Current page: 1 (total book has 23 pages)

Vasily Ivanovich Belov
LAD

Belov V.I.

B 43 Lad: Essays on folk aesthetics. – M.: Mol. guard, 1982. 293 p., ill.

7 p. 50 k. 50,000 copies.

A well-known Soviet writer talks about the aesthetics of peasant labor, folklore, life, art crafts. The book uses ethnographic materials from the Vologda, Arkhangelsk, and Kirov regions.

The publication is intended for a wide range readers.

4904000000-232 078(02)-82

BBK 84R7+63.5(2) R2+902.7

Photographing was carried out in the Vologda and Arkhangelsk regions in 1979-1981.

Archival photographs obtained from the funds of the Vologda Museum of Local Lore.

Vasily Ivanovich Belov

Editor 3. Kostyushina Art editor S. Sakharova Technical editor E. Braude Proofreaders V. Avdeeva, I. Tarasova

FROM THE AUTHOR

Element folk life immeasurable and incommensurable with anything. No one has been able to comprehend it to the end and, hopefully, never will.

In the unquenchable thirst for knowledge, the main property of science is its greatness and impotence. But for all the peoples of the Earth, the thirst for beauty is no less traditional. How dissimilar are these two human needs, which are identical in their power and origin! And if the world really consists only of time and space, then, I think, science interacts more with space, and art with time ...

People's life in its ideal, all-embracing sense did not know such or any other division. The world for man was a single whole. Centuries have cut and polished the way of life, formed back in the days of paganism. Everything that was superfluous, or cumbersome, or not suitable for common sense, national character, climatic conditions - all this was eliminated by time. And what was lacking in this way of life, always striving for perfection, was partly gradually born in the depths of people's life, partly borrowed from other peoples and fairly quickly established itself throughout the state.

Such orderliness and stability can easily be called static, immobility, which is done by some "researchers" of folk life. At the same time, they deliberately ignore the rhythm and cyclicity, excluding everyday static and immobility.

Rhythm is one of the conditions of life. And the life of my ancestors, the northern Russian peasants, was basically rhythmic and in particular. Any violation of this rhythm - war, pestilence, crop failure - the whole people, the whole state was in a fever. Interruptions in the rhythm of family life (illness or premature death, fire, adultery, divorce, theft, arrest of a family member, death of a horse, recruitment) not only destroyed the family, but affected the life of the whole village.

Rhythm manifested itself in everything, forming a cycle. You can talk about the daily cycle and the weekly cycle, for an individual and for the whole family, about the summer or spring cycle, about the annual cycle, and finally, about the whole life: from conception to grave grass ...

Everything was interconnected, and nothing could live separately or without each other, everything had its place and time. Nothing could exist outside the whole or appear out of order. At the same time, unity and integrity did not at all contradict beauty and diversity. Beauty could not be separated from utility, utility from beauty. The master was called the artist, the artist was called the master. In other words, beauty was in a dissolved, and not in a crystalline state, as it is now.

I may be asked: why is it necessary, such close attention to the old, largely disappeared way of life of the people? It is my deep conviction that knowledge of what was before us is not only desirable, but also necessary.

Young people at all times bear on their shoulders the main burden of the social development of society. Modern boys and girls are no exception to this rule. But no matter where they spend their indefatigable energy: whether at a taiga construction site, in the fields of the Non-Black Earth Region, or in factory workshops - everywhere a young person needs, first of all, high moral criteria ... Physical training, the level of academic knowledge and high professional skill in themselves, without these moral criteria, mean nothing yet.

But it is impossible to cultivate these lofty moral principles in oneself without knowing what was before us. After all, even modern technical achievements did not appear out of nothing, and many labor processes have not changed in essence. For example, the cultivation and processing of flax has preserved all the most ancient production and aesthetic elements of the so-called flax cycle. Everything is only accelerated and mechanized, but flax must be ruffled, spun and woven in the same way, as was done in Novgorod villages ten centuries ago.

Culture and folk life also have a deep continuity. You can step forward only when the foot is repelled from something, movement from nothing or from nothing is impossible. That is why our youth is so interested in what worried grandfathers and great-grandfathers.

In the same way, future generations will not be able to do without the living ones, that is, without you and me. They will also need our moral and cultural experience, just as we need the experience of people who lived before us.

It is no accident that the book is called Lad and tells about the harmony, and not about the discord of peasant life. It was conceived as a collection of sketches about northern life and folk aesthetics. At the same time, I tried to tell only about what I know, experienced or saw myself, or knew and experienced people close to me. A good half of the materials were recorded from the words of my mother, Anfisa Ivanovna Belova. There were too many memories, as well as impressions of today. Willy-nilly, I had to systematize the material, giving the story some kind of, albeit relative, order, which dictated the compositional structure of the book.

To save space, I had to reduce or completely remove the live factual material contented with general reflections.

ALL YEAR ROUND

Spring.

Once upon a time, everything in Rus' began in spring. Even New Year. Christian calendar easily got along with the signs of the pagan calendar, almost every day had its own proverb: March 6 - Timothy the Spring.

They said that if Evdokia watered the chicken, then Nikola (May 22) would feed the cow 1
Dates are given in the new style. For details about the folk calendar, see the book of Iv. Poluyanov "Months". Arkhangelsk, 1979.

Signs, born of centuries-old experience of communication with nature, are always definite and devoid of any mysticism. For example, if swallows have arrived, it is necessary to sow peas without delay.

The boundaries between the four seasons in our North are unclear and vague. But nowhere is there such a contrast, such a difference between winter and summer, as we have.

Spring occupied a place in the year between the first drop and the first thunder.

There are no breaks in peasant labor after Maslenitsa. One follows from the other, just have time to turn around. (Perhaps that is why they say: all year round.) And yet, in the spring, people come to their special joys. In the field, in the forest, on the threshing floor, in the house, in the barn - everywhere something new appears every day, inherent only in spring and forgotten in a year. What a pleasure to meet old good friends! Here, bright melt water came up to the very baths - pull out the boat, heat up the odorous thick resin. At the same time, you will tar your boots and replace them with heavy felt boots that have bothered you during the winter. Here the first rook arrived, from day to day, wait for the starlings. You can’t get anywhere, you have to put up birdhouses - a childish joy. And then suddenly a mitten lost in the winter melted in the garden ... And you remember the December winter road, along which you rode with ridges for a new bath.

By the way, it doesn't hurt to think about what happened. It was gone. It is necessary, before the road falls, to take out the last hay from the forest, and needles for bedding for livestock, and firewood for dry wood, and collect traps along the way, skiing along the big and small paths.

And now the horse, snorting, trot away from the village in the morning. On a cart with half a dozen tops, so as not to drag later homely.(A pike spawning is about to appear: it is necessary rush in the exit lake and set traps.) Back - with a cart of hay or pine needles. While the horse is resting and crunching green hay, until the sun melts the blue crust, have time to go into the thicket to look after and mark the trees for cutting for juice. Another type of pine resin - my grandmother asked for the preparation of medicine. The hostess made a hint: to break pine paws on a broomstick. It's also necessary. How long? It’s a matter of a minute, but it’s nice to remember, and it’s also required to cut down a hut along the way: black grouse are just running ... Also chop birch branches for humic panicles. And only then, when the horse heads for the house and the tugs creak, can you take a nap on the cart or sing a song about some Vanka the key keeper ...

In the spring, old women and women whitewash canvases on the crust. They pull out from the cellars and sort out seed and food potatoes, at the same time treat the children with juicy, as if just from the garden, turnips and carrots.

Fur coats and all kinds of clothes are aired, hanging them on the stoves, because the moth is afraid of the sun. The girls continue to spin during conversations, the men and boys are hard at work carpentry. Repair household equipment: harness, carts, harrows. They twist ropes, push snow off the roofs.

Thousands of age-old signs are launched, people wonder what spring will be like and what to expect from summer.

Many cows have already calved by this time. Others wait hour by hour. The big housewife even goes to visit the barn at night. Children also can not wait, they are already tired of without milk. And suddenly one morning in the hut behind the stove appeared, hooves tapping. Big eyes, wet lips. Wool is silk. Everyone takes turns ironing. The first days milk, or rather colostrum, only a calf, then, if Lent is already over, everyone slurps. Milk in peasant families was not drunk, as it is now, but slurped with spoons, with a bite of bread or with jelly, with oatmeal, with berries.

Cattle, after a long winter standing in a stuffy dark barn, humanly rejoices in spring. Asking for air, for the sun. And when the cows are let out into the yard for a while, another one jumps for joy.

Meanwhile, it became quite warm, the roads fell. Fields and meadows began to be freed from snow. Old people look at the sky, listen to themselves: what is spring like? Long and cold or short and warm? Do not miss the sowing period. The one who parted with the three-shelf system and introduces a cultural crop rotation has already scattered clover over the ice shard in the morning.

With anxiety in their hearts, people go to look at the winter: is it not wet, what does it feel like winter has overcome? After all, mother rye, the proverb says, feeds everyone completely. And cattle, and poultry, and a peasant family.

All this is fine, but when to sow? Another hurried, not yet had time to royda 2
Royda - permafrost.

get out, went to plow. He was delighted, whistling with a chauffeur. It throws seeds into the cold ground - you see, since autumn the children have gone around the world. The other did not prepare in time: either there was not enough seeds, or the horse's shoulder was knocked down. This is also bad luck.

There are few such eccentrics in a good village...

Everything is ready, but when do you leave?

Jokingly or seriously, you won’t understand, but the people said this: “Go out into the field and sit on the ground with your bare ass. You will immediately know whether it is time to sow or wait.

But here is the most experienced, most zealous farmer dragged out the plow and harnessed the mare in the morning. And everyone rushed into the field as if on command ...

The tugs creaked, smelling of tar, the coulters crackled with small pebbles. In the sky, over the field, larks are pouring. Plowmen whistle, give commands to the horses: “Straight! Directly!" Or on the inversion: “What, I forgot during the winter, where is the right, where is the left?”

And the horse, embarrassingly waving its tail, turns in the right direction.

In general, in the sowing, the plowman and the horse should have complete mutual understanding. If they start arguing, nothing will work. A good peasant plows without a push, does not curse his horse, does not scold. He acts on her with affection, persuasion, and sometimes shames her like a person. A skittish horse is not suitable for arable land.

And the furrow goes and goes after you, and the rooks immediately sit down in it, poke their noses into their native land 3
The author considers it his duty not only to mention the names of some people who responded to the journal publication "Essays" ("Nash Sovremennik", 1979, No. 10, 12; 1980, No. 3; 1981, No. 1, 5, 6, 7), but also cite here, albeit fragmentarily, their statements on the topic of interest to us. Aleksey Mikhailovich Krendelev from Kharkov writes, for example, that “the main lever that raises a person to his human place has always been labor. So, the work of the peasant in this respect was especially beneficial. After all, peasant labor and peasant life are so intertwined, so closely merged, that it is often impossible to separate them. In such an environment permeated with labor, human rot could not germinate: it was either expelled or isolated to such an extent that it could not give harmful sprouts. This is how the self-healing of the peasant masses turned out. The life of the peasants of the Russian village, especially pre-revolutionary, our literature, including fiction, sometimes portrayed as primitive, empty: they say, peasants are stupid, stupid creatures. But in my view - and I remember the pre-revolutionary village - the people of the village look completely different. Of course, there are stupid people everywhere, even with diplomas. But I am convinced that there were no more dull and stupid among the peasants than in any other class. There was a lot of naivety and, therefore, truthfulness in the peasants of my childhood. They had worldly wisdom, but had little worldly cunning, characteristic of the trade and bureaucratic class. I know of no other example where work is done with such diligence and love as the work of a peasant in the field. Arable land, sowing, harvest - everything turned into some kind of sacred rite.

It is she, the earth, who feeds and waters, clothes and undead. Blue in its time with flowers, blowing coolness, draining the sweat of fatigue from you. She will take you into herself and hug you and put you to rest forever when your deadline comes ... In the meantime, the black furrow goes on and on. Layer to layer lies on the field. And your father, or son, or wife, or sister is already harnessing another horse to harrow, level this spring land.

And a grandfather or grandmother is already pouring large white seed oats into a basket. Here the eternal sower slowly walks in a strip, waving his hand from side to side. A step, a second - and golden rain flies from a handful. Having bounced off the basket, the grains fall on the fresh earth. The sower mutters to himself some eternal incantation: either he sings, or he prays.

In the pine forest, nearby, the children lit a fire. The girls, collecting morels-snowdrops, sing "Vesnyanka". The earth dries up, it is required to immediately bury the seeds.

Usually, after oats, flax was sown - one, at most two strips, then peas and barley.

There was such a sign: you need to stand under a birch and look at the sun. If it is already possible to look through the crown without squinting, then it is useless to continue sowing. You're just throwing away the seeds. If the foliage is no more than a penny and the sun easily breaks through it, then a day or two can still be sown.

After sowing, the bath must be heated. This week both people and horses got it: the man is steaming, the horse is defending.

Here is the first weed.

The first pasture of cattle to pasture is an event no worse than others. The shepherd on this day is godfather to the king ...

