Russian literature. A short introduction

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