My parents are from the village. My dad is a pilot, my mom is a math teacher. Dad was sent to work in the northern city of Ukhta. I grew up there. But Dad always wanted to return to the village.
In 1996, a friend gave us the first book "Anastasia" to read, and Dad, Mom and I liked it immediately.
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I became fully "village" 15 years ago, when we were expecting our first child. In order to carry a healthy baby, I moved to the village to live permanently. After a while, I noticed that sometimes people who live in the city have a condescending attitude towards country people. They consider themselves something better, as if it is more prestigious to live in the city, and the one who lives in the city is smarter, more successful and more developed because of it. It was only after moving to the countryside that I realized that this is complete nonsense.
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This was the image our parents were indoctrinated with to get them to leave the villages. I remembered myself as a little girl and my own similar feelings. Coming from the city, I was really somewhere deep down proud in front of the villagers that I was somehow special, urban.
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The first time I thought about my inadequacy as a city person was when I was a student. We were visiting my grandmother and decided to go to the woods with the neighbor kids to light a fire. Before that, my cousin and I went to the woodstove and took some wood with us. We had to see the faces of the village boys when they saw that we were carrying firewood into the forest! At the same time, my brother and I were very successful in the city, we both went to cool schools and got very good grades.
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That's when I thought I should marry a countryman. That, unfortunately, city people are, by and large, disconnected from life. And so it turned out, when we met my husband, I found out that he was a villager. Now we live in the kin’s domain. And often, when children ask questions about nature, animals, history, geography and many, many other things, I say: "Children, ask daddy, he knows exactly". My theoretical knowledge, once rated with A's, doesn't fit here.
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A couple of years ago, grandchildren who came to their grandmothers on vacation in our kin’s settlement, suddenly out of the blue began to tease my daughter "redneck". Despite the fact that objectively my daughter is better developed than them.
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She plays the violin, draws, thinks quickly and in general treats people kindly, she has no need to call someone names to assert herself. By the way, she did not take offense at them, she just wondered what had come over them, because in her head she does not divide people into rural and urban. She likes to live in the kin’s settlement, but she feels at ease in the city. And then I thought about the falsity of these notions - "urban" and "village". That these images are transmitted through movies. It's as if country people are always drunk, stupid and unkempt. On the contrary, we should still learn neatness from the villagers. The habit of sweeping snow off their shoes before entering the house is worth it!
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And now people who are creating kin’s domains are changing this image. Having been successful in the city, they realized the importance of living in harmony with nature, of daily contact with the land and moved to the kin’s settlements to create kin’s domains.
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But even here the templates work - "we are not like the village, we are better". But village is a very good word from the word "tree". Wood is what gives us energy, gives us life. To live in a wooden house and among trees is to have constant contact with the outside world, with the cosmos.
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"It is not the place that adorns a man, but the man the place", "To live in the village is to be rich!" - are forgotten Russian proverbs. Treat the people living in the village, and you can learn a lot from them: worldly wisdom, practical skills of life on the land. And with surprise you will notice that in many matters they are even smarter than you.
Author: Polina Aleksandrova, Aleksandrov kin’s domain, Perm Region.