The grass is growing fast. Live. In the forest, if the day is warm, by the evening other stems are stretched an inch from the ground.

You look, it's time to plant vegetable gardens ... They spit vegetable seeds into nurseries. A woman will take pre-soaked cabbage or rutabaga seeds into her mouth and forsknet with all her strength. Seeds evenly scatter throughout the nursery. At night, they cover the nursery with a linen bedding or even fur coats if the old people promised a frost and if the cat clings to a warm damper.

Fencing a garden is also a very important thing, without a garden, cattle will wipe out everything over the summer. Good owners have a juniper stake, an aspen pole, a spruce tree - there is no wear and tear on the hedge. The lazy one will have to make it out of what, that's why you have to fence every spring.

Spring ends with the first warm rain and the first rolling thunder. When they hear thunder, the girls must roll over their heads so that the lower back does not hurt during the harvest. And you have to have time to tumble before the thunder subsides. Even in a puddle, even on a meadow, even in an everyday sundress, even in a festive one, still somersault. Laughter, exclamations and enthusiastic girlish squeals do not subside along with a thunderstorm.

Summer.

This is how the world works: if you plow, then you need to sow, and if it is sown, then it will sprout, that it will sprout, then it will grow and bear fruit, and, like it or not, you will do what is intended by providence. Why don't you want to? It is pleasant even for the lazy to plow and sow, it is pleasant to see how strength and life come out of nothing. Great Mystery birth and withering annually accompanies the peasant from spring to autumn. The burden of work - if you are strong and not sick - is also pleasant, it simply does not exist. Yes, and labor itself does not seem to exist separately, it is not noticeable in everyday life, life is one. Both work and rest, and weekdays, and holidays are so natural and cannot exist without each other, they are so natural in their sequence that the burden of peasant labor was hidden. In addition, people knew how to take care of themselves.

The people always with a smile, and sometimes with sympathy, turning into pity, treated lazy people. But those who did not spare themselves and their loved ones in their work were also ridiculed, considering them unfortunate. God forbid to overstrain in the forest or on arable land! You will toil yourself and let your family go around the world. (It is interesting that the torn man later toiled with his conscience all his life, they say, overlooked, blundered.)

If the child overstrains, he will not grow well. A woman will overstrain - will not give birth. Therefore, the overheads were afraid like a fire. Children were especially protected, while the elderly themselves were experienced.

The burden of labor increased gradually over the years.

Unnecessarily hot in the work of teenagers, who boasted in front of their peers, were upset, not allowed to disperse. The overly lazy were encouraged in many ways. Work from a conscious necessity quickly turned into something pleasant and natural, therefore unnoticed.

The severity of it was also brightened up by the variety, the rapid change of household and field affairs. Something, let alone monotony in this work was not. Today the legs are tired, tomorrow the legs are resting, and the hands are tired, to put it bluntly. Nothing was the same, despite tradition and apparent monotony. Plowmen stopped work to feed the horses, mowers interrupted their mowing to break brooms or kick bark 4
The root of the word "rest" is related to breathing. To rest means to take a breath, to calm the heart and muscles. In other words, the concept of "rest" for the peasant refers only to hard physical, and if not hard, then monotonous, long-term work like women's needlework. Rest in the sense of complete inactivity has never existed, if we are not talking about sleep, but about the state of wakefulness. Thousands of people lying on the beach, from the point of view of even the current elderly peasant, is a terrifying absurdity. And not because people are lying naked, but because they are simply lying, that is, lounging.

Summer is the peak of the year, the time for labor takeoff. “Autumn will come, it will ask for everything,” they say in the summer. White northern nights double daylight hours in June, greenery grows rapidly both in the field and in the garden. If thousands of peasant affairs seem to be replaced by the strength of the load and in essence, then in the main of them everything gets tired: arms, legs, and every vein. (Of course, this is primarily work with the forest, plowing and haymaking.) Here they really and seriously relax. They work two or three hours before breakfast - why not the current exercise? Breakfast is usually hearty, with cabbage soup. The regime has to be strictly maintained, it quickly becomes a habit.

In summer, they dine after tea. “Drink another cup, you better eat something!” - treats the big woman - a woman who rules the whole house. After lunch, you must rest for two hours. Before dinner, again a large labor charge. The day is very productive. (Even "in barge haulers", that is, in otkhodnichestvo at work with a contractor, a very rare owner forced me to work after dinner.)

Hiding is the hardest work in the forest, and only men, and the strongest, were engaged in it. The most ancient pre-Christian method of slash-and-burn agriculture resonates in our days only with distant echoes: to hide means to uproot the burnt taiga, to prepare the land for sowing flax or barley 5
The reader, of course, has the right to supplement each section of the essays with examples, details, local variants, methods, plots and names known to him.

At first, a vast forest area was burned, having cut down the timber before that. In the second year they began to hide. Huge smuts were removed, burnt stumps were uprooted. To tear such a stump out of the ground, you need to chop off the roots, dig under it from all sides and then swing it with a lever. One can imagine what a person who worked a day or two in the burnt taiga looked like! Only the eyes and teeth remained white. Hiding disappeared long ago, leaving only the word "gary" as a legacy. A lot of berries, currants and raspberries still grow on the burnt areas in our places.

Cattle were always grazed on forest natural pastures in the summer, they were driven out into the fields only in late autumn.

Going to the osek is the favorite work of many, especially young people. Imagine the first fresh summer, when it smells of young leaves and pine needles, when morels grow and lilies of the valley bloom. A large gang of young people, old people, teenagers, women, and sometimes serious men gather in the forest somewhere on a cheerful hillock. Everyone with hatchets, everyone has some food with them. Aspens, thin long birch trees, dry fir trees are cut down and pulled along the line of the oseka. Then spruce stakes are beaten crosswise and new woods are laid on them, also without cutting branches from them. It turns out a very strong thorny fence. A good osek is half the battle for the shepherd. Just don’t be lazy, drum on the drum and lay down the zagoras - passages and fences made of poles.

On such a day another is born festive mood. On long halts you hear so much of everything both funny and terrible, so many things will happen before the evening that walking to the osek is remembered for a lifetime. From now on, the youth is waiting for this day, although such a day will never come exactly ...

The same festivity emanates from silage, which was not there before. This work appeared in the countryside only together with the collective farms, the artel character makes it very similar to going to the osek. The main female forces mow down 7
Nikolai Petrovich Borisov writes that in his homeland (the former Solvychetodsky district) women “... never mowed, this is the occupation of men. But men never regret. They spared the women, they understood that they were needed for another.

young grass splashing with juice and put it in shocks. (It's important not to let this grass wilt or dry out.) Teenagers push the grass in carts to the silo pits, quickly pushing it down. When the pit is half loaded, some kindest, almost talking mare is pushed into it. It is on it that a proud rammer six years old from birth drives around in the pit all day long. For this, half a day's work is written in his father's book in his name. Horse droppings are thrown away with a pitchfork, the mare is watered by dropping down a bucket of water. When the pit is filled and tamped, the grass smells of delicious sourness - fermentation has already begun inside. They throw it with earth and cover it with clay - wait until winter.

If the weather is hot, gadflies appear. Here you have to carry grass at night, because you can’t cope with any, even the most good-natured, mare on gadflies. At night, the midge, the smallest midge, pesters the night workers. She gets everywhere. (Mice are also called midges if there are a lot of them.) Manure was also taken out in the North at night because of the many gadflies. They piled manure on a cart with pitchforks. Layers are torn off with great difficulty. The driver drives the cart into the field - into lanes and at even intervals with crooked forks pulls the kolyga. In the morning, these kolygi are scattered along the strips and begin to plow. Following the plow, again, either an old man or a boy walks, shoves manure into a furrow with a stick to fill it with earth 8
More about this is described in the story of Vl. Soloukhin "A drop of dew".

It often happened that the haymaking was not yet finished, but the harvest had already arrived, at about the same time winter crops were blowing and flax was pulling. And the weather will never allow you to relax or get bored. When there is beautiful fragrant hay on the forks, and rumbles in the distance, the hands themselves move faster, the rake only flickers. And if a thunderstorm is about to break out, even the most clumsy begin to run across the field. But the main thing, of course, is that the stack was swept away before the neighbors, they put the bread under the roof and ground it first, and the lenok was not the last to pull out.

The age-old desire of the Russian peasant not to be the last, not to become a laughing stock, was perfectly exploited in the early collective farm years. Yes, and the Stakhanov movement was based precisely on this property. In one parable, a man, dying, gave an order to his young son: "Eat bread with honey, don't say hello first." Only hard-working sons recognized the real taste of bread (as with honey), and the one who works in the field, such as a mower, only answered the greetings of those walking by with a nod. So it turned out that lovers of sleep were always the first to greet ...

Harvest is no less than haymaking, an exciting time. Bread - the crown of all aspirations - is already felt really, weightily, and not only in thoughts. Even a small handful of rye stalks cut with a sickle is a good cut of bread, but how many cuts are there in a sheaf?

Zazhinok - one of the great variety of labor rituals - was especially pleasant, encouraging and holy. The best reaper in the family took a sickle and cut off the first handfuls.

Tall - in human growth - a thick sheaf personified abundance.

Mowed winter grain in the North little and rarely. The rye, compressed by a sickle, did not lose a single spikelet in the field, neither mice nor birds had anything to do on the strip. Nine sheaves leaned against each other with their ears up, forming a kind of hut called a wort. From above, like a hat, they put on the tenth sheaf. For some reason, children always wanted to crawl under this warm straw-bread shelter. Each good wort fed a medium-sized family for three or four weeks, it turned out up to a pood, or even more grain. The rye matured for several days in the wort, as they say, stood, then it was transported to the threshing floors.

Not everyone could lay sheaves on a wagon. You need to know how to “stand on the cart”, because dry sheaves slide, and it’s worth crawling out one or two, as the whole tied cart crawls. First, the body of the wagon is stuffed with sheaves along to the brim, then they are laid in rows across, inside with ears of corn. A row on the left and a row on the right, and in the middle again along a few pieces so that it does not fall through. At the top, the rows narrow slightly, and the topmost, very narrow, was laid in acceleration. After that, the whole cart was pulled together with a clamp - a spruce slug.

It is even more difficult to lay barley or oat sheaves on the cart - short and thick. Oats and barley were also harvested in the North, sheaves were placed in piles, in pairs. Peas, on the other hand, could only be mowed, as they “stretch”, cling to stem by stem. Large titins (or kitins, whales) were taken to the threshing floor and raised with wooden three-horned pitchforks to the hooks, that is, under the roof of the threshing floor. Since the horse at the entrance to the threshing floor turns somewhere to the side to facilitate it, it was necessary to be able to drive in without hitting the gate riser, without breaking the wheel cotters or the cart axle. Everything needed to be done!

The sheaves were evenly folded into the notches of the threshing floor, and they lay there until threshing. If there was no old seed rye for winter sowing, they threshed for seeds immediately and sown with fresh grain. (It was necessary to sow in August, during the three-day flight of winged ants.) Bread in the threshing floor, under the roof - consider that the harvest is harvested, saved. This is a great joy and happiness for the whole family. Grow and clean in the threshing floor, but everyone will be able to thresh ...

Summer and carpentry time: cutting a corner in the rain or in the cold is not all the same. Unfinished log cabins sometimes stood for several years, stood as a reproach or a reminder.

Difficult time in summer, what to say, but there were many holidays. They managed not only to work, but also to brew beer and visit guests. Those who didn't make it were laughed at.

Autumn.

Spring does not pass into summer abruptly, summer appears as if by accident and for a long time does not lose many of the properties of spring. Also early autumn all permeated with summer moods. And yet, at any time, something new from the upcoming season appears daily. Nature seems to affirm the reliable and calm strength of tradition. Rhythm is in repetition, in the annual change of one another, but these repetitions are not monotonous. They are always different, not only in themselves, but also because a person, rising to maturity, is constantly changing. The very novelty here is, as it were, rhythmic.

Rhythm explains harmony, a harmonious world order, and where there is novelty and harmony, beauty is inevitable, which cannot appear on its own, without anything, without tradition and selection ... Thus, thanks to harmony, rhythm and a personal, always peculiar attitude towards it, rural work , as something inseparable from life, acquired its own aesthetics.

A man who is physically weak, but knows how to mow well, who knows the skills accumulated over the centuries, mows more grass in a day than any other stupid big man. But if you add centuries-old skills and even your talent, then the mower is no longer just a mower. He is then a person, a creator, creating beauty.

Working beautifully is not only easier, but also more enjoyable. Talent and hard work are inseparable. The burden of labor is insurmountable for a mediocre worker; it easily gives rise to aversion to work.

That is why slowness, which looks like ordinary laziness, and the success of a talented person sometimes cause envy and misunderstanding of mediocre people who do not spare either time or effort in their work.

True beauty and usefulness are also interconnected: who knows how to mow beautifully, of course, will mow more. Just like the one who knows how to carpentry beautifully will build more and better, and not at all in pursuit of a long ruble ...

Peasant work, like natural phenomena, is far from being sharply divided according to the seasons. Others, for some (most often weather) reasons, not made in the summer, are completed in the fall, and those not made in the fall are completed in the winter.

