Russian Peasant Homes, 1888
"All peasants, the rich as well as the poor, live, with very few exceptions, in the same narrow peasant's izba; these homesteads presenting a square of fifteen to twenty feet…
From: 1888 C.E. To: 1888 C.E.
Location: Russia
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
The Russian Peasantry by Stepniak, 1888.
If you enter the house of a notoriously rich peasant, whose granary is brimful of corn, who keeps half-a-dozen horses in his stables, and who has probably in some remote corner under the floor a jugful of bright silver roubles, laid aside against a rainy day, you will be surprised at the extreme simplicity, nay squalor, of his household arrangements.
All peasants, the rich as well as the poor, live, with very few exceptions, in the same narrow peasant's izba; these homesteads presenting a square of fifteen to twenty feet in length and width. Into this space, divided into one or two rooms, both children and grown-up people are all huddled together. The quantity of air afforded for respiration is so puzzlingly small that our hygienists are forced to admit the endosmical action of the walls as the only hypothesis which will account for the fact that these people are not literally suffocated.
"Furniture" is a word which can be used only in its broad philosophical sense when applied to the dwellings of these people. They really have no furniture beyond a big unpolished table of the simplest pattern, which stands in the place of honour, in a corner under the ikons or images of saints; and some long wooden benches, about two feet deep, running all along the walls. These benches are used for sitting on in the daytime and for sleeping on at night. When the family is a large one, some of its members, at bed time, mount on to the upper tier of these shelves, which run all along the upper part of the wall, like hammocks in a ship's cabin.
Nothing bearing the likeness of a mattress is to be seen; a few worn-out rugs are thinly spread over the bare wood of the benches or on the floor, and that is all. The everyday coat, just taken off, serves as a blanket. Beds are a luxury hardly known, and very little appreciated by the Russian moujiks. Even in the peasants' hotels, the dvors on the chief commercial highways of the interior, frequented by the rich freight-carriers, a plentiful and luxurious table is kept, but nothing but bare benches in the way of beds are to be found. In the winter the large top of the stone oven is the favourite sleeping-place, and generally reserved for the elders, so that they may keep their old bones warm.
Stepniak, The Russian Peasantry: Their Agrarian Condition, Social Life, and Religion (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1888), 233-235.
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