood.
 In the evening, the mother clasped her hands: "Father, take a look at what the cat has done to us!" Father says: "No, mother, there's another cat was wandering." - "Which one!" - "A two-legged." Kolyaka lay behind the stove and kept quiet. On his coat froze a couple of inches of sour cream.
The skimmed yogurt was also put in a hot oven. It was ready cottage cheese and buttermilk in the evening, a pleasant sour drink. "Serum from the sour milk" - with the help of this tongue-twister, students trained pronunciation. Cottage cheese was kept in a wooden dish. It was brought to the hayfield in birch-bark baskets with a double wall in the summer. They also used to keep kvas and wort. Cottage cheese was also eaten with milk with a spoon, sour milk, pies and pretzels.
A pitcher of milk every day was put in the oven. This is called "fried" milk. Adults have added it to the tea. The children could directly feast on this delicacy. When cows stopped milking, milk for children was borrowed from the neighbours. The number of lent pitchers etched on the particular splinter. The hostess, giving a loan, also sometimes put sticks. Numbers have not always been the same: borrowers for reliability and disgrace often put extra, "insurance" nicks ...
    In the winter, people applied some strange way to store milk. First, milk was frozen in the dish, and then the ice dairy circles were knocked out and kept in the cold. Such milk could be sent to relatives and taken for the road. It rattled in the bags along with other luggage.