And yet it is better to thresh immediately after the harvest, so as not to produce extra mice and to leave time, for example, for carpentry. It is better to round the flax at once and spread it out as soon as possible, so that it ages under the autumn dews and in order to remove it from the beds before the first snow.

In autumn, during the short, dry Indian summer, everything must be removed from the field, down to the straw, so that the soul does not hurt when the rains begin. A. when the fields are harvested, it’s not a sin to go for mushrooms. Berries are also not the last thing in peasant life, especially for children and women. (The first strawberries are for children, and the smallest ones. The more berries have grown, the greater the age that regales them.) Blueberries also ripen in the summer, this berry is harvested seriously, it, like all others, is not only healing, but also a delicacy . Raspberries, currants, and the princess were harvested along with the harvest. For lingonberries and cranberries in many places they rode horses.

It is very important for rural life to dig up potatoes on time, in a dry season, and put them in the cellar, pull out and cut onions and garlic. In prolonged rains, they pull turnips and rutabaga, which appeared in our area at the end of the nineteenth century. (She was nicknamed “galanka” for her foreign origin. Rutabaga is pulled out of the ground and cleaned of roots with a knife, put in a pile, then dragged somewhere under the roof and cut off the tops, called “lychey”. Lychey is hung on perches, in autumn and winter it is beautiful dressing for cow swill.

Cabbage turns white in the beds until the frost, but it finally has to be harvested.

Cutting, peeling and salting in shredded form or “dice”, that is, heads of cabbage cut in two, is not difficult and somehow very joyful, the cabbage creaks in the hands, like just bought rubber galoshes. Guys, who is not lazy, gnaw on the pokers.

In autumn, in the early mornings, the sound of threshing flails is heard far around and it smells of the smoke of sheep's greenhouses. Fencing stacks. Now the cattle is grazing in the fields, the shepherd has collected his tribute from the village and is resting. Free until next spring. Many men are plowing. The women pick up the flax and put it upright to dry out, but this is no longer years, but trust. It is knitted with straw bundles into large piles and put under the roof.

As soon as the first frost hits, immediately, in order not to waste hay, they begin to reduce the cattle, slaughter extra sheep, calves and rams. Only what is left for the tribe is allowed into the winter. They cut the heads of young roosters. Headless birds shied away, sprinkling the porch or woodpile with blood, others even take off, and quite high.

Not every person can withstand such a spectacle. Some men call a neighbor to slaughter a ram.

Such weakness is forgivable to a person, as if they do not notice it. After all, the blood of animals is the same color as that of a person ...

Lad(1979-81). This is a unique book, and its genre is not easy to define. Formally, it would be ethnographic essays (even an encyclopedia) about the life of the Russian, mainly northern, that is, the most primordial, peasantry in the span of centuries and how it came to the Soviet era, and in part to the Second World War. But Belov himself warns that he “does not pretend to be academic in any way,” although a very thoughtful, harmonious presentation and a wealth of factual material allows the book to serve as an extensive, and in some places indispensable, reference tool. It is not enough to say that this is a very serious, thoughtful book, but it is all imbued with a poetic (Belov - in his native element!), Love and dying spirit. It also contains quotations, epigraphs from poets, from folklore, statements by Russian thinkers, artists, a fair share and personal experience author, illustrative cases from life - there are different layers in the book, and they are mixed. Many comments from bright soul, - and they are interesting and easy to read.

Vasily Belov. Lad

The book is composed of successive sections: "All year round" (seasonal alternation of peasant work and life). - Apprentices and Masters. - Works and needlework for women. - "Native nest" (housing and what surrounds it). - “Life circle” (from infancy to death, step by step tracing the play of age signs; and from birth to funeral, through all household rituals, games, festivities, holidays, gatherings; but - it is noteworthy for Belov: church rites and church spirit in general , and the church spirit of the common people are not at all covered by this copious book). - Food and clothing. - The art of the folk word (and its types: conversation, legend, bygone story, fairy tale, proverb, song, lamentation, ditty, riddle, nicknames; here and - the natural properties of storytellers, the role of improvisation; and the fate of all these genres in post-revolutionary time). - Finally, wooden architecture and folk sculpture. "Wooden northern temples struck not by their size, but by their proportionality." Ornament of wooden structures, birds and horses in architecture. Shemogod birch carving and Kholmogory bone carving. Carved utensils, carved toys (and laconism of clay toys). - All this is condensed in the name "Lad", the way of life - in contrast to discord her.

Vasily Ivanovich Belov

Role rhythm in life and work. Rhythm in the annual repetition of works. Works drive and overlap each other, it can be crowded with one work from another. “Such a state when a person does not know what to do is completely excluded in peasant life.” Children's play turns into work. Diversity, layering and internal harmony of the peasant economy. This harmony gives beauty to rural labor. Who knows how to mow or carpentry beautifully - mows and carves more and better.

Memory and accuracy signs weather, their semi-annual recalculation. Almost a one-day guess at the time of sowing. “This or that custom is so natural, so ancient, that it looks like a product of nature itself.” Prayer at the beginning of important work, especially sowing. Mutual understanding and cooperation with the horse at every work (and for a woman - with a cow). Yes, sincere relations with all pets - and the responsiveness of those.

Every now and then, the author's broad reflections are wedged in, very appropriate, a lot of them are psychological. The spontaneous feeling of a native nest does not depend on the beauty of the area. With age and up to maturity - expanding circles of this feeling, "its own soul in each volost." (However, his remarks about the similarity of Gogol's Mirgorod plots and characters with northern ones are also indicative.) "Hard-working kind people were honored by the world." Wide mutual assistance, especially to orphans and widows. The role of the elderly in large families (where are both of them now?), Their peace of mind in anticipation of death. "The Russian stove cooled down only with the death of a family or home."

There are also many well-aimed reflections on folk art. The fusion of folk art objects with objects of everyday life and work. Folk aesthetics stems from life psychology. The role of craftsmanship in peasant life. Beauty in work as upholding one's personality. Art can live in any work, even for a lumberjack. “People's craving for creative work. It all starts with an irresistible and inexplicable desire to work. Mastery- the same soil from which artists grow. "The need for talent lingers in each of us, it only grows in different ways." "High delight and inspiration are possible in any work." And while: great masters they did not pursue worldly fame in their work, “they even saw something shameful in it, interfering with their art.”

The entire section on the masters is very informative, detailed and interesting. Belov's special attention and understanding is to carpentry, in which he himself worked hard. “Carpentry is the eternal and inevitable companion of agriculture”, “every carpenter’s ax is a continuation of his hands”; wood feeling. (Here - and all types of wood materials, and: the roofs of the huts were covered without a single nail, so much so that no wind would tear them off.) But with attention and understanding, the author delves into the work of stove-makers, blacksmiths, potters (“the birth of an image from clay and fire"), carpenters, coopers, shvets (tailors), shoemakers, furriers (tanners), saddlers, chariot workers, tinkers, tar, tar, shepherds, even well diggers (as they guess the "water vein", where to dig, and by dew, and over the growing grass, and over the crush of midges), will also remember the locksmith-fellow villager who made an iron prosthesis to the decapitated front-line soldier, and the rollers of felt boots - the author finds for each profession love words and explains the intricacies of craftsmanship. It also keeps track of the irrevocably lost types of art crafts and the death of artistry from the flow of production. And, of course, about the breadwinners-millers, and about those who followed the trading line, and here is an important psychological remark: the merchants themselves believed increase their trade is a sin (as well as in general “in the old days, many people considered God’s punishment not poverty, but wealth”).

Yes, almost all of this has gone irrevocably, will never return, but it is all the more precious because it is so lovingly seized when it dries up. Belov has many apt remarks on creativity of all kinds, and how it is connected with patience, hard work and understanding of tradition. (“Almost all craftsmen became apprentices, but only some of them became masters,” however, there was also: “skill passed down by inheritance or by volost neighborhood.”)

And separately: a whole poem is about women's needlework. “Flax was a woman’s lot, like a forest was a man’s.” The complex ups and downs of growing and repeatedly processing flax, with what accuracy it is necessary to keep up with the changes in the weather. He traces the entire unique technology of processing linen, unique in its qualities and serving for many years (which has not been replenished with any of the latest fabrics). And how this processing drove to tireless work, but also fit into everyday life, into “conversations” with their game elements. Further - types of weaving, types of sewing, knitting, lace, weaving - and a combination of needlework with songs. (And how the colors of labor faded under collective farm conditions.)

With great knowledge of the matter and meaning - a lot of device details - a monument to the outgoing civilization. Remarkable features of peasant gatherings (however, the picturesqueness of other collective farm meetings). Numerous ceremonies (ritual regales and refusals of them, abstinence; guest and otgazhivanie; wedding ceremonies, starting from matchmaking). Rebirth of festivities in Soviet times, decline choral art and dance. "Folk musical aesthetics is inconceivable without merging with the sounds and noises of nature." And "after the war, the artistic organization of people's life has decreased a lot." - A sense of proportion in clothes - between panache and squalor. (“From class arrogance, national traditions in clothing began to be considered a sign of inertia.”) A combination of good quality and convenience, especially in everyday clothes. And thrift for clothes, wearing it in generations. “To throw away was considered a sin, as was buying too much.” "The unstable life of the 1920s and 1930s brought to naught the sharp boundary between the weekend and everyday attire." - Finally - and different, many types of peasant food, now also irretrievably gone (the same baking of rye loaves, which we will never eat again).

Against the backdrop of vast everyday material, Belov sometimes does not pass over considerations about the deep distance of Russian history. Decorates the book and his high sensitivity to Russian word formation. There was also a place in the book to challenge the opinion that the northern Russian nature is “dim, discreet”: not to mention the changes associated with the seasons, “the change of landscape moods sometimes happens literally in a matter of seconds. A forest lake from deep blue can instantly turn into silver-lilac, as soon as a light comic breeze blows from the forest. A rye field and a birch forest, a river bosom and meadow grass change their colors depending on the strength and direction of the wind. And also - the sky, the sun, the moon, heat and cold ... The green of flax changes with its growth, the green of herbs - endlessly, and the meadows after mowing are bright green again, and winter turns green before winter. The water in lakes and rivers is either steel, or blue, or up to inky density ... "

The book "Lad" is a treasure in Russian printing.

An excerpt from an essay on Vasily Belov from the "Literary Collection" written by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Read also Solzhenitsyn's reviews of other books by Vasily Belov: "

Culture and folk life also have a deep continuity. You can step forward only when the foot is repelled from something, movement from nothing or from nothing is impossible. That is why our youth is so interested in what worried grandfathers and great-grandfathers.

In the same way, future generations will not be able to do without the living ones, that is, without you and me. They will also need our moral and cultural experience, just as we need the experience of people who lived before us.

It is no accident that the book is called Lad and tells about the harmony, and not about the discord of peasant life. It was conceived as a collection of sketches about northern life and folk aesthetics. At the same time, I tried to tell only about what I know, experienced or saw myself, or knew and experienced people close to me. A good half of the materials were recorded from the words of my mother, Anfisa Ivanovna Belova. There were too many memories, as well as impressions of today. Willy-nilly, I had to systematize the material, giving the story some kind of, albeit relative, order, which dictated the compositional structure of the book.

In order to save space, I had to reduce or completely remove living factual material, contenting myself with general reflections.

ALL YEAR ROUND

Once upon a time, everything in Rus' began in spring. Even New Years. Christian saints easily got along with the signs of the pagan calendar, almost every day had its own proverb: March 6 - Timothy the Spring.

They said that if Evdokia watered the chicken, then Nikola (May 22) would feed the cow. Signs, born of centuries-old experience of communication with nature, are always definite and devoid of any mysticism. For example, if swallows have arrived, it is necessary to sow peas without delay.

The boundaries between the four seasons in our North are unclear and vague. But nowhere is there such a contrast, such a difference between winter and summer, as we have.

Spring occupied a place in the year between the first drop and the first thunder.

There are no breaks in peasant labor after Maslenitsa. One follows from the other, just have time to turn around. (Perhaps that is why they say: all year round.) And yet, in the spring, people come to their special joys. In a field, in a forest, on a threshing floor, in a house, in a barn - everywhere something new appears every day, inherent only in spring and forgotten in a year. What a pleasure to meet old good friends! Here, bright melt water came up to the very baths - pull out the boat, heat up the odorous thick resin. At the same time, you will tar your boots and replace them with heavy felt boots that have bothered you during the winter. Here the first rook arrived, from day to day, wait for the starlings. You can’t get anywhere, you have to put up birdhouses - a childish joy. And then suddenly a mitten lost in the winter melted in the garden ... And you remember the December winter road, along which you rode with ridges for a new bath.

By the way, it doesn't hurt to think about what happened. It was gone. It is necessary, before the road falls, to take out the last hay from the forest, and needles for bedding for livestock, and firewood for dry wood, and collect traps along the way, skiing along the big and small paths.

