Reseña del libro "The Turning Year: The Story of the Russian Village Year (en Inglés)"
The year goes round. It does not go round to the same place. In Rodniki, a village deep in the forests of the Russian north, old Avdotya has a rule: once the waters are blessed at Epiphany, the fairy tales go back into the forest to sleep, and nobody may tell them until the long nights return. So for a whole year, from Candlemas to the first snows of winter, the village lives its life instead, and we live it with them. Twelve evenings, twelve feasts, twelve fires. The girls slide down the Maslenitsa ice hill on their spinning-board seats while the men fight wall against wall on the river. The children call the larks back from the rooftops. A father walks home from Petersburg in the spring mud and arrives at the churchyard gate just as the Easter bells ring out. A herdsman from the Vaga locks the herd with a padlock and drops it into the village springs. The girls curl the birches at Semik and float their wreaths down the river. A small boy goes looking for the fern flower on St John's Eve. Lightning strikes on Elijah's day and leaves a stone arrow in the earth. The last sheaf of rye stands under the icons, a wedding is held in the first snow, and a young man draws his lot for the army. Between the evenings, a present-day narrator steps out of the village to ask of every custom: is it very old, or very new and only pretending? Is the pancake really the sun, or did a Soviet archaeologist decide it was? Was there ever a god called Kupala, or a goddess called Lada? Why did nobody in the north burn the straw Maslenitsa? How did the news of a murdered Tsar reach a village with no newspaper, and why were its peasants, for the first time in their history, called to swear the oath? Why did people keep Stone Age arrowheads as thunderbolts, and what did a Swedish archbishop believe about swallows sleeping under the ice? And how did a northern bride lament her own wedding in the same tunes used for the dead? The village is invented. Everything else is real. The customs are those recorded by the collectors and ethnographers of the Russian north; the sayings come from Vladimir Dal; the history is history. Wherever something is only guessed, or is somebody's bright idea that nobody has been able to prove, you will be told so. Illustrated in colour with more than forty paintings, prints and photographs: Kustodiev's Maslenitsa and Trinity, Levitan's birch groves and golden autumn, Venetsianov's reapers, Repin's departing recruit, the bright popular prints of the country fairs, and the first colour photographs of the Russian countryside. The second book in Twelve Nights by the Stove: Russian Folklore and Myth, Told by the Fire. It can be read on its own.
