Erzya Traditions — the traditional way of life of the Erzya people.
Family and Children
Until the twentieth century, the Erzya had two forms of family: the large patriarchal family and the small nuclear family. The large family encompassed several generations of male-line descendants together with their wives, all living together in a single household, working their fields in common and sharing food and clothing from communal stores. The number of family members sometimes reached several dozen people. The head of the patriarchal family was the eldest man (pokshtya), the guardian of the entire domestic order, while his wife attended to "purely female matters." Large families lived in several houses situated on the same homestead and connected as a unit: Yamushev Pyotr Ivanovich and Yamushev Andrey Ivanovich, Lyubayev Andrey Ivanovich and Lyubayev Yefrem Pavlovich, Ruzavin Sergey Stepanovich and Ruzavin Semyon Stepanovich, and so on.
After the death of the head of the household, families sometimes divided into smaller ones, with the eldest son overseeing the partition. Small families continued to retain features of the patriarchal order, and there were cases of small families reuniting into large ones. The Mordva practiced a form of polygamy unlike that of Muslims: regardless of a man's financial means, by ancient Mordva custom the wife of a deceased man became the wife of his brother, who was obliged to care for her children as if they were his own. This was considered a very humane arrangement — the Mordva always remembered that a child without a father is like a feather in the wind. The contracting of marriages was a matter not so much for the young people themselves as for their parents, who paid attention to the family's property standing, the girl's industriousness, her health, and her family tree. In our village, many girls were brought in from Staryye Selishcha, Chukaly, Protasovo, Varmazeyka, Petrovka, Roksashon, Aleksandrovka, and Permeyevka, and girls from Pikshen were given in marriage to those same villages. All the marriages connecting these villages took place mostly at the initiative of the parents and very often without the young people's consent; this practice persisted until 1925.
Midwife grandmothers were held in particular esteem in our village — both before and after the war — and they are still remembered: Doronina T.I. and Svyatkina F.I. Births usually took place in the bathhouse. All the inhabitants of the village were born in bathhouses. If it happened that a woman gave birth elsewhere — sometimes in the fields during field work — her child was invariably washed in the bathhouse afterwards. Perhaps it was for this reason that the people of Pikshen did not bathe inside Russian stoves, as was done in other villages, but had a bathhouse instead. Not everyone could afford a bathhouse of their own; such families used the neighbors', and sometimes as many as fourteen families would wash in a single bathhouse. Both in tsarist times and in the first half of the last century, rural families had many children — sometimes as many as eleven. There were families that prayed to God asking him to take one or two away. Children were born, grew up, and were not closely supervised; they slept wherever they could find space. In every house without exception, palat'ya (sleeping lofts) were nailed to the ceiling, where the children mainly slept. This freed up the floor space for nighttime and early-morning movement, since most people slept on the floor. Each brother with his family occupied his own corner of the house with his children. Small children were kept, as much as possible, in cradles suspended from the ceiling.
Palat'ya have survived to the present day at the home of Kambaratov Vasily Mikhaylovich; the rest of the village's inhabitants tried to remove as quickly as possible everything connected with the old ways and to acquire the trappings of modern life.
In the Mordva worldview, the choice of a fortunate name was of great importance to the newborn's future fate. The village's inhabitants knew that a name is character, and character is destiny. Before Christianization, the name in the village was usually given by the midwife or the child's father; after baptism, by the priest; and in Soviet times, the village council sometimes made suggestions at the time of filling out the birth certificate.
In 1933, Lyubayev Pavel Kirillovich, aged fourteen, was helping at the village council to fill out birth certificates — there was no longer a priest in the village. A woman asked him to find a name for her daughter. She was given the name Arina. The next day the mother came back in tears and begged them to change the certificate and alter the name; the village elders had explained to her that a very poor woman named Syoman' Orya had once lived in Pikshen, and that her daughter would follow in Orya's footsteps. It turned out that Arina is the Mordva form of the name Orya. They tried to explain to her that this name was famous throughout all of Holy Russia — it was the name of Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin's nanny, a kind, hardworking, and wise woman. The woman kept repeating her objection: "But she wasn't wealthy — she was just a nanny." So the name had to be changed after all.
