Russian literature. A 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