This is a kind of saga that covers the lives of several generations of women from the same family from the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th century. To recreate the fate of the heroines who lived on the Upper Volga and in St. Petersburg-Petrograd, the author was helped not only by family traditions, but also by confessional murals and revision fairy tales. Sometimes historical documents come into conflict with our current understanding of what the structure of life was like in those days, but facts are a stubborn thing, and the heroines themselves reveal a difficult character. How else can we withstand hard peasant labor, epidemics, wars, frequent childbirth, or even accidental happiness?