Joel Adlen on Piano

(Baby ryazanskiye). Peasant Women of Ryazan is remarkable on three levels. First, as a solid, well-paced narrative in the best storytelling traditions of the melodramatic pre-Revolutionary cinema: from the first few scenes, the film holds the spectator in a firm emotional grip. Secondly, it succeeds in capturing the peasant folkways of Central Russia (it was popular in Western Europe as an ethnographic glimpse of an exotic culture). Finally, in its story of two women driven out of their homes by reactionary reprisals from parental authorities, Peasant Women offers a protofeminist critique emerging from a powerful and complex social tragedy, in which man as oppressor and woman as oppressed are both victims of society.