New Books In Folklore

The Worlds of Russian Village Women: Tradition, Transgression, Compromise (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013) by Laura J. Olson and Svetlana Adonyeva casts a new look at the traditional representation of Russian women and village life in scholarship. Grounding the imagery of a Russian woman in the network of her relationship with her family and the larger community, Olson and Adonyeva show how age and gender shape village communities and traditional lifestyle. Previously, Olson and Adonyeva argue, women have been excluded from the folklore tradition mainly because their performances took place in private rather than public setting, and thus were either not accessible for, or discounted in scholarship. The private character of these performances, however, endows women with a larger agency in preserving and negotiating tradition. Through the discussions of aspects and practices of village life as marriage and courtship, death, memory, motherhood, magic, or singing over the course of three generations, the ima