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Tales From Another Country: Fictional Treatments of the Russian Peasantry, 1847–1861

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Jenny Woodhouse
Jenny Woodhouse
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
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Extract

In 1846 a story entitled ‘Derevnia’ (The Village) appeared in the Russian press. It was the account of the life of a young peasant woman, from her birth, through her upbringing as an unwanted orphan, her unsuitable marriage staged to satisfy the whim of the landowner's wife, her sufferings at the hands of her husband's family, to her decline and early death. The story aroused the ire of Slavophil critics: ‘In it is assembled all the coarseness, outrage and harshness, that can be found in peasant customs. But what is striking is not specific details, but the profound lack of feeling and complete lack of moral sense in the whole way of life.’ It was praised by the radical Westernist critic V.G. Belinsky no less profusely than it was attacked by the Slavophil Yu. S. Samarin, not for its literary merits but for its truth to life: ‘[Grigorovich] displayed here much observation and knowledge of real life and succeeded in demonstrating both the former and the latter in simple, honest, true images, with remarkable talent.’

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , October 1991 , pp. 171 - 186
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

Notes

References to specific editions are given only where page references are necessary, or where a writer is little known and little reprinted. After the first reference to each author discussed, the dates of publication of each piece mentioned will be given in brackets in the text.

1 Grigorovich, D.V., ‘Derevnia’ (The Village), (1846), in Polnoe sobranie sochineniia v 12 tomakh, (St Petersburg, 1896).Google Scholar

2 Samarin, Yu. F., ‘O mneniiakh Sovremennika … ‘, Moskvitianin, I, 1847, and Sochineniya (St Petersburg, 1900), I, 77.Google Scholar

3 Belinsky, V.G., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, (Moscow, 1953–1959), X, 321.Google Scholar

4 Turgenev, I.S., Zapiski okhotnika (book publication, 1852), has been translated into English by Richard Freeborn (Sketches from a Hunter's Album), (Harmondsworth, 1967).Google Scholar

5 Prutskov, N.I. et al. , Istoriia russkoi literatury (Leningrad, 1982), pp. 619–20.Google Scholar

6 This argument has been greatly influenced by the concepts of ‘structure of feeling’ and ‘social character’ developed by Williams, Raymond in Chapter 2 of The Long Revolution (London, 1961)Google Scholar, although, as I have suggested, Williams' model is not totally applicable to the kind of work under discussion.

7 Druzhinin, A.V., Povesti, dnevnik (Moscow, 1986), p. 150.Google Scholar

8 Gogol', N.V., Vybrannye mesta iz perepiski s druźiami (1847).Google Scholar

9 Belinsky, , P.S.S., X, 217.Google Scholar

10 Radishchev, A.N., Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu (A Journey from Petersburg to Moscow), (1790).Google Scholar

11 Karamzin, N.M., Bednaia Liza (1792).Google Scholar

12 Sollogub, V.A., Tarantas (1845).Google Scholar

13 Pushkin, A.S., Istoriia sela Goriukhina, (1830).Google Scholar

14 Gogol', N.V., Shinel (The Overcoat), (1841).Google Scholar

15 The Russian ‘physiological sketch’ was a genre derived directly and deliberately from French examples. Dickens' Sketches by Boz derive from the same source. For an account of the genre in Russia see Kuleshov, V.I., Natural naia shkola v literature XIX veka (Moscow, 1965).Google Scholar

16 Annenkov, P.V., ‘Romany i rasskazy iz krest'ianskogo byta v 1853m godu’ (Novels and stories of peasant life), Sovremennik, 2 and 3, 1854.Google Scholar

17 Pisemsky, A.F., Sobranie sochineniia (Moscow, 1982–1984).Google Scholar

18 Potekhin, A.A., Sochineniia (St Petersburg, 1896).Google Scholar

19 For instance, François le Champi (the name denotes an infant abandoned in the fields), expresses his support for his protector, a miller's wife, thus: ‘Comment pouvez-vous penser que je manquerai de coeur pur vous consoler et vous soutenir? Est-ce que je ne suis pas votre serviteur pour tant que j'ai à rester sur terre? Est-ce que je ne suis pas votre enfant qui travaillera pour vous, et qui a bien assez de force à cette heure pour ne vous laisser manquer de rien …’ (Sand, Georges, François le Champi, Editions de Poche, (Paris, 1983), pp. 92–3.Google Scholar

20 The most obvious model for formal sophistication is Lermontov's Geroi nashego vremeni (A Hero of our Time), a psychological puzzle which is explored through a series of varied narratives, their sequence designed to provide layers of character analysis rather than to chart events chronologically.

21 Avdeev, M.V., ‘Ognennyi zmei’, Otechestvennye zapiski (1853), 86.Google Scholar

22 Grigorovich, D.V., Literaturnye vospominaniia (Moscow, 1961), p. 135.Google Scholar

23 Review of ‘Smedovskaia dolina’, Moskvitianin, 1852, I, 86.Google Scholar

24 Dal', V.I., Tolkovyi slovaŕ russkogo iazyka (St Petersburg, 1861–1868).Google Scholar

25 Gogol', N.V., ‘Kak ssorilsia Ivan Ivanovich s Ivanom Nikiforovichem’, in Mirgorod, 1835.Google Scholar

26 Kokorev, I.T., ‘Savvushka’, 1852, in Sochineniia, (Moscow, 1956).Google Scholar

27 Dal', V.I., ‘Russkii muzhik’, 1846, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, (St Petersburg/Moscow, 1898).Google Scholar

28 Tolstoi, L.N., Utro pomeshchika, 1856.Google Scholar

29 Even such an undoubted radical as A.I. Herzen did not liberate his serfs (see, e.g., Semevskii, V.I., Krest'ianskii vopros v Rossii v XVII i pervoi polovine XIX veka (St Petersburg, 1888), II, 307Google Scholar), so it is hardly surprising to find that the writers of fiction under consideration, none of whom gave much evidence of political awareness, did not do so. A.F. Pisemsky wrote to his friend the playwright A.N. Ostrovsky in 1855 asking him to send a servant to Pisemsky's estate and ask Gerasim (described as a rogue) to forward the obrok due (Pisemsky, A.F., Piśma, (Moscow/Leningrad, 1934) p. 84).Google Scholar

30 Moskvitianin's harshest attack on Grigorovich is Samarin's (note 3). Later the journal softened. For instance, the review cited in note 23 mentions the earlier ‘unattractiveness of [Grigorovich's] gloomy and sick figures’, and sees some improvement as Grigorovich's acquaintance with peasant life has removed his ‘blindfold’, although he is still blamed for undue literariness and too much dependence on Georges Sand as a model.

31 Semevskii, Krest'ianskii vopros, vol. II, passim.Google Scholar

32 The planning and implementation of the Emancipation settlement radically changed perceptions of the peasants. Barely a decade after A Sportsman's Sketches, Bazarov, the radical intellectual of Turgenev's Fathers and Children, finds them stubborn and intractable. Indeed a novel of Druzhinin's shows a landowner reduced to negotiating with peasants as (almost) equals (see Woodhouse, J., ‘Proshloe leto v derevne: A.V. Druzhinin's depiction of the Emancipation year’, Slavonic and East European Review, LXVI, 1, 1988Google Scholar).