In this article, we will talk about how young peasant girls lived with landowners. Life, of course, according to all, but a lot can be guessed only by remembering that with any treatment of serfs, the landowner remained unpunished. Saltychikha and a couple more high-profile cases - this is all that the tsarist office work was capable of, and that because the cases were egregious. And you can learn about what was happening on the estates only by reading the memoirs of the gentlemen, published after death.
For example, Mrs. Pozdnyakova, a St. Petersburg landowner, organized something like a boarding house for noble maidens on her estate. She took from a dozen beautiful and slender peasant girls to her estate, where teachers taught them to read, manners, dance and everything that a noble girl should know. Only now the future of these girls was not entirely noble, like the thoughts of Madame Pozdnyakova: at the age of fifteen she was selling girls. Reasonable - to decent houses as maids, and beautiful - to decent gentlemen for pleasure. They say that the landowner earned good money.
As for the landowners, many eyewitnesses report that the harem of courtyard girls was a certain indicator of the master's status as a good kennel. For example, the Ryazan landowner Gagarin just loved hound hunting and young peasant women. In a separate room he kept up to ten girls and two gypsies who taught these same girls songs and dances: apparently, Gagarin also loved amateur performances. I alone think that no one asked the courtyard girls about their preferences in love and music?
There were, of course, cases that attracted the attention of the public and the investigating authorities. For example, the rather well-known general Lev Dmitrievich Izmailov not only got himself a harem of thirty girls, but also quite willingly shared them with his high-ranking guests. The girls were kept under lock and key so as not to run away, only occasionally taking them out for a walk. Such, you know, the padishah of the middle lane.
But it looked even more wild that the drunken guests of Izmailov, not finding what they wanted in his harem, broke into peasant huts and easily took girls and married women for themselves. The peasants in one Izmailovo village had the audacity to refuse uninvited guests and were, without exception, whipped.
Izmailov was charged not only in the case of girls, but also in the case of cruel treatment of serfs. And what do you think he was? - Yes, nothing: the estate was taken under guardianship, and Izmailov remained to live in it.
The impunity of the landlords gave rise to arbitrariness. Another high-profile case was associated with the name of the landowner Strashinsky. This brave man did not leave chaste any of his peasant serfs. Some cases were so egregious that today they would have been given life in prison. But Strashinsky was punished not for this, but for the fact that he gave perjury about a young peasant woman who ran away from a neighbor's landowner, whom he sheltered in his bedroom. And on other matters he was "left in suspicion." It was decided to take away his estate from Strashinsky, but not all of them were recorded on him, so the master did not remain without his corner.