This song is rather old; the original text goes back to 1861 and is a fragment of a poem written by Nikolai Nekrasov, a famous Russian poet. The music was written later, around 1898.

In this song, a peddler tries to seduce a village girl to buy his goods (calico and brocade). It is unclear from the song whether he succeeded or not, although in the original poem he gives her his goods as a gift and plans to marry her after all.

For me, it is just one of the very old Russian folk songs which I've heard thousands of times starting from my early childhood. I was very surprised, of course, that this song/music turned out to be quite popular.

It is always difficult to explain, why a song becomes so popular. Perhaps, it was a lucky combination of the text and music; the role of the music maybe was even more important, although the composer (Yakov Prigozhy) is now totally forgotten. Several other composers tried to make songs based on this text, but it did not work at all.

I cannot say what this song means to me... I, my parents, and also their parents heard this song many times since our childhood, and I just take it for granted.

I am a chemical engineer from Moscow, Russia. In 2001 I was invited to the University of Twente and since then I work partly at the UT and partly in a spin-off company of the UT called Encontech B.V.