Notes of a Floodplain Dweller

10 hrs. 55 min.

Language Russian

Author Pavel Zaytsev

Narrator Vladimir Sushkov

Description

The memoirs of a hereditary Mologian peasant Pavel Zaitsev (1919–1992), whose chapters are now offered to the reader, have been lying on the author’s table since 1975—life taught Pavel caution. After all, he recalls everyday life, places, and the way of life that were mercilessly destroyed by the Communists, who, as is known, did not want to “wait for favors from nature,” and used the semi-slave labor of their subjects for a delusional, hellish remaking of it—right up to an aborted (thank God!) turn of the northern rivers, which would have finally ruined Russia.

…“I was born in a haymaking field, at the end of June 1919, into the family of Ivan Nikanorovich Zaitsev, a peasant from the village of Novinka-Skorodumovo, of the Breytovsk volost, of the then Mologsky district, of Yaroslavl province. <…> In my grandfather Nikanor’s hut, at that time twenty-two people had gathered, and they sat down to eat in four shifts. First ate the children, then the six sons of Nikanor; after them came the six of his daughters-in-law; and last ate the master himself with his wife Anna and the decrepit old man Feokist. They lived in cramped conditions, but calmly and harmlessly; they respected one another, and in everything tried to please the head of the family. And he was a calm old man, a homebody—he didn’t chase after profit, didn’t wrong anyone, and everyone in the family trusted him in everything.”