Russian literature. A short introduction

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.

The sense of rural devastation, of what was often termed the ‘bestialization of the people’, prompted a search for the picturesque in the far North of Russia, which had remained relatively untouched by serfdom and which was saved by its remoteness from the seasonal migration to cities that had (in the eyes of many Populists) tainted the regions nearer to Moscow and St Petersburg with urban ways. It was here above all that folklore collectors searched for the rituals, celebrations, spells, songs, and tales that they believed preserved traditions stretching back to pre-Christian times. But the region