And now the horse, snorting, trot away from the village in the morning. On a cart with half a dozen tops, so as not to drag later homely.(A pike spawning is about to appear: it is necessary rush in the exit lake and set traps.) Back - with a cart of hay or pine needles. While the horse is resting and crunching green hay, until the sun melts the blue crust, have time to go into the thicket to look after and mark the trees for cutting for juice. Another type of pine resin - my grandmother asked for the preparation of medicine. The hostess made a hint: to break pine paws on a broomstick. It's also necessary. How long? It’s a matter of a minute, but it’s nice to remember, and it’s also required to cut down a hut along the way: black grouse are just running ... Also chop birch branches for humic panicles. And only then, when the horse heads for the house and the tugs creak, can you take a nap on the cart or sing a song about some Vanka the key keeper ...

Date: 08/11/2014 at 21:56

A detailed, understandable description of Russian peasant life interspersed with ethnographic information and lively personal sketches (primarily northern, of course). What does winter mean for a peasant, and what is summer, what is a threshing floor, and what is help. How they fell in love, got married, how the child grew, how they grew old, what they ate, what they drank tea with. As a native of the Vologda region, Belov cannot but pay special attention to the main product of these places - flax, to which an entire chapter was devoted.

Belov presents the world as a hierarchical system of identities, among which there is a place for the unique identity of a Russian, namely a Russian person.

The earth was not so vast before. Viking ships sailed across the Atlantic. Herodotus knew how our distant ancestors whipped with bath brooms. Thor Heyerdahl proved to everyone that the possibility of crossing the Pacific Ocean existed long before Magellan. Afanasy Nikitin traveled to India from Tver on a horse, and, moreover, without any visas. Russian Pomors knew about the great Northern Sea Route many centuries before Krasin and Chelyuskin. And why did the ancient bazaars of Samarkand and Bukhara sound great and get along well in all the main languages ​​of the world? Sounded and did not mix? People of different nationalities did not always sort out their relationship in the ringing of daggers and sabers.
Evidence for this is innumerable. And if someone seriously dug up only one history of trade and navigation, then even then the general view of the past could become much brighter. But intertribal communication was carried out not only through trade. In the nature of most peoples there is also curiosity, an aesthetic interest in other people who are different from you. In order to remain oneself, it is not at all necessary to destroy the neighbor's house, which is completely different from yours, with fire and sword. Vice versa. How will you recognize yourself, how will you stand out among others, if all houses are the same, if food and clothes are the same taste? The ancient Novgorodians, moving east and north, were not inherently conquerors. Stefan of Perm, the creator of the Zyryan alphabet, set a high example of disinterestedness in relations with foreigners. Russian and Zyryansk settlements still stand side by side, military skirmishes between Novgorodians and Finno-Ugric tribes were very rare. In any case, much less often than with blood brothers: Muscovites and Suzdal ...
Hospitality, the remnants of which have been preserved in many places of the vast North, in ancient times reached, apparently, a cult level. The consanguinity of people of different nationalities was not considered a sin by Russians - neither pagan nor Christian, although it was not encouraged, so to speak, by public opinion. The same public opinion allowed for a slight mockery, a mockery of the people of another nation, but did not allow them to grow to antagonism. For what? If you don’t have enough land, take an ax and go in any direction, writhe, burn the cuts.
The invader of someone else's property, the bloody villain, the deceiver did neither honor nor benefit to his tribe. Respect for other people's rights and national customs came primarily from a sense of self-preservation.
But this does not mean at all that the Russian people easily parted with their lands and customs. Even three centuries of nomad domination did not teach him, for example, to eat horse meat or steal other people's wives.
The world for a Russian person is not good because it is great, but because it is different, there is something to marvel at.

EDGE
Nature burns an indelible brand in the soul, leaves its mark on the external and internal appearance of people. Even speech culture, although to a lesser extent, is also subject to such influence. For example, for a Russian living in the southern part of the country, many words related to forest and snow are unknown.
The psychological identity of an ethnic group largely depended on natural environment, from the landscape, features of the season, etc. A southern person cannot live without the expanses of the steppe; to a northerner, the treeless expanse seems bare and uncomfortable. And the white nights on Solovki confuse a resident of even central Russia. Perhaps this is also why the images of a foreign and native side are so strong in Russian folklore. Interestingly, in the popular understanding, the foreign side (and in the opposite direction, the native side) was always objective and multi-layered, or something. When a girl got married, she even neighboring village seemed like a stranger at first. The alien side became even more “alien” when they went to barge haulers. The soldier's "foreign side" was very harsh and distant.
Going to the other side, you need to fasten your heart, otherwise you can fall into the abyss. “Away like people, but at home as you like,” the proverb says. In its own land, the foreign side is not yet so terrible. Getting to another land, where “birds sing not in our way, flowers bloom in a different way”, a person calls the previous, small alien side no longer alien, but native. Resentment or ridicule received on a foreign side was not always forgotten immediately upon arrival home. The good-natured malice of popular rumor often manifested itself in such nicknames as “Permyak - salty ears”, “Yaroslavl water drink”, “Vologda calves”, “white-eyed miracle”.
And yet, the mockery reached only certain limits, usually the alien artel, as well as an individual alien, was treated with respect.

VOLOST
A volost in the common sense was called several villages united by a land society, a church parish, or geographical features. It could be both, and another, and the third together. In other volosts there was more than one parish and more than one community.
Most often, the volost was located along the river or near the lake. The villages stood one from the other at a small but sufficient distance for field work. People tried to settle on elevated places overlooking the water. There were really beautiful volosts and volosts that were so-so, or even completely shabby. So, in the Kadnikovsky district of the Vologda province, Kumozero was one of the most beautiful places. These are hills bordering a long picturesque lake, on the hills of a village, gravitating towards the main village with a temple, which is still visible for many kilometers around. No wonder the parish was a fairground.
It is difficult to imagine any other community more characteristic of peasant life. The volost always had its own name, was distinguished by its special vitality and rarely succumbed to administrative gutting. She, on the other hand, flaunted her special accent, had, as it were, her own soul and her own good genius. Family ties, like the nerves of a living body, pierced her through and through, although it was considered more noble to marry not in one's own parish.
All adult residents knew each other by sight and by hearsay. And if they didn't know, they wanted to find out. “Whose boyfriend are you?” - asked the rider of the boy opening the tap. Or: “I, mother, have been from Verkhoturye, Ivan Glinyany’s niece, but I went out (again the exact address follows) for Antipya (a detailed account continues about who, where and whose relative this Antip is)”. Or: “The girls are painfully kind, where did they come from?”
This or something like this started all the conversations.
The life of the parish did not tolerate obscure words, nameless people, secret deeds and locked gates during daylight hours.

For a huge number of Russians who lived in that era, Belov's Lad was a powerful introduction to Russian ethnic identity. All the separate and disparate rural impressions drawn from my own barefoot childhood, from vacation trips to the village to my grandmother, suddenly acquired integrity and clarity of the vast life circle of traditional Russian culture. Personal I connected with Motherland through native. And the path, and the forest, in the field, each spikelet was put by Belov in its place in the general system of Russian life, subordinated to a good harmony.

Rus' was presented as a country where everything goes on as usual in the whirlwind of work, life and partying, where an almost perfect harmony of man and nature, man and being has been achieved. Many things can be objected to this picture, ruthlessly trampling on the very genre of peasant-ethnographic utopia. But Belov knew all the objections much better than the objectors. It is he who owns "The Habitual Business" - a real image of the hell of the post-war Stalinist village. The task of "Lada" was just to describe the ideal that is formed after the exclusion of the invasions of evil. A world not corrupted by sin (and urbanization, in particular Soviet-style urbanization, for Belov is precisely the fall). And outside of this fall, in Paradise, Russian life is harmonious, beautiful and practical.

WELL DIGGERS. The rumor has passed: men are coming from somewhere, digging wells: they are about to appear. "Yes where? The women were the first to be alarmed. "Which village?"
No one knows.
But there is no smoke without fire, the rumor has passed, so they will come. There was talk in the houses that a new common well should be dug.
“We must, but where are they?”
"They're coming."
They're coming. Time goes by too.
"Did not come?" - they ask a month later from those passing from neighboring villages.
“Not yet,” the neighbors replied. “Nearby.”
So close so close. Time endures. Another month has passed.
"Didn't show up?"
"Must from hour to hour."
... They waited for the spring, and the haymaking passed. “Okay, we’re sitting with this,” says the end that is closer to the river. "No, we're not sitting!" others protest.
Finally, early in the morning, after the cover, three diggers showed up. Their belongings are small: two shovels, three axes, a saw, and a thick rope-hutch to go down to many fathoms.
Due to the long wait, the residents did not dress up for a long time. We talked right away. The masters took the deposit. One, apparently the eldest, walked down the street for an hour and a half, looking for a vein. He stopped near the stone and firmly said: "Here." On the same day they began to dig, lowering for a start a small, five rows, well log house.
The thing went. Two at the top are building up a log house, one below, digging in, lowers it. They put up a gate to pull out a bucket of earth on a rope. When the depth passed to the third sazhen, the old men began to ask:
— What, how far is the water?
- There will be water. Soon.
- What?
- Exactly. It's already wet.
On the second day, even the voice from the well was barely audible. Ask:
- Well, how? Is there water?
- Side by side...
We've been digging all day. In the morning, before the sun, someone came to visit. There were no men on the ground or under it. Gone, even single-row mittens remained. They lay forlornly on a public tub turned upside down.
Someone kicked the bucket, she blurted out and rolled to the side ...
It turned out that the specialists were walking along the ditches, and not at all along the wells.
After such diggers, society is already very distrustful of real artisans, who, without thinking twice, move on to the next village. We have to run after them to the outskirts, to persuade ...
And here is a gray-haired old man, the unspoken leader of the diggers' artel, bangs his fingernail on the snuffbox, coughs, glances. In the morning, until the sun shines, he walks through the back streets, looking where the dew has fallen, where and how the midge is pushing, where what kind of grass has grown. He pretends, coughs. Not in a hurry. It is about such old people that they say that they see three fathoms into the ground. The wells dug under their guidance serve people not for decades, but for centuries.

In the conditions of total national alienation of the state in the post-Stalin USSR, ethnic solidarity, a sense of their ethnic community and their special ethnic style was the only way for Russians to get together and somehow defend their interests, to resist the disappearance of the people in the vapour of great construction projects. In the USSR, there was a ban on any political activity, especially strict for Russian nationalists, whom, unlike dissidents, the West would not even think of helping.

The only Russian nationalist who could conduct a full-fledged public political activity was Solzhenitsyn, however, the awareness of the national content of his speeches was too buried under the dissident (read - Russophobic) component, was too directly associated with an external attack on the state as such, and besides, it tasted despised by the people of Vlasovism. Therefore, Solzhenitsyn's nationalism could become truly significant only in the 1990s. For the 1970s and 1980s, the event was precisely the introduction to Russianness through aesthetic experience, the awareness of Russianness as a style, which was the only and most natural form of national unity. That is exactly what Belov did.

The effectiveness of the actions of the national aesthetic movement of the 60-80s was quite high. The genocide of the Russian population was stopped in the form of the liquidation of unpromising villages. In 1974, the government adopted a program for the development of the Non-Chernozem region, which involved extensive investments (for the first time during the years of Soviet power) in central, root Russia, in the targeted improvement of the situation of Russians. The level of implementation of this program was quite Soviet, but the rate of collapse of the Russian village decreased and, perhaps, only this helped the Russian ethnos not to cease to exist in the years of the catastrophe of the 90s.

When today they sometimes oppose with arrogance the enlightened bookish civic and ethnic nationalism of the late Soviet times, the nationalism of the kosovorotka and the “fofudya”, they don’t think about the fact that ethnic self-consciousness became in the 90-00s the only force that somehow held Russian society , the only leverage for its revitalization and crystallization. In the absence of a developed political nationalism, which had to be created practically from scratch, aesthetic nationalism, a sense of identity at the level of the "life world" were the foundation on which Russian development was possible. People who in the 70s fell in love with birch and linen towels, in the 90s were able to morally resist the drug frenzy of Westernism and Russophobia, and in the 210s they straightened their backs, took up arms and joined the fight for Novorossia.

Quote:

TASTOLSHINA

Features of the northern Russian cuisine are explained not only by climatic conditions, not only by the external environment, but also by the moral and everyday way of life.

Therefore, the concept of "national cuisine" undoubtedly has an aesthetic side.

Russian peasants, depending on the posts, divided food into lean and non-lean (meat). The alternation, verified by long folk experience, was by no means limited to this. The change of seasons, purely local traditions, and personal preferences made the table diversify. The big housewife never baked, for example, sicheniki for two days in a row. If today they cooked peas in the house, then the next day they tried to cook mushrooms or something else. The festive-calendar cycle also influenced the nature of food, because on holidays wort was boiled (mainly for beer), and the waste from cooking (rye grains) was used to make kvass. The peasant table entirely "grew" on the mowing and plowed field strip. What grew on the field strip?

RYE

Grain, or cereal, since ancient times, belonging and a sign of a settled way of life, ennobled the restless spirit of a nomad. It, this tiny seed, concealing in its small womb a powerful and incomprehensible force of germination, inspired poets and set the tone for the most powerful philosophies. Indeed, isn't it amazing? You have to die, literally be buried in the ground, so that your life continues even more widely and luxuriously.

