The Worlds of Russian Village Women: Tradition, 
Transgression, Compromise. By Laura J. Olson and Svetlana 
Adonyeva. The University of Wisconsin Press, 2012. 368 pp. 
Notes. Bibliography. Glossary. Index. Photographs. $39.95, 
Paper.  
Elaine MacKinnon, Department of History, University of West Georgia 

 
It has never been easy for outsiders to penetrate the closed communities of the Russian 

peasantry. Consequently, certain elements of rural life and culture remain shrouded in a veil of 
mystery and misperceptions.  Understanding gender in the Russian villages is particularly 
elusive, because women tend to perform their various roles in not readily visible domestic 
spheres, and patriarchal norms prohibit women’s interactions with strangers.  Two scholars, 
Laura J. Olson, an American, and Svetlana Adonyeva, a Russian, have joined forces to overcome 
such barriers to study the lives of Russian village women. The result of their three-decade long 
research project, The Worlds of Russian Village Women: Tradition, Transgression, Compromise, 
opens a valuable window into the lives of three generations of Russian women and the history of 
their communities set against the backdrop of the twentieth century.  This richly detailed and 
comprehensive work portrays women both as individuals and as social agents, and makes a 
compelling case for the preeminence of gender and age as major factors shaping rural 
communities today. 

The book challenges previous scholarship on Russian folklore and ethnography.  The 
authors contend that because rural women have not traditionally sung or told stories in public, 
but rather did so in private spaces, often to exclusively female audiences, they have been ignored 
or misinterpreted by folklorists. Looking at women solely through the lens of patriarchy 
contributed to scholars minimalizing of the significance of culture as a realm within which 
women find agency and even empowerment. Women possess their own traditions, and these play 
a significant role in the ways they exercise power within a patriarchal order.  Olson and 
Adonyeva depart from previous researchers in that they focus primarily on recording and 
analyzing women’s own thoughts and explanations for the songs, stories, and rituals that they 
perform.  From 1983 until 2009, they conducted interviews with women born prior to 1950 in 
rural communities in northern and central Russia. This created personal channels of 
communication, observation, and interaction that then offered access to the domestic spaces of 
women’s cultural and social agency.  The interviews also afford the authors scope for analyzing 
the important interplay between individual motives and community norms. They show how 
women either transgress or make compromises with social customs and thereby shape the 
interpretation and transmission of tradition.  Their long term commitment to the project also 
enabled them to observe women at different phases of the life cycle, and during different seasons 
of the year, providing a clear sense of how women’s roles change over time.  

Both authors bring to their analysis a shared interest and training in folklore, gender, and 
cultural studies. Seven of the nine chapters explore women’s engagement in various cultural and 
social activities, including storytelling, singing, performing chastushki (short four-line lyrics that 
are often satirical and challenge social norms and hierarchies), witchcraft, gossip, superstitions, 
courtship, marriage, and death rituals.  Their analysis of songs, stories, anecdotes and fables 

 
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Anthropology of East Europe Review 32(2) Fall 2014 

demonstrate the resiliency of traditional beliefs and customs. Village women still construct 
identities through folk singing, and in particular romantic odes that reflect the patriarchy of the 
past rather than the norms of the present. The authors also illuminate more modern rituals such 
as soap opera watching, which has become a means of social cohesion and moral agency.  
Women are revealed to be major contributors to the corpus of rural folklore, though they tell 
stories and practice magic in ways decidedly different from men. Women use cultural forms such 
as folk singing to tell their own stories and unlike men, seek less to entertain than to transmit 
values. The authors also show how women act as primary spiritual guardians of their households 
and their communities, which is empowering even within a still prevalent framework of 
patriarchy.  

Due to its interdisciplinary approach and content, this book will be of interest to scholars 
in multiple fields, including history, folklore, gender studies, cultural anthropology and 
sociology. The book is particularly useful for students because of its discussion of methodology 
for social and cultural analysis, including using gender identity as a means for gaining access to 
rural women’s domestic spaces. They engage in critical dialogue about their use of interviews, 
and thoughtfully analyze moments where they believe cultural misunderstandings may be 
occurring.  Most beneficial for students is the fact that this book is not simply a compendium of 
interview transcripts, folk songs, and other cultural texts.  The authors provide a lively and 
insightful narrative, through which they contextualize and interpret these source materials, and 
compare their analyses with that of other researchers from both Russia and the West.   

Though panoramic in its portrait of women’s lives, the book has limits, especially with 
the size of its sample. It relies primarily upon subjective statements of self-selected women from 
only a small number of rural communities in one region of Russia. Some may contest the 
authors’ claims for the significance of subjectivity in determining the exact nature of what 
women’s lives are like, and of how power is exercised. Despite these limitations, however, this is 
a groundbreaking study that not only broadens our understanding of women’s lives in the 
Russian countryside, but also tells an important story of how rural communities weathered the 
twentieth century’s upheavals of war, revolution, collectivization, and the collapse of Soviet 
communism.  The book is, moreover, a testament to the fruitfulness of collaborative research 
between Russia and the West. It offers a unique and intimate glimpse into the world and mindset 
of these village women, the stories they tell and the songs they sing.  It is an engrossing book to 
read whether or not one specializes specifically in Russian cultural studies and history. The 
authors draw readers into these women’s lives in a meaningful way, by making the women as 
familiar to the reader as they are to the authors themselves.  It illuminates the essential role of 
culture as a medium for the negotiation of social and political power in rural communities. The 
hope is that this will inspire similar multi-disciplinary approaches to the study of gender and 
peasant life in other regions of Russia and the world.  
 
 

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