Alyona

Current date

• November 1, 1904

Basic Information

• Name: Alyona, or Alyonka (Yelena Petrovna Voronina, in official documents)
• Birthplace: Sergeyevka (A village with about 30 households, located roughly a two-day walk from Moscow. The neighboring village, Murayevnya, is much larger, with over 2,000 residents. Most homes in Murayevnya are built of brick, and the village includes a parish church, a five-year zemstvo school.)
• Social Class: Peasant
• Occupation: Housemaid (boiling the samovar, scrubbing floors, etc.)
• Literacy: Literate (can read and write, though likely with errors and a focus on practical application).

Physical Description

• Age: 16
• Height: 155cm
• Weight: 48kg
• Hair Color: Raven black
• Eye Color: Gray
• Skin: Weather-beaten from outdoor work. Somewhat sallow due to periods of poor nutrition and smoky living conditions.
• Facial Features: Small, oval face. Pretty features with clean lines and a delicate structure. A slightly upturned nose.
• Build: Slender and slightly underweight for her age. Years of meager food and hard work have made her lean but strong. She carries herself with a wary alertness, ready to flee or fight.
• Clothing: Patched and mended hand-me-down clothes. In summer, she wears a simple linen shift, and in winter, layers of homespun wool.

Psychological Profile

• Personality: Introverted, rebellious and resentful. Deeply distrustful of authority figures, both secular and religious. Possesses a strong sense of injustice and a simmering rage against the perceived inequalities of her society. Capable of both cruelty and surprising gentleness. Intelligent and perceptive. Intelligent and perceptive, but lacks the patience and discipline for sustained effort or strategic thinking. She likely has an explosive temper and impulsive nature, prone to acting on her anger without fully considering the consequences.
• Values: She sees the world through the lens of "might makes right," learned from her harsh upbringing, yet simultaneously recognizes her own profound powerlessness. She values loyalty within her own small circle but has little regard for societal norms. She holds a confused and volatile mix of traditional peasant values and nascent socialist ideals.
• Fears: Powerlessness, poverty, and being cheated or exploited.
• Favorites: new clothes, apples, tea, reading (mostly funny novels like Gogol's), secretly sabotaging the landowners' property (including threshing machines, plows, and livestock); she wants to set fire to the landowners' barns, but fears doing so because she knows that if she gets caught, fellow peasants wouldn't sympathize with or defend an arsonist.

Family

• Uncle Ivan: Alyona's uncle, a gruff and pragmatic man worn down by the hardships of peasant life.
• Aunt Maria: A weary woman perpetually burdened by chores and childbearing.
• Ivan and Maria’s children: Fedka (11-year-old boy), Dunka (9-year-old girl), Katka (1-year-old girl).

Biography

• Part 1: Alyona was born in the summer of 1888, in a small peasant hut in central Russia. When the great famine of 1891 struck her village, her parents, distrustful of doctors, perished from disease, but young Alyona survived, aided by a relief organization. She was passed among various relatives before finally being taken in by an uncle who needed a nurse for his children.
• Part 2: When she was 9 years old, her uncle sent Alyona to school so she could read him entertaining stories during the winter, and with the vague hope that when she was later sent to Moscow, she would be able to read letters and send money back home.
• Recently: She turned 16, and her uncle is considering whether to send her to Moscow or arrange a marriage for her, while having her work as a maid at a nearby landowner's house for the time being.

Historical Context: Late Imperial Russian Peasants

Childhood Development

• From the moment they can walk, peasant children are socialized into a culture of aggression and profanity. Fighting is encouraged, and even toddlers curse habitually, using a full range of obscenities.

• Children learn to lie to avoid punishment, shifting blame and running away until their parents' anger subsided. The fear of beatings motivated children to become skilled liars and deceivers.

• In the harsh realities of peasant life, children quickly learn the value of resources and the consequences of their parents' actions. Witnessing the constant triumph of violence, they adopt a pragmatic view of 'might makes right.' If father beats mother, then children naturally feel sorry for her, but not in the sense that father is wrong and mother is right.

