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4.4 - The Peasant

from History 4 - Heroes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 December 2024

By
Alexey Vdovin
Edited by
Simon Franklin ,
Rebecca Reich  and
Emma Widdis
Simon Franklin
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Rebecca Reich
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Emma Widdis
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

The peasant as a protagonist in Russian literature emerged in the late eighteenth century in comic operas and Nikolai Karamzin’s short fiction. By the 1850s, the genre of ‘stories from the life of peasants’ had become widespread, and included the depiction of Ukrainian peasants. Its popularity hinged on the fact that peasant ‘other’ came to serve as an idealised image of national character. This chapter focuses in most detail on the period between the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and the Russian Revolution in 1917, when the models used for depicting peasants were most diverse, and the ‘grey muzhik’, or average peasant, featured in the work of many writers. Under Stalin, the free-labour peasant disappeared from Russian literature due to collectivisation and repressions, only to re-emerge in the Village Prose of the late Soviet period as writers transformed citizens of collective farms into nostalgic images of a lost Russia.

Keywords

protagonicitypeasants in fictionethnographismpeasant voicepeasant mindserfspeasant subjectivity
Type
Chapter
Information
The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature , pp. 737 - 755
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Glickman, R., ‘An alternative view of the peasantry: The raznochintsy writers of the 1860s’, Slavic Review 32.4 (1973), 693–704.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herman, D., Poverty of the Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature about the Poor (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herzberg, J., Gegenarchive: Bäuerliche Autobiographik zwischen Zarenreich und Sowjetunion [Counter-archives: Peasant autobiography between the tsarist empire and the Soviet Union] (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2014).Google Scholar
Ivanits, L., Dostoevsky and the Russian People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).Google Scholar
Masing-Delic, I., ‘Philosophy, myth and art in Turgenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album’, Russian Review 50.4 (1991), 437–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ogden, A., ‘Fashioning a folk identity: The “peasant-poet” tradition in Russia (Lomonsov, Kol'tsov, Kliuev)’, Intertexts 5.1 (2001), 32–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Razuvalova, A., Pisateli-‘derevenshchiki’: Literatura i konservativnaia ideologiia 1970-kh godov [‘Derevenshchik’ authors: Literature and conservative ideology of the 1970s] (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2015).Google Scholar
Vdovin, A. V., ‘“Nevedomyi mir”: Russkaia i evropeickaia estetika i problema reprezentatsii krest'ian v literature serediny XIX veka’ [‘Unknown world’: Russian and European aesthetics and the problem of representing peasants in mid-nineteenth century literature], Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie [New literary review] 146 (2016), 287–315.Google Scholar
Woodhouse, J., ‘A landlord’s sketches? D. V. Grigorovic and peasant genre fiction’, Journal of European Studies 16.4 (1986), 271–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Woodhouse, J., ‘Tales from another country: Fictional treatments of the Russian peasantry, 1847–1861’, Rural History 2.2 (1991), 171–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Woodhouse, J., ‘Pisemsky’s Sketches from Peasant Life: An attempt at a non-partisan reading’, in Offord, Derek (ed.), The Golden Age of Russian Literature and Thought: Selected Papers from the Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, Harrogate, 1990 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992), pp. 84–102.Google Scholar
Zink, A., Wie aus Bauern Russen wurden: Die Konstruktion des Volkes in der Literatur des Russischen Realismus 1860–1880 [How peasants became Russians: The construction of the folk in Russian Realist literature 1860–1880] (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 2009).Google Scholar

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