Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

But the actual daily life of the Russian peasantry – beset by disease, poverty, poor to non-existent education, and (before 1861) enserfment – did not incline writers to witty brilliance. On the contrary, from the late eighteenth century, Russian literature had a sentimental preoccupation with the sufferings of the Russian peasantry at the hands of cruel or callous landowners. The customary symbol of the dashing Russian officer as the romantic pioneer of civilization in the Caucasus had its antipode in the figure of the exploited lower-class woman, as evoked in, say, Karamzin’s story Poor Liza (1792), showing a peasant girl betrayed by a selfish young man from the upper classes. To be sure, Pushkin’s story ‘The Station-Master’ in his Tales of Belkin (1829) suggested that the relationship between an upper-class man and his mistress from ‘the people’ might be based on affect and mutual contentment rather than one-sided exploitation. But this was, from the point of view of the Russian radicals who began to dominate Russian literary production in the 1840s, not a tenable suggestion. Indeed, in the 1840s and 1850s serfdom was seen even by some conservatives as an institution that was intrinsically wrong. And in 1851, the radical poet Nikolai Nekrasov, the most talented among politically committed authors of verse, made a degraded and beaten peasant woman the symbol of his verse and emblem of his social sympathy:

But early lay heavy upon me the shackles

Of another, untender and unloved Muse,

Of the sad travelling-companion of sad beggars,

Beggars born for struggle, suffering, and labour –

Of a weeping, lamenting and hurting Muse,

Perpetually hungry, pleading in degradation,

Whose only idol was gold.

The Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861 did not mitigate the emphasis on rural misery but rather enhanced it. To be sure, some writers, such as Tolstoy, took a Utopian view of the new relationship between landowners and peasants. The scenes on Lyovin’s estate in Anna Karenina (1876–8) show the patriarchal peasant household as a model for a successful family in which husband and wife have complementary and fulfilled lives. Two decades before, in his ‘Landowner’s Morning’ (1851), Tolstoy had shown an enthusiastic young Russian gentleman trying to introduce rational work methods to his serfs: now Lyovin learned from his freed peasants not only how to mow, but also how to look at life. Having been unable to allay his suicidal frustration by studying philosophy and theology in books, Lyovin was finally set on the path to equilibrium by hearing of the attitude to life of an old peasant who ‘lived for his soul and remembered God’.

But eulogization of rural life was possible only in conditions where peasants’ land-holdings afforded them a tolerable existence. The chaotic process of land reform not only bankrupted many landowners who had lived on estate incomes before 1861, but also subjected peasants to economic uncertainty, leaving some worse off than they had been before the reforms. A single bad season could spell destitution and famine. All of this was observed at close quarters by the educated employees of the new post-Emancipation institutions of rural administration, the zemstva, such as doctors and teachers, many of whom were sympathetic to Populism (Narodnichestvo), a movement aimed at bringing education and political enlightenment to ‘the people’ but also (and paradoxically) at preserving the traditional practices and values of peasant life. A flowering of ethnography (the systematic collection of folklore and recording of material culture and daily life) was accompanied by a burgeoning of fiction rich in ethnographical detail, but also in social pessimism. The critical-realist stories of writers such as Gleb Uspensky, Nikolay Uspensky, Valentina Dmitrieva, and later Vsevolod Garshin, Vladimir Korolenko, and Ekaterina Letkova, painted an unremittingly bleak portrait of the Russian village. The degradation represented was so extreme that it raised questions about how this could possibly be mitigated by social reforms. A later and particularly grim example of this tradition was Chekhov’s story ‘The Peasants’, which went down extremely badly with populists of a more idealistic colouration, such as Tolstoy. In Chekhov’s imaginary village, with its rubbish-strewn stream, squalid huts, and brutal human relationships, the only event distracting from the daily grind was an annual religious procession, received with a pious and hysterical fervour that had absolutely no relevance to the tenor of life for the remainder of the year. Significantly, the only ‘human’ characters in the story were a waiter and his family who had returned from years of life in the city.