The ability of one rye grain to produce several stems (tillering), resistance to moisture and cold made rye a favorite and essential cereal in the Russian North-West.

Rye is, first of all, bread, and the following proverb has been composed about bread, among thousands of others: "Eat pies, take care of bread." Every work connected with grain, from sowing to grinding, had an almost ritual character. Human nobility and blasphemy were most clearly revealed around bread. Without bread, the entire work and everyday peasant aesthetics immediately fade.

In late autumn, after threshing, the grain was carefully distributed: this for seeds, this, worse, for livestock feed, and this for flour. The portion intended for flour was immediately dried on barns or in ovens and taken to the mill.

How nice to go to the mill!

Old people, teenagers and children willingly agreed to such a trip. An overnight stay at the water mill was remembered for a lifetime. The mill was in peasant life a kind of place of communication, the focus of news, disputes, fairy tales, bukhtins, it seemed to complete the long and sometimes very risky path of a grain of bread. The ground flour, pouring from the tray, was warm, almost hot: you can touch the fruits of your labor with your hand, with your own skin. Even the peasant horse, returning home with a wagon increased in volume after the mill, snorted merrily, becoming infected with the good mood of the owner. Flour was poured into a wooden chest or left, as they say today, in a dry and dark place. From now on, she was commanded by a big woman. The chest had a compartment for rye, wheat, barley and oat flour. The chest was in the basement, and he always had a wooden flour scoop with him. Intending to bake bread, the first thing the big woman thought about was the leaven that remained from the previous dough and “lived” in the kneader all this time, covered with an old canvas tablecloth. No one has yet been able to bake real rye bread without sourdough! Flour was brought to the hut in a wicker birch bark basket.

In the evening, the hostess made the dough on slightly heated river water. The homely rhythmic tapping of the whorl on the edges of the kneader, like the purring of a cat, or the noise of a samovar, or the creaking of a cradle, complemented the feeling of family comfort and solidity. (There were times when sourdough and a whorl for a year or more were not required at all. Also in our time, in many homes, the creak of a cradle is heard once in a lifetime or is not heard at all.)

Kvashnya was tied with a tablecloth and placed in a warm place. Sometimes on a hearth, sometimes right on the stove. At night, the big woman woke up carefully, looked to see if she was “walking”, and kneaded it in the morning. While the oven was heating, the dough continued to rise, and the hostess began to roll it over the seeder. She took the dough with a wooden bread spatula, placed it in a floured round wooden bowl (also called a bread bowl), and tossed the dough in the air. It turned from side to side on the fly. Round cakes covered with flour tumbled on a clean linen fly. The stove, swept clean with pine broom, should be well heated, but not too hot. The loaves were tipped over from the fly onto a wide wooden shovel and hastily, one after the other, were thrust into the heat. Six or eight loaves sat on the floor of a closed oven for as long as required. In the hut and on the street, an amazing, unlike anything, smell of baked dough appeared.

Somehow the guy Kolyak came to this smell, deciding to play a trick on the baker (the story is true):

Theta, what are you doing? Are you baking?

We also bake.

Word for word, the guy talked to the woman. When the conversation seemed about to dry up, he threw up a new topic:

And today the cow at the Bozhatka began to calve, but she changed her mind.

Do not lie! It's not a man, it's a cow.

The woman, standing in the middle of the hut, began to talk about her cow, then they switched to something else, then to a third. My aunt loved to talk. She stopped only when blue smoke went from the hut. She threw up her hands.

Goblin, Goblin, Kolya, I have seven Korowai in the oven! Rushed to get it. The loaves were black as cast iron. Kolyaki and the trace caught a cold ...

Overbaked is no better than underbaked, but underbaked loaves were at least good for cattle.

A loaf of bread always lay on the table, along with a bread knife and a salt shaker. Children could take a cut of bread at any time for them, adults observed the howl. The owner always cut the bread at the table. The beggars were cut off a cut of the usual size, and when the table was empty, they said: "God will give." Oddly enough, bread was sometimes baked from a weed companion of rye - a fire, it saved people from hunger. At the time of national disasters, the symbol of which was always rye crackers, everything was added to the sourdough: dried potatoes, bone meal, sawdust, crushed straw, etc. and so on.

Failure, that is, unfermented or sour bread, fell on the big woman with shame, and in such cases she always lamented. The loaf of unfermented bread sagged, the bottom crust was heavy and dense. The sour bread caused heartburn.

Nothing was tastier than salted rye bread (the dough was usually not salted) with clean water, if a person had worked out enough. They washed it down with milk and yogurt. From crushed rye breadcrumbs Lenten time made a biscuit. Tyurya, or mura, made from pure rye bread was also respected, unless, of course, there was nothing else to sip. The recipe for making tyuri is the simplest: pour boiling water into a cup, crumble bread into it, then onion, adding linseed oil and salt to taste.

Kvass was also made from bread crusts or crackers, but it was not main way its manufacture.

“Mother rye feeds everyone completely.” Not only fed, but also watered, we have the right to add. Beer in the North until the war itself was the main holiday drink among the peasants. They cooked it from rye.

Anfisa Ivanovna tells about it this way:

“On the nineteenth of December, and according to the old style, the sixth, was the feast of St. Nicholas, in our parish the patronal. We also arranged the wedding for Nikola, so that for one expense. This is 1926, they didn’t get married anymore, but if there was a church, they still wouldn’t get married during Lent. Everyone was waiting for the holiday, from young to old. Even beggars. Many people come that day, the housewives baked pies especially for the poor. The wort was also left, although not a first, but a friend for regaling random outsiders.

Rye for beer was taken good, very germinating, they made a pool for three or four houses, on average, one and a half pounds per ten-pound tchan. Hanging down. Whoever has worse rye will be thrown into rubbish. On the eve of the day, the women will be ordered to apply large kadets of resh water, so that they will fog up, warm up a little, and soak, pour grain into it. It's winter. And in the summer, right into the bags and into the river, they will bend a little with stones so that it does not float up. Rye gets wet in the river longer than in kadtsy, about three days, at home in the heat, the grain swells faster. In the river the sacks are turned, in the tub the rye is stirred with a oar. They take out the swollen rye and scatter it in a thin layer on the white floor. The grain germinates for four or five days, sometimes for a week, it is watered, but not ted. When the sprouts become large and grow together into an insole, they spread it, rub it, soak it with spray from a fresh broom and put it back in bags. Immediately on the floor they will thoroughly cover and malt for four to five days. When there is a smell of malt, these bags are pulled out and dried on the barn. Do not dry a lot of malt in the oven, it can turn sour. And to distribute it to homes, it will come out differently, who is not dry enough, who is too dry. Malt will be dried on the barn in half a day, good firewood is stored for this. Masters of drying stir the malt every now and then, but they do not dry it to the end, they say: it will come later on its own. They will push the malt from the barn, blow it through, and then you have to grind it on small millstones ... ”

It took twelve to thirteen days to prepare the malt, the brewing of the wort took one and a half days, the beer “went” in the cold for up to two days. Consequently, the entire process of making beer lasted at least two weeks, and in winter sixteen or seventeen days.

Already at the beginning of filippovka, the peasants of the Sokhotsky volost began to go to each other, figure out how many guests will be with whom and how much to wet the rye. In each village there were one or two meticulous varts. The rest also knew how to brew, but not everyone dared: the responsibility for artel malt is too great! There were times when all the cooking, ten pounds of selected grain, flew into the chimney, or rather, went to the throw, to feed the cattle, and half the village was left without beer and wort for the holiday.

Once two men in Timonikh decided to cook separately. They ruined everything. The local poet Sudenkov did not take long to come up with a long song about them.

Therefore, the brewing of beer was unanimously entrusted to the most experienced.

Anyone whose life has even slightly touched the pre-war northern village will probably forever remember the feeling of a cold night, the crackling of frozen logs, the smell of fire, placers of red sparks and a blue starry sky. The kitchen in the night alley does not let you sleep, many even get up in the middle of the night, hastily dress and run to look. In the morning, when it gets darker, giant shadows flicker on the snow and on the walls of the houses, the red fire, laid out almost at the very house, has already melted in the snow. Large barn chocks are burning in a round snow pit, goats are standing over the pit, a multi-bucket cast-iron cauldron hangs on the goats. This cauldron soars with all its might, under it, on fire, blush, boulders and stones are gaining heat. No one is allowed into the darkness of the open courtyard gates, but you can slip in unnoticed and see a huge shang. (Some said tshan, but never chan.) This shan stands on two thick logs, with a large deck slipped under it. Shan is covered with clean bedding and sheepskin coats. The dim light of home-made lanterns illuminates the preoccupied, solemnly important old people.

The kid shoots out into the street with bullets.

Meanwhile, silently, with some strange gravity, they are preparing clean, pre-scalded dishes: tubs, buckets. Wooden tongs are scalded with boiling water to get hot stones, large and small ladles, a teremok and a purse.

In the middle of the bottom there is a small square hole, tightly plugged with a long rod. Tshan was first heated with boiling water and the cooled water was drained. Then they poured all the coarsely ground, as if crushed malt, rubbed it, gradually poured clean hot water.

The actual cooking began - the most important and crucial moment. Vartsov was in the shameful danger of a leak. If the malt was too dry, the wort might not settle, and then everything went to waste.

The first supply of water, the second.

Hot stones hissed into the tchan. Sometimes they were put into a purse with handles, woven from twisted birch rods. This purse, loaded with hot stones, was lowered into the tchan, and hung there on a crossbar, heating the contents. In the meantime, a lattice tower was being prepared, made of thin spruce planks according to the height of the tshang. Straw, cut along its length, filled the gaps between the planks, sewed it together with threads, the lower ends were fanned outward. This kind of filter was carefully put on the pin. When the wort was cooked and finally settled, the chief cook solemnly announced: “We will lower it.” Having crossed themselves, they threw back the insulation and began to carefully loosen the pin. And now the first stream of hot fragrant wort hits the deck. First, they try it from a ladle, and everything in a row, starting with the old people. Then it is hastily poured with ladles into wooden nozzles and cooled.

Having lowered the first wort, they began to brew drugacha. The next morning, the first thing they treated to the wort was women, old people and children.

It was the most delicious, healthy, most honorable non-alcoholic drink. Anfisa Ivanovna says that, having divided the wort: “Who has a bucket, who has two,” hops are poured into the remainder of the wort, at the rate of two pounds per powder of rye. Boil the wort with hops. Then they cool, pour into tubs and prepare chalk (replacing yeast) from the same hops and wort. Then they pour all the contents into the walker and wait for it to ferment in the cold.

Further, Anfisa Ivanovna continues: “Of course, it is desirable that it is completely cold to wander, and if it doesn’t “walk” in any way, then they lower the stone for a while to warm it up a little. They don’t let it reach the end, they begin to fold and pour into nozzles. The pomace hops were also divided, dried in the summer and frozen in the winter. The women used them to make chalk for pies. And when they amuse with a walker, they dance around it so that it walks better. It used to happen that Nikanor Ermolaevich brewed liquid beer, it cut with hops, the peasants deliberately sat at a party and did not drink. It hurts, they say, liquid. He will dislike: “But I have it boiled! And you have cooked for Nikola, it smells of malt.” Good beer holds a handkerchief, and it looks beautiful, and it is tasty to drink, and fizzy, and thick. And about a good wort they say: "Just bite."

On one and a half pounds of rye, five or six buckets of wort fell together with a friend. Approximately two thirds were used for beer, one third for festive drinking for teenagers, children and the elderly. (Women and adult bachelors were allowed to drink beer on holidays.)

Close relatives and welcome guests were greeted with a bowl of wort. Beggars and random strangers were brought to the door in glasses and mugs on a holiday.

Kvass, brewed on boiled river water from grain, that is, from boiled malt, was considered an everyday drink.

Thus, bread and malt - these two main “taxes”, without which peasant life is unthinkable, have been performed by mother rye for centuries. They baked kalachi from rye flour when there was no bread, but they wanted to eat. The flour was kneaded very thickly in water, kneaded a large fold, bent rolls from it, rolled koloboks and put it into the oven. From the same dough, the hostess oozed succulents with a rolling pin. If you hang this juicy on the stalk of the fork and stick it into a flaming furnace, it will almost immediately swell from both sides. It turned out like a fried tasty bubble. In the morning on hastily often boiled porridge-zavara, using the ability of rye flour to malt, boil, acquire sticky properties. This thick porridge was eaten with milk, curdled milk, with denim [Melt sour cream - Ed.].

On wide thin rye saplings, which were made in fifteen or twenty pieces, potato flyers were prepared. Crushed potatoes diluted in milk were evenly spread over the juiciness, bent and pinched at the edges, then poured with sour cream, sprinkled with zaspa and put into a hot oven. The hostess tried to bake them for all tastes. One in the family liked thin and soft, the other dry, the third preferred thicker, etc. The same roguls were often baked from cottage cheese (for some reason it was called thick), from boiled cereals resembling salamat, from pea and barley mash.

