It was such a vision that inspired the students to go to the people. Brought up as they were in the European world of the noble palace and the university, they were on a journey to an unknown land and a new and moral life based on 'Russian principles'. They saw the emancipation as an exorcism of Russia's sinful past - and out of that a new nation would be born. The writer Gleb Uspensky, who joined the Populists in their 'going to the people', vowed to start a new life in 'the year of' 61'. 'It was utterly impossible to take any of my personal past forward… To live at all I had to forget the past entirely and erase all the traits which it had instilled in my own personality.'4
Some of the Populists who left their parents' homes to live in labouring communes' where everything was shared (sometimes including lovers) according to the principles set out by the radical critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky in his seminal novel What Is to Be Done (1862). Here was a novel that offered its readers a blueprint of the new society. It became a bible for the revolutionaries, including the young Lenin, who said that his whole life had been transformed by it. Most of these communes soon broke down: the students could not bear the strains of agricultural work, let alone the taste of peasant food, and there were endless squabbles over property and love affairs. But the spirit of the commune, the ascetic lifestyle and material-ist beliefs which the students had imbibed from Chernyshevsky,
continued to inspire their rejection of the old society. This generation gap was the subject of Turgenev's novel Fathers and Children (1862) (often mistranslated as Fathers and Sons). It was set in the student protest culture of the early 1860s when the call of youth for direct action in the people's name opened up a conflict with the 'men of the forties', liberal men of letters like Turgenev and Herzen, who were content to criticize the existing state of affairs without addressing the future. Nineteenth-century Russia had its 'sixties' movement, too.
'The peasants have completely overwhelmed us in our literature', wrote Turgenev to Pavel Annenkov in 1858. 'Yet I am beginning to suspect that we still don't really understand them or anything about their lives.'5 Turgenev's doubts were at the heart of his critique of the student 'nihilists' (as they were called). But they applied equally to the intelligentsia's obsession with the 'peasant question', which dominated Russian culture after 1861. With the emancipation of the serfs, the rest of society was forced to recognize the peasant as a fellow citizen. Suddenly the old accursed questions about Russia's destiny became bound up with the peasant's true identity. Was he good or bad? Could he be civilized? What could he do for Russia? And where did he come from? No one knew the answers. For, in the famous lines of the poet Nekrasov:
Russia is contained in the rural depths Where eternal silence reigns.6
Armies of folklorists set out to explore these rural depths. 'The study of the people is the science of our times', declared Fedor Buslaev in 1868.7 Ethnographic museums were set up in Moscow and St Petersburg - their aim being, in the words of one of their founders, Ivan Beliaev, 'to acquaint the Russians with their own nation'.8 The public was astounded by the peasant costumes and utensils on display, the photographs and mock-ups of their living quarters in the various regions of the countryside. They seemed to have come from some exotic colony. In almost every field of serious enquiry - geography, philosophy, theology, philology, mythology and archaeology - the question of the peasant was the question of the day.
SERF ARTISTS. Nikolai Argunov: Portrait of Praskovya Sheremeteva (1802). At the time of this portrait the serf singer's marriage to Count Sheremetev (whose image is depicted in the miniature) was concealed from the public and the court. Argunov was the first Russian artist of serf origin to be elected to the Imperial icademy of Arts.
IMAGES OF DOMESTICITY.
Left: Vasily Tropinin: Portrait of Pushkin (1827). Wearing a khalat, the writer is portrayed as a European gentleman yet perfectly at ease with the customs of his native land.
Below: Alexei Venetsianov: Morning of the Lady of the Manor (1823), a picture of what Herzen called the 'feudal bond of affection' between the noble family and its household serfs.
RUSSIAN PASTORAL. Above: Venetsianov: In the Ploughed Field: Spring
1827), an idealized depiction of the female agricultural labourer in traditional Russian dress. Below: Vasily Perov: Hunters at Rest (1871). Like Turgenev, Perov portrays hunting as a recreation that brought the social classes together. Here the squire (left) and the peasant (right) share their food and drink.
MOSCOW RETROSPECT. Above: The Kremlin's Terem Palace
restored in the1850s by Fedor Solntsev in the seventeenth-century Muscovite
style, complete with tiled ovens and kokoshnik-shapedarches. Below: Vasily
Surikov: The Boyar's Wife Morozova (1884). The faces were all drawn by
Surikov from Old Believers living in Moscow.
The Faberge Workshop in Moscow crafted objects in a Russian style that was very different from the Classical and Rococo jewels it made in Petersburg. Above: Imperial Presentation Kovsh (an ancient type of ladle) in green nephrite, gold, enamel and diamonds, presented by the Tsar Nicholas II to the French Ambassador in 1906. Below: Silversiren vase by Sergei Vashkov (1908). The female bird wears a kokoshnik and her
wings are set with tourmalines.
THE ARTIST AND THE PEOPLE'S
CAUSE. Ilya Repin's Portrait of Vladimir Stasov (1873), the nationalist critic whose dogmatic views on the need for art to engage with the people were a towering and, at times, oppressive influence on Musorgsky and Repin. 'What a picture of the Master you have made!' the composer wrote. 'He seems to crawl out of the canvas and into the room.' Below: Repin: The Volga Barge Haulers (1873,). Stasov saw the painting as a commen- tary on the latent force of social protest in the Russian people. Opposite: Ivan Kramskoi: The Peasant Ignatii Pirogov (1874) - a startlingly ethnographic portrait of the peasant as an individual human being.
