Ordinary peasant utensils will be presented in this lecture as carriers of hidden meanings, fears, and rules of everyday life. The conversation will focus on the symbolic language of things, their role in relationships between people, and why familiar objects in Russian culture could be perceived as sources of power, anxiety, and even danger. Household utensils usually seem to be something extremely understandable: things serve people, help in daily life, accompany everyday existence, and rarely make one think about them for more than a few seconds. This lecture offers a different perspective on familiar items - as participants in cultural history, carriers of meanings and signs, capable of telling much about human perceptions, fears, prohibitions, and ways of building relationships with the surrounding world. At the center of the discussion will be the symbolic language of things in Russian culture. The talk will address why objects begin to 'speak' at all, how people learn to read their meanings, and how material properties influence the place of an object in social life. Special attention will be given to questions that sound particularly captivating: why some objects were considered safe and everyday, while others could be perceived as dangerous for the owner, family, or home. Through such narratives, everyday reality is revealed from an unexpected angle - as a space where behind every action, form, and purpose there may hide an entire layer of mythological and cultural representations. The lecture will be conducted by Dmitry Baranov - a candidate of historical sciences and head of the department of ethnography of the Russian people at the Russian Ethnographic Museum. Such experience is especially important for the discussion of material culture: here, deep knowledge of sources is needed, as well as the ability to connect a specific item with a broader context of folk beliefs, social rituals, and historical memory. Thanks to this, listeners will be able to see behind simple things a complex system of views, in which utensils were part not only of everyday life but also of the symbolic order.