It was open way, and the stuffing was often bent in the juice, and it was steamed in it, releasing the juice. In this way they baked, for example, sicheniki. Finely chopped turnips, at worst turnips, the hostess will seal in juices, bake and close tightly for an hour so that the sicheniki evaporate. Anointed with oil for beauty, they are very tasty. They baked chopped potatoes and boiled peas in the same way. For a diligent cook, such products were in shape an exact copy of a crescent moon, for Nerages they looked like a fish. If they were not yet held in their hands, fell apart, the big woman lost a lot in the eyes of the household. But she was especially worried when the pies turned out to be unsuccessful.

LIFE

Kutya was cooked from barley. To do this, soak and shovel the grain in a wet mortar. Peeled barley boiled mixed with peas was called kutya - it was the oldest Slavic food used during pagan rituals.

From barley, as they said yash (barley), flour was baked by yashniks - pies in the form of cakes, surprisingly peculiar in taste and smell. In autumn, the dough was usually tipped over onto large cabbage leaves, and a leaf pattern was imprinted on the bottom of the baked pie with each of its veins.

If pies were baked from a mixture of barley flour with another (wheat, oatmeal or pea), they were called dvuzhitnik. Sometimes, right after the mill, even three types of flour were mixed, it turned out to be three-milled, and pies from it - three-milled.

On big holidays, and therefore relatively rarely, pure wheat was baked, which was both brewed and kneaded with homogeneous wheat flour. Household families did not use bread sourdough for pies, for this there was a large clay jug or trough. Pies were baked in the same way as bread, only the dough was added and used not with leaven, but with chalk.

Difficult task to bake good pies! Especially on holidays. In a few days, the mistress-big woman's soul began to hurt. But how much contentment and joy there was when, having “rested” on the bench under a canvas cape, part of the pies migrated to the table and the whole family sat down at the samovar.

Of course, the rybnik was considered the most famous and beloved, when fresh bream, pike perch, pike, etc. were bent into the dough. (Rock horn and perch also gave fragrant juice in the dough, the rim soaked with it is no less tasty.) The pie was stuffed with lamb, and salted lard, and chopped eggs. However, if we talk about the filling, then fresh mushrooms among others are the most original. You can’t confuse a sponge, or ryzhechnik, with any other pie, but on a holiday it was not popular, it was believed that it was a vulgar filling. Often, crushed fresh blueberries were baked in dough, resulting in a berry. If there was nothing at hand, the big woman baked onions, and sometimes a simple salt cake will be bent [Fake cake, salty bend "without nothing" - Ed.]. Powdered pies were called pies, poured with sour cream, sprinkled with cereals and, after the oven, richly anointed with butter. Pies, poured with potatoes diluted in milk and sour cream, were called nalitushki. They also baked salad bowls [With a filling of well-oiled oatmeal - Ed.], and the dough baked without any filling was called a crumb.

Pies baked before someone left home were called plantains, and they still have a sad reputation. How many soldiers, students and other plantains were baked in Rus', no one has yet counted, and probably no one can count. Wheat rolls were also baked for the journey, and pretzels were prepared for the children, that is, the same rolls, only small ones. On the day of the vernal equinox, they planted in the oven, sometimes several dozen, "larks" - miniature tyuteks made of wheat dough.

Pea flour baked from pea flour was considered the most unpopular pie, but many people loved kissel from the same flour, they ate it in fast days hot and cold. When cold, the frozen pea jelly was cut with a knife and poured abundantly with linseed oil. During Lent, bolshukhas often boiled round, unground peas - thick, seasoned with onions.

And yet the most common cereal after rye was not barley or wheat and peas, but oats. Oatmeal dishes were generally considered healing. For women in labor, for example, they cooked a special oatmeal decoction. They made flour, oatmeal and sleep from oats, they did not grind it, but pounded it in mill mortars. For this, they even built separate, without millstones, water or windmills, called crowds. In order to prepare zaspa, the grain was steamed in large cast irons, then dried on the stove hearth and covered, peeled from it. The winnowed oat kernel was roughly ground on hand millstones. It turned out zaspa, cereals, from which they cooked oatmeal, salamat and oatmeal, the so-called lean cabbage soup, where crushed crackers were often poured.

The oats, crushed with pestles, turned into flour in the crush, and it had to be sifted twice. The sowings were used for cooking oatmeal jelly, while the flour was usually used for pancakes.

Oatmeal jelly is a favorite Russian food. It is about him that a proverb is composed: “There will always be enough space for the Tsar and kissel.” On ordinary days, it was boiled in cast iron. Bolshukha fermented oatmeal, used the sula in advance, in the morning they filtered it and began to boil it by the fire. On holidays in some places, for example, in Tigina of the present Vozhegodsky district of the Vologda region, jelly was cooked in special tubs, lowering red-hot stones into it. Kisel turned out so much that there was an anecdotal rumor about the inhabitants of Tigina.

Hot jelly thickened before our eyes, it must be eaten - do not yawn. They sipped it with rye bread, seasoned with sour cream or vegetable oil. The cooled jelly froze, and it could be cut with a knife. From a sprawling lid, it was tumbled into a large dish and poured with milk or wort. Such food was served at the end of the meal, as they said, “over the top”. Even the most well-fed were obliged to at least take a sip ...

Pancakes made from oatmeal were prepared in the interwar, in the morning, in great abundance, especially on Shrove Tuesday. They were also brewed in the evening, baked with a good grease, in large frying pans and on a good fire. The oatmeal pancake was large and thin, like paper. He even shone through. It was rolled up with a tourniquet, folded into two-four-eight layers. They ate piping hot, with melted butter, with sour cream, with salted mushrooms, with crushed blueberries or lingonberries. The remaining pancakes were poured with oil, sprinkled with zaspo and put in a blasted oven. A foot half an inch high (about two centimeters) could hold about thirty or even more pancakes, depending on the skill of the big woman, which, flushed, rushes like a bird from the fire to the table.

FAST

The chain connection of all phenomena of labor and everyday life is clearly demonstrated by at least such a primitive example.

If there are meat cabbage soup on the table, and not mushroom cabbage soup, then strength appears in the arms and legs, and if there is strength, you will plow more and mow more. In this case, there will be not only bread for oneself, but also straw, and steam, and chaff for cattle, and there will be cattle, and again there will be cabbage soup.

The circle is closed...

But he shut himself up for more high level: at the table, for example, there will be not only cabbage soup, but also oatmeal, and this, in turn, gives new strength, from which a person works more beautifully, faster and better, and from this he also has free time from field work. Where does he go in the fall in such free time? Of course, in the forest, for mushrooms and berries. So, roughly speaking, good cabbage soup entails another, also good, but not the main food.

Prosperity in meat and dairy food depended entirely on success in the arable field and in the hay meadow. It was beneficial for lazy owners to be superstitious, they say, cattle are out of place. But that’s why she didn’t come to the court because the hay was dusty, and the owner was too lazy to shake that the extra oats, without hesitation, would be taken to the fair, while on good yard the horses will leave the oats. One way or another, the cattle in some houses did not really take root, the offspring were weak and few in number, one failure was necessarily followed by another.

Probably, to work with cattle, a special talent is needed, associated with a love for everything lowing, neighing, bleating, grunting and clucking. Anyone who, during his morning sleep, frowns at the lowing of a cow or pulls a blanket over his head because of a rooster's singing, will not pass for a good peasant. The bestial connoisseur will not help him either.

During the summer and autumn, the cattle went for a walk, and with the first frosts the shepherd stopped grazing. In each house, at the family council, it was decided who and how much to let into the winter. To save hay, with the first strong frost in the village, cattle were reduced.

There is little beauty in this spectacle ... Many women could not be present at the slaughter. Some men drove the children away, others, on the contrary, taught the children from childhood to the sight of blood.

Meat carcasses were hung on poles (higher from cats) and frozen. In winter, meat was cut off periodically and cabbage soup was cooked daily in between fasts. If there was a strong thaw, the meat had to be salted in tubs. Corned beef, even in haymaking, was not in a special way. Lamb in the northern peasant life was preferred to beef. Almost everything went into action. The skin was kept, salted, or sheepskin was immediately dressed from it, the skin from the calf was used for boots. The female hostess washed the intestines of a slaughtered animal in the river up to five times, from which excellent food was prepared, not to mention the liver, etc.

The legs and head of the animal were burned on coals and kept until the holidays for cooking jellied meat, or jelly. Kholodets was a traditional snack on holidays, and at the usual dinner table it was sipped in kvass. Extensive cast iron, in which jelly was boiled, was exposed from the furnace in the evening, on the eve of the holiday. It was always a pleasant moment, especially for children. While the mother (or grandmother) poured the liquid broth into the dishes and carved the contents, one could feast on cartilage and bone marrow. With special enthusiasm, the children received bones - objects for their games, the girls were given ankles, the guys - grandmas. Immediately there was not enough for everyone, so a queue was established, for Nikola by one, for the day of the Assumption - by another. The hostess from the mutton entrails always melted lard, it was stored in circles in chests. Potatoes boiled and fried with such bacon were served on the table either in the morning or at lunch, after cabbage soup, and oatmeal was necessarily added to it.

The crispy remains of lamb peritoneum melted in lard were called rinds, cracklings. They were also reputed to be a delicacy, but after them it was dangerous to drink cold water.

Meat was eaten only in jelly, in cabbage soup, finely chopped and baked in a pie. In many houses, if there was not enough corned beef before haymaking, they slaughtered a ram or yarushka in the summer, at the very height of the field harvest. Having cooked fresh cabbage soup twice, the remaining lamb was dried in a hot oven and stored in rye flour. Shchi from such lamb acquired a completely different taste.

For those who were engaged in hunting, hare, black grouse and hazel grouse were transferred only during the spring and early summer seasons. At this time, the hunters tried to restrain their ardor.

Even more extensive and complex are the traditions of women's everyday life associated with dairy food. In terms of its significance, the growth of a cow was equivalent to such events as a patronal feast, relocation to a new hut, and the arrival of barge haulers. Bolshakha knew the time of growing up to an accuracy of three or four days, at this time she went to the barn every now and then. They visited the cow at night, and if this event was about to happen, then the whole house did not sleep. For the first few days, only the calf was milked. But now the pail is boiled, washed, dried, a sprig of juniper is inserted in the stigma. Two dozen clay krynochek were stored and roasted in the oven (for some reason they were called kashniks). The cat, with a loud meow, is the first to meet the hostess at the doorstep, carrying a white-foamy liquid into the hut, this childish grace, the personification of health and family harmony.

With what thrift they treated milk, says the fact that only babies drank it. The rest ate with spoons. In autumn, as the proverb says, “they slurp milk with an awl”. Milk was poured into a large common cup, rye bread was crumbled into it, and the children slurped it between the udders, in other words, additionally. Yogurt was also eaten with crumbled bread, but not only by children, but by everyone else. Such food could be the third dinner course. Yogurt, mixed with a top, was served less often, since they tried to save up sour cream. In the evenings, women churned sour cream in whorls in special pots called rylniks. After a long and very tiring chatter, the first clots of the mixture, raw oil, appeared. Gradually they merged into one common lump. Water was added to the rylnik, the liquid was drained, and the mixture was melted in a non-hot oven. Then poured and cooled. It turned out amber-colored Russian ghee. The remains after such a melting were called denye, they were seasoned with potatoes, eaten with pancakes, etc.

With Kolyaka, who "burned" the neighbor's bread, such a story happened once. When there was no one in the hut, it fell into his mind to feast on a sour cream top. Climbed and brought down the entire shelf with jars. Not knowing what to do, he beckoned the cat. Dipping his paw in sour cream, he imprinted cat footprints on the shop and on the floor. With a calm soul, he went out into the cold to chop wood. In the evening, the mother threw up her hands: “Father, damn it, what have our cat-ot done!” The father says: “No, mother, another cat has been fornicating here.” - "Which!" - "A two-legged." Kolyaka was lying on the stove, keeping quiet. A whole inch of sour cream was frozen on his fur coat.

The removed curdled milk was also put in a hot oven, by the evening it turned out thick (cottage cheese) and whey - a pleasant sour drink. “Whey from curdled milk” - with the help of this tongue twister, schoolchildren trained pronunciation. Thick - cottage cheese - was stored in a wooden bowl. In the summer it was worn for haymaking in burtases - in birch bark tuesas with a double wall. (Kvass and wort were also carried in them.) Cottage cheese was also eaten with spoons in milk, in yogurt, pies and roguli were baked with it.

Stavets (pot) with milk was placed in the oven every day. Such milk was called fried, adults added it to tea, while children were allowed to directly enjoy this delicacy.

When the cow stopped milking and switched to dry wood, milk for children was borrowed from neighbors. The number of borrowed lids was marked with notches on a special splinter. The hostess, lending, also sometimes put sticks. The numbers did not always coincide: the borrower, for reliability and in order not to disgrace herself, often put additional, “safety”, notches ...

In winter, a somewhat strange method of storing milk was used. It was frozen in dishes, then ice milk circles were beaten out and stored in the cold. Such milk could be sent to relatives and taken on the road. It rattled in knapsacks along with other luggage.

