You're born on the last night of 1832 in a smoky hut in Ryazan province, south of Moscow, and you belong to the master, along with the hut and the horse. At eighteen you marry the tall boy who gave you a kerchief, and you move into his father's house, where his sister counts your buckets and his father is the Big One.

This is the life of a peasant daughter-in-law in Imperial Russia, told in second person: a week of wedding laments, the slop tub before breakfast, a proverb about beating your wife, the Crimean War levy that shaves your husband's forehead and takes him for twenty years, a son with an empty line in the church book, the manifesto of 1861 that frees the serfs and changes nothing in your house, a village court, and the famine of 1891.

SOURCES

- O. P. Semenova Tian-Shanskaia, Zhizn' "Ivana": ocherki iz byta krest'ian odnoi iz chernozemnykh gubernii (St Petersburg, 1914), Russian original; fieldwork in Dankov district, Ryazan province: births, matchmaking, weddings, the household, beatings, the cold room

- V. I. Dal', Tolkovyi slovar' (2nd ed., 1880-82), entries Snokha, Baba, Shuba, Zhena, Zolovka and Lob: the proverbs and the shaved forehead

- Brockhaus-Efron encyclopedia, "Krovosmeshenie" (1895), "Kantonisty" and "Razdely semeinye"; Granat encyclopedia, "Snokhachestvo"

- Great Soviet Encyclopedia, "Rekrutskaia povinnost'" and "Soldat": the levy, the term of service and the soldier estate

- D. Mackenzie Wallace, Russia (1877; rev. 1905), chs. VI and XXXI: the household of the old type and the son taken by the army

- F. Engels, "The Russian Army", New York Daily Tribune, 16 November 1855: the levy rate

- The recruit regulation of 1834, English translation

- M. Kovalevsky, Modern Customs and Ancient Laws of Russia (1891), Lecture II

- S. G. Fedorov, "Snokhachestvo i samosud v obychnom prave rossiiskoi i sibirskoi derevni vo vtoroi polovine XIX - nachale XX v.", Gramota 2015 no. 11(61): the courts and the slander verdicts

- M. G. Muravyeva, "Between Law and Morality: Violence against Women in Nineteenth-Century Russia", in Rosslyn and Tosi (eds.), Women in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Open Book Publishers, 2012)

- I. N. Milogolova, Sovetskaia etnografiia 1991 no. 2, and G. S. Maslova, Sovetskaia etnografiia 1966 no. 5

- N. N. Prokop'eva, "Bol'shak i bol'shukha v russkoi derevne", Materialy REM vol. 1

- Z. Z. Mukhina, Vestnik RUDN: Istoriia Rossii 2013 no. 1

- G. Popkins, Journal of Legal Pluralism 43 (1999): the township courts

- I. Popp, Territoriia (2025)

- G. V. Laukhina, Izvestiia RGPU no. 115: land by male souls

- J. Rouhier-Willoughby, Folklorica XII (2007)

- Editors' preface to L. N. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 29 (1954): the famine kitchens of 1891

- W. T. Shinn, "The Law of the Russian Peasant Household", American Slavic and East European Review 20:4 (1961), abstract

- M. K. Matossian, Slavic Review 45:3 (1986), abstract

- Natkhov and Vasilenok, Economic History Society blog (2022), on infant care and infant mortality

NOTES ON PRECISION

Malanya, her family, Fyodor's family and the village are invented, and so is every line of dialogue. Village customs (the hut with no chimney, the matchmaking, the laments, the coins in the corners, the coin in the boot, the cold room) follow Olga Semenova Tian-Shanskaia's ethnography of Dankov district in Ryazan province and the other sources actually read. Semenova did her fieldwork from the 1880s to 1906, so her customs are used for the 1850s as a reconstruction. The levy rate (about fifty men per thousand souls over two years of war) comes from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia and Engels. The court hearing of 1864 is invented: its slander verdict follows a pattern from other provinces' records (Fedorov's Trans-Urals material), and its punishment follows a Ryazan case in Semenova. Fyodor's return on leave in 1868 is invented; the army did cut its terms after 1855, but the exact years of each cut were not verified. The coercion the story implies is never shown or described, and the word for it is never spoken; the narration gives only the encyclopedias' verdict on the practice. No reliable figure for how common it was exists, and none is given. Works that were located but not read (Worobec, Engel, Frank and others) are not cited, and nothing is attributed to them. Tolstoy, who ran free kitchens in Dankov district from October 1891, is real.

Everyone in this video is a stick figure and the main character is invented. No likeness of any real person is depicted or implied.