The Worlds of Russian Village Women: Tradition, Transgression, Compromise by Laura J. Olson, Svetlana Adonyeva (review)

The Worlds of Russian Village Women: Tradition, Transgression, Compromise. By Laura J. Olson and Svetlana Adonyeva. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012. Pp. vii + 368, glossary, notes, bibliography, index, photographs.)The Worlds of Russian Village Women represents the first study of rural women's lives as they are lived, rather than through the heavy coloring of ideological agendas. As the authors note in their introduction, Russian rural women have typically "been depicted as victims of oppressive patriarchy, or celebrated either as symbols of inherent female strength or as one of the original sources of one of the world's great cultures" (p. 5). Olson and Adonyeva focus on how women construct their identities in light of village tradition, simultaneously valuing it and compromising with its tenets as well as transgressing it. The authors study three generations of rural women: those born between 1899 and 1916, those born between 1917 and 1929, and those born between 1930 and 1950. Each generation experienced a different reality, namely the last years of the Russian empire, the early years after the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Stalinist era, respectively. The book illustrates how the shifting social structures of each period are reflected in the folklore, ritual traditions, and, ultimately, in the identities of women in these three groups.The book is composed of nine chapters, seven of which are dedicated to various aspects of folk tradition, including courtship and marriage, songs and singing, motherhood, magic, legends, and death and memory. The first two chapters provide background information for the study and the interdisciplinary theoretical approaches that Olson and Adonyeva apply. The authors rely on analytical tools from anthropology, psychology, sociology, linguistics, literary theory, history, and folkloristics. Chapter 1 focuses on the patriarchal nature of Russian folklore scholarship and how it has systematically silenced women's voices. The authors convincingly demonstrate that because women usually told tales or sang epics at home, collectors erroneously assumed that these genres were exclusively in the male purview. When folklorists did manage to collect examples from women, they attributed the practice to decaying tradition and judged women to be less effective performers. In addition, the female genres of laments and lyric songs, often sung in groups, were viewed as less prestigious than men's solo genres. Chapter 2 outlines the nature of age and gender status for men and women in the twentieth- century Russian village, with particular emphasis on the role of bol'shukha (mistress of the household). They discuss how women forged relationships, were socialized and initiated, and how Soviet-era values altered and interacted with traditional norms.In the bulk of the work, the authors focus mainly on two types of texts: poetic genres (lyric songs, romances, and chastushki, two-tofour- line humorous songs) and narratives about rites of marriage, birth, and death as well as about magic and the supernatural. They stress that these narratives provide "a subjective view of history" (p. 47). Olson and Adonyeva conclude that these songs and stories form the basis for "plots" and "scripts" of the teller's/singer's life. Plots are defined as "standard formulations of past action" contained in folklore, literature, and pop culture, from which people select "to transform their lived experience into knowledge, into narrative, or into autobiography" (p. …