FISH

In nature, there are many oddities that are inexplicable from the point of view of a rationalist, they do not give him rest, they constantly torment the poor fellow. A person with a poetic perception of the world not only does not suffer from such oddities, but sometimes also invents them himself, creating a mystical halo around the most understandable and everyday phenomena.

Who is right, we will figure it out later, according to the proverb “when the cat is a cat”. (By the way, cats just confirm the existence of natural oddities. It is striking, for example, their resemblance to humans. In what? At least in cleanliness. Or in their feline “perfumery” abilities. These animals can compare with us in culinary intelligibility: spoiled the cat will not eat frozen meat, stale milk or spoiled fish. Be sure to serve him everything fresh. All his old laziness instantly disappears when either the hostess with a pail or a fisherman with a fresh catch enters the hut.)

The smell of the lake and sedge, fog and greenery brings the fisherman into the house along with the fish. In the morning he tries to be in time for pies. If he returned in the evening, they immediately arranged a taganka on a hearth (two bricks placed on the edge, a burning splinter between them, a frying pan or a large saucepan on top). Selyanka was similar to the so-called hodgepodge served in today's restaurants, very few. Even its name came from the word “sel” (something thick, flowing), and not at all from “salt”. The peasant woman was cooked in different northern places in different ways, but always with fish and an egg dissolved in milk. Onion, salt, pepper, bay leaf made it an exquisite, somewhat even aristocratic dish on the peasant table. Quite another thing is the ear. What it is - there is no need to explain, since fish soup and fishing have always been lucky in Russian literature. For starters, let us recall at least Chekhov's heroes from the story “Burbot”, and even better Gogol's Rooster, who, entangled in gear, yelled to Chichikov straight from the water: “Come here! Come to us, come to us!”

Let's try to throw off the satirical foam from these episodes, let's read the same Burbot in a serious way, although this is almost impossible. Man's eternal interest in the poetry of water, fire, grass, etc. will be exposed. This poetry thickens in a fisherman's fire like a double or triple fish soup, which, after a dozen spoons, makes the most hungry person full. Let us imagine the height of haymaking, when every bone hurts from fatigue and when there is nothing more gratifying than ordinary sleep. But then someone accidentally gave the idea. The silent ones immediately become talkative, the old grow younger. Fatigue is gone. And now they are dragging a hen from somewhere [Breden - Ed.] and, having barely reached the river, they take off their clothes, hastily, already in the fog, they climb to fish.

The same excitement, which has been accumulating in the sleeping child's soul since the evening, opens the adjacent eyelids, raises the sweetly sleeping boy in the dewy dawn and hurries him along with the morning herd somewhere to the river or to the lake.

The fish was boiled, fried, baked, dried, salted and dried. A real, knowledgeable fisherman himself cooked a double fish soup: when good fish (pike, pike perch, burbot, bream) were poured into a broth made from small fish (ruffs, perch, roach) and boiled again. Bream, pike perch, pike baked in rye dough were opened by the owner himself and he always dismantled the fish head by bones, and they tried to find a bone cross in the pike head. The head of a large bream from the fish soup was presented to the guest as a sign of honor, but by no means everyone could handle it. An inept eater could throw away the most delicious - the brain and tongue. Dried fish, called sushch (snytok, ryapus, perch, roach), was boiled in posts, on the road and in hayfields, having previously crumbled and finely rubbed in the palms. They usually salted large fish. Many people liked salted “smell” fish in the pie, preferring it fresh. Salted caviar was very tasty, for example, pike, burbot, and porridge. When fresh, it, together with milk, was bred in milk and put in a hot oven. Pies were also often baked with milk and fresh caviar, and burbot liver was also suitable for this.

GARDEN

“Chop up an onion, it will smell like a fish,” one old woman used to say. According to these simple-hearted words, one can judge the place occupied by fish in Russian cuisine. The characteristic of the bow also sounds here. A special proverb has been composed about a tortuous and overly obsequious woman: “Like an onion, it is suitable for any meal.” Indeed, what is more important for a cook than an ordinary onion? There are many sayings and riddles about onions. He makes people roar without grief, knocks the frenzy out of their heads, knows how to instantly turn bitter into sweet. Anyone who was born in a pre-war village probably remembers winter evenings without light and bread. A burning stove, a small fireplace, onions on the shelves and ... a sweet onion baked by the fire. The first arrows of the onion, green, spring, bitter, killed any infection in the mouth! They unexpectedly came to the rescue when the stove was empty in summer; picking a bunch, cutting it with a knife and crushing it with a pestle in a wooden cup was a matter of minutes. A pipe with a peeled skin was also edible, although a different one squeezed out a tear. And paired with potatoes, the onion has already made the weather on the peasant table. So onions and boiled potatoes in kvass and half a loaf of rye bread were replaced in fasting and meat cabbage soup. Crushed potatoes with radish in kvass and now a favorite hay food in those places where malt kvass is still found.

Potatoes baked in an autumn fire were loved not only by children, but also by many adults, they baked it in baths, in barns, and in home ovens. In times of hard times, such ditties were sung:

potato, potato,
What an honor to you.
If there were no potatoes,
What would you eat.

But potatoes are not worthy of other, higher folklore genres. But the usual turnip, supplanted at the beginning of the century by swede, then completely disappeared, is immortalized even in fairy tales. It is for what.

Turnips were sown on a busy couple on Ivan's day, in the middle of summer, so that the earthen flea would not eat. Therefore, this vegetable, like peas, most likely was field, and not garden. By autumn, constellations of small yellow turnips grew like mushrooms in the still unpressed barley. Their kidnapping was one of the traditional attributes of childish and teenage mischief. Adults were indulgent in the theft of unharvested peas and turnips, although punishment with burning shame and no less burning nettles threatened every thief. The exciting chill of risk, like bitterness to sweet white pulp, was mixed with children's raids on the strip. The inner side of the peel had a beautiful wavy pattern, the turnip crunched in the mouth.

Ripnya was cooked from turnips - a thick stew. The already described sicheniki were baked, but, most importantly, it was steamed in stoves. Having stuffed a large pot with washed turnips, they put it upside down on a shovel in a warm oven overnight. In the morning, near the iron, a real feast began. Parenitsa was eaten by children and adults, naked and with bread, with and without salt. If the same parenitsa is thinly cut and put on a baking sheet in the oven for one more night, then it will turn out to be dry-cured - the most popular children's delicacy. Dried carrots made from steamed carrots were even more famous; they were sometimes brewed instead of tea.

In the large-family outbuildings in the basements, there were more than one tub of such dry-cured wood. Everyone who wanted to take it, stuffed their pockets with it, chewed it in conversations. They even played games of chance on it.

Strangely popular in the Russian North was the swede, nicknamed galanka (Dutch) for its foreign origin. It was not sown in the field, but planted with seedlings in the garden. It grew large, but was no longer as tasty as turnips, but lychi, in other words, the tops were a help in feeding livestock. The same parenitsa was steamed from rutabaga and dried vyalenitsa, but later it was replaced by turnip, from which neither one nor the other was obtained.

Carrots, cucumbers and beets were always allotted in a small garden bed. Fresh cut cucumbers, mixed with boiled potatoes and poured with sour cream, were eaten before autumn instead of the second. For some reason, beets and most of the carrots went to livestock. But cabbage was again in great honor, cabbage soup was filled only with it. Fresh cabbage, like turnips, was steamed in the oven. Salted it in two ways: dice and shredded. Anyone who has eaten salted sauerkraut will forever remember its juiciness and unique taste. During Lent, chopped cabbage was mixed with crushed boiled potatoes and poured over with linseed oil. They did the same with grated radish. The peeled radish constantly floated in a tub of cold water, it was taken out in the mornings and in the evenings. Grated radish in kvass, mixed with hot, freshly crushed potatoes, would be a decoration for any current table ... The taste of hot in cold acquires a special charm for many people, while others are completely indifferent to such details.

FOREST GIFTS

The northern peasant life, like a man (if he is not an orphan), had in nature not only relatives, but good acquaintances: some were the closest, others more distant. For example, of all the cultivated cereals, rye, of course, was the closest to folk life, it was not for nothing that she was called mother, nurse, etc. Among the trees - this is a birch, sung in songs, and among the mushrooms, of course, camelina. Not a single mushroom could compete with him, since the saffron milk cap, like fish, can be boiled, salted, baked in a pie, and even, after slightly salting it, is eaten fresh. In the mushroom year, the people salted mushrooms with tubs, they were eaten with potatoes and pancakes, cooked until the very haymaking. But all the same, a stew made from salted mushrooms or dried butter - a lip - was in the very last place in a series of meat, fish and other stews. Why? Unclear. Maybe because of the cheapness available to any couch potato, maybe because it quickly bored. Most likely from both together.

If there was a crop failure on mushrooms, then milk mushrooms, or half milk mushrooms, or head over heels grew, but if there were none of these, then waves would definitely appear in the fall. At worst, it was possible to salt the whites and solodag, which, in comparison with saffron milk caps, were considered almost grebes.

For drying, oil was harvested in abundance (white ones did not grow everywhere). At the height of summer, they were collected for roasting, peeled off the brown skin and languished on a taganka. “Not the roads of the cuts, but the roads of the butt,” says the proverb. They were dried in a non-hot oven, then strung on a harsh thread and hung under a mat or poured into a wooden hollow. The aroma from these mushrooms was recognized and loved not by everyone, just as not everyone could freely, at any time, step into the field with a mushroom basket. Children, old people and the poor gathered mushrooms, the rest did it only along the way, in fits and starts, and sometimes secretly. The same can be said about the collection of berries, wood angelica, sorrel, oxalis, birch sap race. Everything depended on the time at which the berry ripened and whether bread, flax, sour cream or haystacks were put under the roof. Even in late autumn, a woman could hardly find time to go, for example, for cranberries, without which the life of a northerner is unthinkable. The collected cranberries were rolled on a sieve like peas, discarding the remnants of moss and other impurities. It was frozen for the winter. The berries brought from the frost clattered like pebbles. Kissel and drink were cooked from them, crushed for food with pancakes. In the fall, they added it to shredded cabbage, hot tea, and, of course, ate it just like that.

With cranberries in abundance, lingonberries successfully competed for another year. This is the most revered berry in northern Russian folk cuisine. It was soaked (like apples are soaked in central Russia), but more soared. Many steamed lingonberries were poured with wort, so it was stored longer. They ate lingonberries with pancakes, with oatmeal, with porridge-custard, in milk, seasoned tea with berries, prepared a drink from it and simply enjoyed the “over-satiation” after eating. For some reason, women after childbirth and convalescent patients always wanted “lingonberry”.

It is hard to even imagine how many people this earliest, brightest, reddest, most fragrant, sweetest berry brought up! It brought up, because the main education takes place in childhood. The first spring of childhood, when you were first let into the warm, mysteriously noisy sunny forest, is the most memorable, and the first berry in such a spring is always strawberry. And if there is a berry of infancy and early childhood, then it is, undoubtedly, strawberries, even children's grief is connected with it, the longing of waiting for a mother who, walking from a hayfield, will surely pick a bush with the first half-white berries. She, the strawberry, has always been the culprit of the first fear experienced by a little man lost in the forest, and the first jubilation, and immense joyful relief from the fact that gloomy, alien, noisy pines suddenly turn the other side and become again native and local.

The smell and aroma of wild strawberries was born even from a dozen and a half ripe berries, at home it became even stronger. And how you don’t want to give these berries to your younger sister who still can’t walk, how you want to eat them yourself! But here they are, these red droplets, divided equally, and the first elevating drop of altruism washes away the remnant of resentment and animal greed in the child's soul. From now on, a child, picking berries, will always remember the younger ones, anticipating not the sweetness of berries, but the joy of giving, the joy of generous patronage and a feeling of pity for the younger, defenseless being. And how dear is the father's encouragement, how good it is to see that the berries you pick are slurping with milk during dinner the whole family! The next day, the little novice altruist will no longer be stopped by heat, mosquitoes, or intrigues of peers. He will again rush to collect strawberries ...

The unpopular berries included the sour stone fruit, the most accessible and growing anywhere in the middle and at the end of summer. For some reason, the rowan year was considered a harbinger of fires, perhaps because the forests really blazed here and there with silent flames. Ice cream, harvested in autumn, rowan, hanging in bunches in attics, was brought to the hut, and even adults seemed inexplicable in its unexpected transformation from bitter to sweet.

Among the marsh berries, blueberries were the most unloved, they cannot be dried, they are all watery, and they were harvested only when there were no blueberries. The same frivolous attitude is felt towards the princess - red currant. Cloudberry has stood and stands apart among the berries - a somewhat aristocratic berry, unlike any others, with an amazing honey taste. This taste changes dramatically depending on the degree of ripeness, while the ripeness of the collected cloudberries depends on several hours, it quickly turns from white, hard and crunchy into soft, amber-yellow. Raspberries and black currants were harvested for delicacy and for drying for medicinal purposes, as was bird cherry. Bird cherry, however, very rarely survived until such a moment. On holidays, teenage boys, like thrushes, hung on the trees for hours. Adult bachelors did not disdain her either.