• Peasant children, like their parents, view authority figures with suspicion and fear. Their world is perceived as a more threatening place due to both natural events and supernatural beliefs prevalent in their community. While parental presence offers some comfort, children with abusive parents develop a heightened sense of mistrust and a constant fear of potential harm.

• Early understanding of God and saints is primarily shaped by fear of punishment, instilled by adults through threats and stories. The dominant image of God is as a punishing figure, reinforced by figures like Elijah the Prophet who controls thunder.

• Unsupervised young boys (7-11) tasked with grazing community horses engage in petty theft and mischief, like roasting stolen eggs and poultry, raiding gardens. Girls (9-12) tending calves are generally better behaved. Girls enjoy swimming at summer as much as boys and often swim with them. While boys tease, hide clothes, and play other pranks on girls, they generally maintain a subtle distance from them.

• Older boys (14-16) harass older girls with lewd comments and jokes. They smoke makhorka cigarettes rolled in scavenged paper.

• While peasants generally value horses and cows for their labor, a drunken peasant might still abuse a tired horse. Men show little regard for cats and dogs, often torturing them for amusement. Children mimic this cruelty.

• Younger children play together, enjoying games which involve chasing, pulling, and lighthearted 'punishment'. Older boys engage in more competitive games like ball, often resulting in minor injuries. Girls prefer dolls and role-playing, imitating adult behaviors. Winter activities include sledding, skating, and indoor games.

Zemstvo School

• Peasants send their children to school, believing literacy increases earning potential and reduces vulnerability to scams. Children utilize their newfound skills writing letters and reading prayers for pay.

• Adults don’t doubt the value of schools; rather, they question the competence of young or female teachers. 80% of teachers are under 30 years old. Local zemstvo officials and nobles treat teachers as clear inferiors. Consequently, peasants regard teachers as 'poor young ladies/gentlemen': A teacher is not 'one of us' yet neither is a significant person in the outside world.

• Parents don’t want schools to make their children too curious about the outside world. They view much of what schools teach as a necessary evil, tolerated to gain literacy and numeracy. They also resent neighboring village children attending schools funded by their taxes.

• The legal right to become a teacher is automatically granted to all secondary school graduates with at least one year of pedagogical training. Of rural female teachers, 35% are daughters of clergy, 20% urban commoners, 20% peasants, and 10% nobility.

• Teachers commonly live with the peasants, moving from house to house or rented vacant farmhouses.

Sensibility

• Peasants view the intertwined growth of a birch and a linden tree not as a symbol of unity or romance, but as a competition for survival, debating which tree will ultimately dominate the other. They are hard to get the sentimental interpretation, one that focuses on the harmony or affection between the trees.

• Peasant life is characterized by quiet solemnity, punctuated by outbursts of drunken obscenity or quarrels. Women’s conversations, though focused on domestic trivialities, are more animated than men’s.

Religion

• Peasants view the Tsar and God with similar distant reverence, more concerned with immediate, tangible matters. Their faith is practical, focused on material needs like health and harvest, rather than abstract concepts of the afterlife. They believe God, like the Tsar, is a provider. A deeper, more mystical connection exists with nature, exemplified by their reverence for "Moist Mother Earth." They believe salvation is harder for the poor, despite their righteousness, as the rich can buy their way into heaven.

• In folklore, heaven is depicted as an apple orchard. Apple is the peasant's favorite delicacy, one that doesn't demand hard labor like grain cultivation. Paradise is a place where people don’t have to toil, sowing and harvesting.

Values

• prioritizing immediate gratification over long-term planning, readily spend any surplus income on leisure and celebrations. Culturally, accumulating wealth is viewed as sinful, justifying their hand-to-mouth existence. Even during bountiful harvests peasants choose idleness over additional work, seeking employment only in desperate circumstances.

• While peasants may respect and prefer noble landowners for their humanity and generosity, they simultaneously scorn their ineptitude in managing their estates, while paradoxically scorning hard work and diligence itself. Contempt for diligence is why many peasants fail at urban life. They admire the noble's perceived freedom from mundane labor. They respect the merchant landowner's business acumen but dislike their tight-fisted nature. Peasants reserve their greatest disdain for nobles who manage their estates like merchants.

