Why Did Russians Sleep on Top of the Stove? A Winter in 1898

Northern Kostroma province, winter 1898: one room for the whole family and, in a corner, a huge block of clay with no chimney. We spend the winter in a peasant izba to find out why Russians slept on top of the stove.

Smoke drifting out through a hole in the roof, pots kept hot in the oven until supper, a calf by the door, washing and sweating inside the oven, and who slept on the stove, on the polati (a platform under the ceiling) and on the golbets (a wooden box built against the stove). A village teacher wrote it all down in the late 1890s; he even copied into his notebook the logging contracts signed in the late summer and autumn of 1898 for that winter.