Very few, but also the most delicious of the berries, was the polyanka, which has now disappeared everywhere.

When asked what you would cook on a fast day, Anfisa Ivanovna answered this way: “They didn’t call cabbage soup soup, because they didn’t crumble onions and potatoes into cabbage soup. They will put a piece of meat and cabbage, otherwise oatmeal. Behind the cabbage soup came potato pancakes, or fried potatoes with rinds, sprinkled with sleep, they ate yogurt on top of the satiety, and sometimes they slurped the thick, either in milk or in the same yogurt. They also cooked porridge in milk from different cereals, they made scrambled eggs, as well as potato pancakes, salamat, also oatmeal, kneaded with sour milk, and poured fresh, this is called “with watering”. Well, oatmeal pancakes or yash shangas, and pies on a weekday are tripe”.

The question about fast food was answered with the following words:

“Peas are boiled thickly or lean cabbage soup made from oatmeal, potatoes were eaten with linseed oil, oatmeal was made with kvass, or just a mixture of water and salt. And if peas or cereal cabbage soup were boiled liquid, then they made a biscuit bowl, crushed rye crackers were poured into the stew. And when peas with barley are cooked - it was called kutya, the barley for it was soaked and crushed raw in a mortar, the peel was peeled off. We also cooked an onion with cranberries - very tasty. They ate parenina from turnips and ripnitsa, sauerkraut with potatoes, pea jelly and oatmeal jelly with linseed oil, fish soup, radish with kvass, they also cooked soup from saffron milk mushrooms or dried mushrooms.

Speaking of peasant (and not only peasant) northern cuisine, we must not forget about the special properties of the Russian stove. She, this oven, being swept, did not boil food, did not fry, but slowly simmered and steamed, preserving the taste, aroma and other properties of the product.

WHAT THE SAMOVAR RINGS ABOUT

In the mansions of the Stroganov merchants, the guest of honor was given brewed “grass”, which, according to historians, was not even on the table of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich every day. From Salt Vychegodskaya, this marvelous oriental drink began its triumphant journey through Rus'.

Tea, apparently, strongly pressed sbiten, as well as fruit and berry drinks in Russian life, although it was difficult for him to compete with kvass.

But such confrontation is inappropriate. A good drink verified by the people, as a good national custom, is not an enemy to another equally good drink (custom). They just complement each other, and each wins next to the other.

Time, place and mood unmistakably prompted the owner or hostess how to quench the thirst of a guest, worker, household. In one case it was tea, in another - kvass, in the third - wort. Many loved birch sap. Each such drink had its own dishes and its own ritual, depending, however, on the individual characteristics of a person. They say: "Everyone will drink, but not everyone will grunt."

In a short historical period, tea drinking in the north of Rus' has taken root so much that the samovar has become a sign of domestic well-being and an expression of everyday folk aesthetics. It seemed to complement the two most important centers in the house: the hearth and the front corner, the household fire and spiritual, inner warmth. Without a samovar, like without bread, the hut looked inferior, the same feeling was from an empty front corner or from a cooling stove. By the way, the Russian stove itself, improving, so to speak, technically (from black to white), has always been associated with the aesthetics of peasant life. Who, for example, did not listen to the songs of the winter wind in a warm pipe, sitting or lying near the native casing? The most amazing thing was the feeling of the closeness of this cold wind and your inaccessibility to it.

In the latest versions, the Russian stove kindly and good-naturedly provided the opportunity to make noise, boil, sing and ring the Russian samovar. It is for him that the hostess rakes out hot golden coals two or three times a week and pours them into an iron stew with a scoop. For the samovar, a special vent was made in the oven, a draft chimney, which operates independently of the oven views.

In what cases was the samovar installed? Very many. The unexpected arrival (arrival) of a relative or just a travel person, before dinner on a hot hay day, on wires, after a bath, on holidays, from the cold, with joy or frustration, to pies, in order to simply heat the water to boil eggs, jelly etc. and so on.

River water was preferred for drinking. God forbid that the samovar be set up without water at all, which often happened to absent-minded cooks. Then the samovar, as if perplexed, was silent for a while, then suddenly began to make an unnatural noise, and finally slowly sank and fell on its side ... Not every blacksmith-tinker undertook to solder a tap and a fallen off pipe. Just for this reason, they tried, if possible, to buy a second, spare samovar.

The shapes and volumes of samovars were infinitely varied. Cleaned with river sand until the sun shines, the samovar perfectly harmonized with the wood of the peasant house, with its benches and utensils, policemen and, more often, unpainted cabinets. The revived, boiling samovar really, as it were, came to life and spiritualized. The strange, eternal interrelationship of water and fire, the proximity to man of both made tea drinking one of the most gratifying activities that brings people together, holds families together and feasts.

Here the bow of the bucket rattled, the water poured into the samovar rustled. Then the smell of birch fire was felt, and in the knee of the iron pipe connecting the samovar to the chimney, the flame hummed and subsided. Three minutes later, this whole copper device begins to make noise, like a steady summer rain, and after five it stops.

The water boils with a spring, hot steam beats into the hole like a sultan. The samovar is taken to the table, put on the same copper tray, and a teapot is placed on the burner.

Tea sets, according to the number of family members, surround a wooden board with pies and a large stand with fried, baked, or rather, stewed milk in the oven.

Light heat from burning coals, a slight ringing that turns into some kind of mysterious singing, steam, smell, hot, shining sides of the samovar, where you can look - all this is flavored with a large piece of cake and a tiny piece of sugar loaf. Two spoons of milk fall in white puffs into the amber-brown contents of the cup. Adults pour it all for you in a saucer, share milk foam among the smallest and begin their endless conversations. This is how tea drinking is perceived in early childhood.

In adolescence, if there is no one younger than you in the family, they give you all the foam so that the beard grows. At this time, you already know that you can’t change places at the table, you can’t leave the cup just like that, you must definitely turn it on its side or upside down. Otherwise, according to the sign, it is very difficult to quench your thirst, and you will be poured endlessly.

One of the main features of the Russian samovar is that it can boil until the end of tea drinking, for which it is enough to keep the pipe slightly open.

During the wars, in the famine years, the samovar, like the Russian stove, was peasant house and healer and comforter. For lack of tea-sugar, they brewed carrot jerky, St. John's wort, currant leaf, etc.

For some reason, in difficult times, the peasant samovar became the object of special attention (the same fate was, however, with Russian bells). But not always, when he was carried away from the hut, he was accompanied by sad female lamentations. During the Great Patriotic War, Russian women, on the call to collect non-ferrous metal, without a single sigh gave their last samovars to the war fund, after which the water had to be boiled in cast iron. Nowadays, the samovar is being replaced everywhere by the electric kettle, which has its pluses and minuses...

Several years have passed since the wonderful man and talented writer Vasily Ivanovich Belov, one of the founders of "village prose", left us. With his work, he made a great contribution to the development of Russian literature, reflecting the identity of the Russian North. Especially loved by readers are his ethnographic essays published in the works of Lad. Harmony in folk life - the desire for perfection, expediency, simplicity and beauty in way of life. The meaningfulness of the centuries-old traditions of folk labor and life, "the experience of people who lived before us," help us create the future. “Outside of memory, outside the traditions of history and culture, there is no personality,” said Vasily Ivanovich. “Memory forms the spiritual fortress of a person.”

Here is what his longtime friend, Anatoly Nikolaevich Greshnevikov, politician, deputy of the State Duma of the Russian Federation, wrote about the book “Lad” and about Vasily Ivanovich Belov. Writer, member of the Writers' Union of Russia, winner of a number of journalistic awards.

Vasily Ivanovich Belov - a classic of modern Russian literature, laureate State Prize USSR, great citizen and patriot of Russia. Readers of the older and middle generations are well aware of his novels "The Usual Business", "The Village of Berdyaika", "Carpenter's Tales", "The Dawns Kiss", a cycle of humorous miniatures "Vologda Bays". A lot of noise was made in its time by the novel "Eve" - ​​about the tragic fate of the peasantry.

A real sensation was made by the appearance in the press of essays under common name Lad. About the life of the village, its way of life, traditions and culture, which laid the foundation of Russian statehood.

I have long been friends with Vasily Ivanovich. Together they traveled to small Russian cities and villages. He also visited the Vologda region, in his native village of Timonikha, where most of his works were written, including Lad.

Nash Sovremennik magazine has been publishing it since 1979 with the updated subtitle Essays on Folk Aesthetics. He continued in 1980 and in 1981. And in 1982, a beautiful thick book was published, illustrated with magnificent photographs. With the then shortage of everything and everyone, I hardly managed to get this work. He was read, as they say, to holes. It was passed from hand to hand by my friends and journalistic colleagues.

Russia from century to century was known as a peasant power. Any blow to the peasantry meant a blow to the country. The destruction of villages, the eradication of the peasant worldview led to the weakening of Russia. Having lost her peasant way of life, she subjected herself to self-destruction. Salvation could be a return to the roots, to the peasant beginning, harmony.

At the time of the search for ways to save the country, Belov's Lad sounded with an amazingly accurate and powerful explosion. On his essays, by leaps and bounds, interest in the history of the country, in the tragedy of dispossession, in the understanding of rural labor and life began to rise. The eternal craving of the peasant for beauty, perfection and simplicity Belov called the capacious word Lad.

And the city cubs rolled to the villages and villages to look for their roots, to buy houses for a different life, non-fussy, patriarchal, as in Belov's book. The hands of connoisseurs of antiques and Russian antiquity were itching, they rushed along the dales and villages to take away and buy up icons, bast shoes, samovars, spinning wheels from the old people.

The feathers of local historians creaked, inspired by the truth and the meaning of their work, they went to villages, archives and museums to collect grains of the history of disappearing villages, crafts, traditions, began to reproduce the chronicle of the lost, to connect the thread of times. In schools, teachers and students were drawn to the study of history small homeland, local history museums opened here and there. The journalists in the capital's publications have ceased to shun the themes of peasant labor, the life of villages and villages. Lad! Lad! Lad! That's what the Russian people lacked.

And then the authorities would understand, comprehend, support the process of restoring historical memory, lead the movement to revive agriculture, restore the feeling of a master to the peasants, and give worthy funding for their programs! Of course, to repent for collectivization, for the fact that Tukhachevsky exterminated the Tambov peasants with gas, for the demolition of unpromising villages. In general, to carry out, as Vasily Belov said from the rostrum of the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR, the rehabilitation of the peasantry. But the government got scared. She practiced criticism of the former agrarian policy, called the village a "black hole" and threw it into the market element, that is, to the mercy of fate.

This was not what Belov expected. Not for the words right and wrong fought. He understood: the authorities are afraid of the appearance in the country of a real, strong independent owner of the land, who knows the price of both freedom and labor. The official, nourished by Western values ​​and dressed in everything foreign, felt in his gut that he would not rule as soon as a new kulak appeared on the earth, an independent and rich peasant. Rollback, total privatization and unprecedented robbery and humiliation of peasants began.

Again, through all television channels and in all central newspapers, uncontrollable perverted lies poured out on the Russian village. The history of peasant Russia began to be distorted again, smeared with black paint.

Arrows of criticism also rained down on Belov. It has been discontinued and reprinted. And the book, which became the anthem of the Russian mode, the encyclopedia of peasant life, was consigned to oblivion. Instead of including it in school programs, making documentaries on it, it was simply written off to the archive. The haters of everything Russian returned to the communist horror stories, began to re-introduce into their consciousness how obscene the life of the peasants in the country had been for many centuries. The history of the life of the Russian village, according to their stories, is unrestrained drunkenness, greedy and lazy landowners, wandering beggars, cholera riots, fat-bellied priests, fierce world-eaters. It is only incomprehensible, but who then fed the country where the Lomonosovs were born ?!

The story of the life of the Russian village, told by Belov, looked different, more truthful and more interesting. "Lad" is not an idealized representation of the life of the peasants, nor can it be considered an ethnographic work reflecting the mores, customs and way of life of the village. Belov transferred the stories of Anfisa Ivanovna's mother and other Timonikh's peasants to paper. He reminded the Russians what the life of the village really was and what we lost in the country with the destruction of this life.

“Lad” is a free story of a resident of Timonikha about his home, about childhood and adolescence, about hayloft and barn, fishing tackle, about games, weddings and seeing off to the army. It is inherent in the peasant not only to sow bread and clean the samovar, but also to sing songs, ditties, speak the language of bukhtins and sayings, retell fairy tales, keep legends and conspiracies. The development of Russia proceeded rapidly, progressively, while Timonikh and hundreds of thousands of Timonikh lived and developed.

After writing Lada, Vasily Belov was forced to put aside the stories about the search for and approval of meaning poetic traditions Russian peasantry. Another weapon turned out to be in his hands - journalism. He again entered the battle for the village and took the fire of criticism on himself.

Timonikh, as a soldier surrounded by the enemy, will live and fight for his existence to the last house, as to the last bullet. And Belov will never leave her alone, he will never board doors and windows forever, he will not sell her to a summer resident. He will share with her the bitter fate of loners, and the village will know that he, her reliable protector and keeper, is nearby.

Prepared by Vadim Grachev

PUBLICATIONS