The older brothers and sisters, and the elderly men and women, were the main ones who looked after the children. The most effective means of upbringing was to involve children in the family's working life as early as possible. This was, all things considered, the right approach. Different families had different methods of raising the young — not only the father's absolute authority over his children, but also the influence of fatherly prestige. In the family of Bogdanov Terenty Semyonovich (thirty people — Ivankan'), the women in the morning prepared breakfast for the men. The most calorie-rich food was placed on the table, tastier than what was served to other family members, since the men were leaving for heavy labor that lasted from first light to last. When the children rose and the infirm members of the household awoke, the women set a different table for them — and for themselves as well. Boys of ten or eleven tried to wake up early, sit down at the father's table, and go off to work with the men; they felt themselves to belong to the male half of the world.
Agriculture
The implements for tilling the soil, as with other peoples, were the plow-saban, square four-cornered harrows — on which weights were sometimes placed to dig deeper into the soil — and various other tools. All these implements were made of wood; local blacksmiths forged iron plowshares and a palitsa (a heavy wooden club used as a tool) to go with them. Not everyone could make a plow-saban, a harrow-sukhovatka, or a sokha (also called the Great Russian sokha). Sowing was done by hand.
The harvest was gathered mainly with sickles (tarvaz). The sickle blade was usually serrated along its cutting edge, with a blade width at the center of 3 cm. These tarvazy were used right up to the present day. In some households they have been preserved; they are well suited for cutting nettles to prepare feed for piglets.
Sheaves were stacked into haystacks and ricks on the threshing floor. In summer there was no time to process them, but in winter there was. The farmers Kuznetsov, Dokukin, and Romanov (Tsarek) worked in this fashion, making use of the labor of Pikshen's inhabitants.
Scythes fitted with rakes were used for harvesting. This is a very heavy implement, used mainly by men — and strong men at that. From time immemorial, grain was threshed on threshing floors. For this purpose, a layer of soil was removed with iron spades to the depth of the root system of the grass; the area was cleared, watered, sprinkled with ash, and tamped down so that the floor would not crack (chopped straw or chaff was added during tamping). Sheaves for threshing were laid with their ears facing each other, and threshing was done by hand with flails. The grain was cleaned in the wind, tossed upward with wooden shovels.
Hand mills and windmills were used for grinding. Hand mills came in two varieties: in one kind the upper stone was turned by hand, in the other kind geared toothed mechanisms were used, making the work easier and the output higher.
Flour and grain were kept in storehouses, in large wooden bins and chests. In Pikshen there were storehouses where the community kept grain reserves in case of famine. Steelyard balances (bezmeny) were used as weighing devices during trade — some were wooden, elegantly turned, others were iron. Agricultural produce was often sold by measure, using a wooden cylindrical vessel holding two buckets.
Livestock raising, animal husbandry, and beekeeping occupied an important place in the household economy. A horse was found in almost every family; it served as the draft animal.
Cows (skal) were kept for the needs of the individual household. There was no particular breed. Sheep and goats came in white and black. Pigs were likewise of the common Russian breed and were kept only in households that had grain to spare. There was a saying on this theme: if you have grain left over, get yourself a piglet. Our ancestors also kept chickens, ducks, and geese (used mainly for the needs of their own families).
Several families kept bees. In a letter, Milyayeva Yevdokiya Yevdokimovna, born in 1897, wrote that the Ivankan' (the Bogdanovs) treated their guests to honey and mead. My mother, born in 1908, told how the Ivankan' had an apiary in the Sevon'ley ravine. Wild cherry still grows there today; the site of the little cottage has been preserved, and the purest water seeps up from the ground. According to her account, the hives were of the log-hollow type and stood outdoors year-round. At the end of July they would fire up the Russian stove in the cottage, melt the honeycomb in cast-iron pots, and separate the honey from it — a honey that differed from today's in its flavor and medicinal properties. Everyone who sowed buckwheat tried to get land as close as possible to the apiaries, knowing that a buckwheat flower lives for only one day and that if a bee does not visit it, there will be no grain and no good harvest; in some places beekeepers were paid a small sum for this service. Old beekeepers say that the end of the world will be recognized by the behavior of bees. Bees will leave this life before humans do.
Here is what the scholar A. Smirnov of Kazan University, who studied the life of the Mordva of Nizhny Novgorod Governorate, wrote: "One must give the Mordva their due — they do not shy away from teaching their children literacy, as the Russians do in certain villages of Lukoyanov District. The Mordva are excellent farmers: their grain always comes up better than the Russians', and their livestock are larger and better fed than Russian livestock. The Mordva are good kitchen gardeners: by the time the first wheeled carts can get through, they are already delivering fresh green spring onions grown in their cattle sheds to Russian villages. In general, it must be said that the Mordva of Lukoyanovsky District are a most appealing people" ("The Land Where Pushkin Traveled," p. 39).
Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging
Our ancestors made use of the forest's gifts, gathering mushrooms, berries, wild apples, and nuts. They hunted using pit traps, various snares, and steel traps. In the nineteenth century, hunting rifles appeared. In our area there were great forests. My grandmother told me that bears once lived in our forests; there also survives in memory a story of a local hunter who went out hunting with his dog and rifle. A bear suddenly attacked him, knocked away the rifle, and began mauling the hunter. The dog threw itself at the bear and drew its fury onto itself. Freed from its grip, the hunter ran away, leaving both his dog and his rifle in the forest. He came home exhausted and lay down on the porch. Some time later the dog returned, its hide torn to shreds, and seeing its master asleep, it attacked and strangled him. "For hunting, the Mordva kept greyhounds or hounds specially. In winter he would deliberately go out hunting to run down hares, foxes, and wolves..." ("The Mordva," p. 71).
Today everything has changed. Deliberately or not, people are destroying the fauna, forgetting that the Most High Lord — or Ineshkipaz — has charged humankind with the duty of preserving and multiplying all that surrounds us. Decades of improper use of fertilizers have destroyed the gudgeons and minnows in the river. We used to catch them with homemade fishing tackle: the hook was made from copper wire, there was no fishing line — just ordinary white thread — the float was carved from wood, and the rod handle was cut from hazel. Small fish used to bite eagerly on a worm. Compare that with modern rods — and even with those we cannot catch any fish.
On the steep banks there used to be many swift nests; bats have disappeared and been destroyed; swallows are no longer seen. These birds caught flies and mosquitoes — there used to be fewer of those than today, and some of them are carriers of disease.
The generations that came before us helped wild animals and birds to survive; if people had not destroyed them, they would have survived on their own — nature created them that way. I was fortunate enough to spend about twenty-five years with my grandfather; other people's grandfathers died of hunger in the hungry year of 1944. I will never forget how he scolded my brother, Ivan Nikiforovich, for not leaving a single cluster of rowan berries for the birds in autumn. We always laid in a supply of rowan berries for winter. All our lives we have left fruit on the upper branches of the orchard trees for the birds. Today hunters could pile hay in the forests — hay prepared in summer — for the elk; they could clear springs for the wild boar, wolves, foxes, and hares; one could give many examples of how to help them survive and thrive. Today's hunters (and they are not from our village) use for hunting everything imaginable: snowmobiles, mobile phones, electric fishing devices. Tomorrow they will put to use micro-aircraft with video cameras — the technology deployed for military purposes will be turned against wild animals. Nowadays in winter there are no hare tracks to be seen in the snow.
Bears disappeared long ago; the forest has been felled over large areas, and for this reason owls are no longer seen either. Our forests are connected with the forests of Sarov, where bears still live to this day.
Dwellings
Research by domestic scholars has established that the original form of permanent dwelling was the pit-house type, which developed along the following progression: pit-house — semi-pit-house — above-ground log construction. The last two types may have developed in parallel. The most ancient and simplest in plan was the single-chamber dwelling (kudo). The later forms were four-sided log izbas of varying sizes, layouts, and degrees of complexity. In practice it is precisely these that have survived to the present day: wooden, log-built, with a post-foundation structure.
Until 1965, straw served as the roofing material. In many photographs taken by D.Ya. Diveykhin during those years, surviving thatched roofs can be seen. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, houses were heated "in the black" manner — stoves were built without chimneys to carry the smoke out; just below the ceiling there was an opening, but the smoke could not fully escape that way, and double doors were installed to help draw it out. When the stove was lit, the outer door (the full height of the doorway) was opened while the inner door (half the height of the doorway) remained closed.
Here is what was written by Milyayeva Yevdokiya Yevdokimovna, born in 1897, a resident of our village: "My father's house had no chimney, and neither did the others' — Bashayev Andrey's, Pepel Dmitry's. The smoke came out into the living space. The family was large. The house was cold." And here is another account. From the newspaper Kolkhoznaya tribuna (Collective Farm Tribune), dated November 25, 1972: "Here, for instance, is what Natalya Semyonovna Turshatova, a pensioner, says about those same houses: 'Before, the housing was plain and poor; the stoves were fired in the black manner — smoke came out through the doors. Thirty-five of us lived in such an izba — from old to young. Five brothers with their wives, a father-in-law and mother-in-law, and every one of them with a heap of children. We slept on the floor; in cold weather the livestock were kept there too. We ate our meals on the floor as well, since there wasn't enough room at the table.'"
Until the mid-twentieth century, houses with shutters — a feature characteristic of Ukraine — could still be found in the village.