The life of the pre-revolutionary Russian village in our time is often overshadowed or, on the contrary, poeticized. The impartial view of an eyewitness becomes all the more important. Olga Semenova-Tyan-Shanskaya (1863 1906) - the daughter of the famous geographer and traveler and an ethnographer herself - for many years, taking a village in the Ryazan province as the object of research, she conscientiously recorded everything that had to do with the life of the peasants there. The result is an amazing book, full of facts from the life of our ancestors, a book about a unique culture that has disappeared in time.