A people's tragedy

Long before the Populists came on to the scene, Slavophile writers had argued for the moral superiority of the ‘ancient’ peasant commune over modern Western values. ‘A commune’, wrote Konstantin Aksakov, ‘is a union of the people who have renounced their egoism, their individuality, and who express their common accord; this is an act of love, a noble Christian act.’ Similar virtues were attributed to the peasants by the great romantic writers of the nineteenth century. Dostoevsky, for example, claimed that the simple Russian peasant — the ‘kitchen muzhik’ as he once called him in a famous dispute — lived on a higher moral plane than the more sophisticated citizens of Western Europe. The peasants, he had written in his Diary of a Writer, were truly Christian and long-suffering. It was they who would ‘show us a new road, a new way out of all our apparently insoluble difficulties. For it will not be St Petersburg that finally settles the Russian destiny … Light and salvation will come from below.’ Tolstoy also saw the simple peasant as a natural sage. Thus it is from the peasants that Prince Levin learns how to live in Anna Karenina; just as in War and Peace it is from Karataev, a humble Russian peasant, that Pierre Bezukhov comes to understand the spiritual meaning of life. Karataev’s character — spontaneous, direct and unselfconscious — was a projection of Tolstoy’s own moral philosophy. He lived in harmony with the world and humanity.5

These romantic visions of the peasantry were constantly undone by contact with reality, often with devastating consequences for their bearers. The Populists, who invested much of themselves in their conception of the peasants, suffered the most in this respect, since the disintegration of that conception threatened to undermine not only their radical beliefs but also their own self-identity. The writer Gleb Uspensky, to cite an extreme and tragic example, drove himself insane after years of trying to reconcile his romantic view of the peasants with the ugly reality of human relations which he was forced to observe in the countryside. Many of the ‘realist’ writers of the 1860s, who described the darker side of the countryside, ended up as alcoholics. There was a general sense of Angst amongst the liberal educated classes whenever the hard facts of peasant life disturbed their idealized images of it. Witness the storm of debate caused by the unflattering portrait of village life in Chekhov’s Peasants (1897), the short story of a sick Moscow waiter who returns with his wife to his native village, only to find that his poverty-stricken family resents him for bringing another set of mouths to feed. Or the even greater public outrage at the publication of Bunin’s novella The Village (1910), which spared nothing in its dark portrayal of peasant poverty and cruelty. ‘What stunned the Russian reader in this book’, a contemporary critic remarked, ‘was not the depiction of the [peasants’] material, cultural and legal poverty … but the realization that there was no escape from it … The most that the Russian peasant, as depicted by Bunin, was capable of achieving … was only the awareness of his hopeless savagery, of being doomed.’6

Gorky wrote about The Village that it had forced society to think ‘seriously not just about the peasant but about the grave question of whether Russia was to be or not to be?’7 The enigma of the peasant stood at the heart of the problem of Russia’s national self-identity. The ‘Peasant Question’ was the starting point of all those interminable debates (they fill the largely unread pages of nineteenth-century Russian novels) about the future of Russia itself.