“Recently rediscovered, and featured at numerous women's film festivals, The Peasant Women Of Ryazan is remarkable on three levels. First, as a solid, well-paced narrative in the best story-telling 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 look, behavior, and folkways of peasant life in Central Russia: on this level, the film is of some ethnographic interest, but more importantly, the attention given to deeply rooted customs helps explain why old and oppressive mores should not be viewed schematically as feudal attitudes sure to vanish when the new social order arrives. Finally, in its development of the story of two women driven out of their homes by reactionary reprisals from parental authorities, The Peasant Women Of Ryazan offers a proto-feminist critique emerging from a powerful and complex social tragedy, in which man as oppressor and woman as oppressed are both victims of society.”