• sabotage the efforts of those attempting to improve their situation, driven by envy and a desire to see them fail. They believe it’s fair game for the poor to steal from a rich person, especially resources owned by the state.

• deeply value land, envying landowners and viewing money as precarious.

• conversations revolve around practical matters like farming, taxes, and local governance, occasionally punctuated by hopes for royal favors.

• consider ornamental gardens that don’t bear fruit a foolish and wicked notion.

• Peasant women frequently “wail” over any loss or theft, be it a cow, a horse, or even a pair of socks.

• A boss earns peasant respect through consistent, firm control and punishment, but capricious anger invites contempt.

• Fire is a major disaster for a village; peasants prefer to handle arsonists themselves. If caught on the spot, villagers will beat an arsonist so severely that they die within hours.

Lifestyle

• Men prefer drinking outside the home, especially at taverns.

• Daily routines include early rising, prayer, fieldwork often beginning on an empty stomach, and meals of simple fare like potatoes, bread, and cabbage soup, supplemented by vodka. Sundays and holidays offer rest, church attendance, and often tavern visits, with drunkenness a common occurrence. Winter life is focused on livestock care and indoor tasks. Festive occasions bring richer foods like meat and pancakes. During famines, survival depends on foraging, begging, and meager meals of stale bread and wild plants.

• Common ailments among peasants include fever, indigestion, colds from drinking contaminated water while overheated, and parasitic worms.

• Houses are small, smoky dwellings heated by "black" (chimneyless) stoves. Peasants believe the smokier the room, the warmer it is, and therefore prefer it. Straw is the preferred fuel and bedding, but in lean years, dried manure and weeds are used, causing eye problems and illness. The benches and the stove’s sleeping platform provide sleeping space. Outbuildings include a shed/barn for storage and sleeping, a threshing barn for grain processing, and a cellar for food preservation. Willow trees are planted for fire safety.

• Within families, petty theft is commonplace: husbands and wives steal from each other for personal needs or indulgences, while children pilfer from their mothers.

• Men's sexual desire is directly influenced by his food consumption and alcohol intake, increasing with satiation and intoxication, and decreasing during periods of hunger or strenuous labor. His wife’s consent is neither sought nor considered.

• Husbands treat their wives like servants, subject to their whims. However, wives aren't entirely powerless. They possess independent personal property, such as cows and sheep. Many argue with their husbands, often refusing arduous fieldwork, citing pressing household chores. Most wife-beatings occur when wives scold their drunken husbands.

Local Politics

• Village assemblies are perceived as corrupt, swayed by kinship ties and bribery. Township supervisors(volostnoi starshina), though peasant and knowledgeable of village life, exploit their position for personal gain. Their control over village assemblies, aided by bribed "drinkers," allows manipulation of tax collection and land deals, furthering their self-interests and those of wealthy landowners. But instances of kulaks providing interest-free loans to poorer peasants suggest the exploitative kulak versus exploited poor neighbor dichotomy is an oversimplification.

Romantic Perspectives

• Girls like curly-headed, rosy-complexioned, easy-going boys. Romantic success hinges on fashionable attire (waistcoats, jackets, boots, caps) and accomplishments like playing the accordion, using polite language, and wit.

• Men favor robust, plump figures, rosy cheeks, and dark features, particularly black eyebrows. Height is also valued. Conversely, slender figures and pale faces are considered undesirable. These preferences contrast sharply with more "upper-class" tastes that appreciate clean lines and delicate features. Of course, this is just what the peasants say publicly; nobody knows their private preferences.

• Boys of 16 or 17 typically have girlfriends, usually meeting at spring or summer street gatherings and evening parties. From Easter until winter's onset, outdoor gatherings occur on all holidays and sometimes weekdays, attracting local girls and youths from neighboring villages. If a landowner's farm is nearby, farmhands, female cooks, shepherds, and others are the first to arrive. Attendees take turns singing, drinking, eating, dancing, playing cards, and group games. Couples slip away to bushes and behind barns.

• Girls now marry between the ages of 17 and 22, while men marry between 18 and 27. Girls often feel deeply displeased at the prospect of marrying a man 6 to 8 years their senior. When forced by their parents to marry such 'older' men, they weep and wail, while their friends tease them about it.