Leon Bakst: Portrait of Diaghilev with his Nanny (1906). Diaghilev had never known his mother, who had died when he was born.
Writers, too, immersed themselves in peasant life. In the words of Saltykov-Shchedrin, the peasant had become 'the hero of our time'.9 The literary image of the Russian peasant in the early nineteenth century was by and large a sentimental one: he was a stock character with human feelings rather than a thinking individual. Everything changed in 1852, with the publication of Turgenev's masterpiece, Sketches from a Hunter's Album. Here, for the first time in Russian literature, readers were confronted with the image of the peasant as a rational human being, as opposed to the sentient victim depicted in previous sentimental literature. Turgenev portrayed the peasant as a person capable of both practical administration and lofty dreams. He felt a profound sympathy for the Russian serf. His mother, who had owned the large estate in Orel province where he grew up, was cruel and ruthless in punishing her serfs. She had them beaten or sent off to a penal colony in Siberia - often for some minor crime. Turgenev describes her regime in his terrifying story 'Punin and Barburin' (1874), and also in the unforgettable 'Mumu' (1852), where the princess has a serf's dog shot because it barks. Sketches from a Hunter's Album played a crucial role in changing public attitudes towards the serfs and the question of reform. Turgenev later said that the proudest moment in his life came shortly after 1861, when two peasants approached him on a train from Orel to Moscow and bowed down to the ground in the Russian manner to 'thank him in the name of the whole people'.10
Of all those writing about peasants, none was more inspiring to
the Populists than Nikolai Nekrasov. Nekrasov's poetry gave a new, authentic voice to the 'vengeance and the sorrow' of the peasantry. It was most intensely heard in his epic poem Who Is Happy in Russia? (1863-78), which became a holy chant among the Populists. What attracted them to Nekrasov's poetry was not just its commitment to
the people's cause, but its angry condemnation of the gentry class, from which Nekrasov himself came. His verse was littered with colloquial expressions that were taken directly from peasant s
peech. Poems such as On the Road (1844) or The Peddlers (1861) were practically tran-scriptions of peasant dialogue. The men of the forties, such as Turg-enev, who were brought up to regard the language of the peasants as too coarse to be 'art', accused Nekrasov of launching an 'assault on poetry'.11 But the students were inspired by his verse.
The question of the peasant may have been the question of the day. But every answer was a myth. As Dostoevsky wrote:
The question of the people and our view of them… is our most important question, a question on which our whole future rests… But the people are still a theory for us and they still stand before us as a riddle. We, the lovers of the people, regard them as part of a theory, and it seems not one of us loves them as they really are but only as each of us imagines them to be. And should the Russian people turn out not as we imagined them, then we, despite our love of them, would at once renounce them without regret.12
Each theory ascribed certain virtues to the peasant which it then took as the essence of the national character. For the Populists, the peasant was a natural socialist, the embodiment of the collective spirit that distinguished Russia from the bourgeois West. Democrats like Herzen saw the peasant as a champion of liberty - his wildness embodying the spirit of the Russia that was free. The Slavophiles regarded him as a Russian patriot, suffering and patient, a humble follower of truth and justice, like the folk hero Ilia Muromets. They argued that the peasant commune was a living proof that Russia need not look beyond its national borders for guiding moral principles. 'A commune,' declared one of the movement's founding members, 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.'13 Dostoevsky, too, saw the peasant as a moral animal, the embodiment of the 'Russian soul'; once he even claimed, in a famous argument, that the simple 'kitchen muzhik' was morally superior to any bourgeois European gentleman. The peasants, he maintained, 'will show us a new path', and, far from having something to teach them, 'it is we who must bow down before the people's truth'.14
This convergence on the peasant issue was indicative of a broader national consensus or ideology which emerged in Russia at this time. The old arguments between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles gradually died down as each side came to recognize the need for Russia to find a proper balance between Western learning and native principles. There were hints of such a synthesis as early as 1847, when the doyen of the Westernizers, the radical critic Belinsky, said that, as
far as art was concerned, he was 'inclined to side with the Slavophiles' against the cosmopolitans.15 For their part, the younger Slavophiles were moving to the view in the 1850s that 'the nation' was contained in all classes of society, not just the peasants, as the older ones maintained. Some even argued, in a way that made them virtually indistinguishable from the Westernizers, that the nation's true arena was the civic sphere and that Russia's progress in the world was dependent on the raising of the peasants to that sphere.16 In short, by the 1860s there was a common view that Russia should evolve along a European path of liberal reform, yet not break too sharply from its unique historical traditions. It was a case of keeping Peter and the peasant, too. This was the position of the 'native soil' movement to which Dostoevsky and his brother Mikhail belonged in the 1860s.
Populism was the cultural product of this synthesis and, as such, it became something of a national creed. The romantic interest in folk culture which swept through Europe in the nineteenth century was nowhere felt more keenly than among the Russian intelligentsia. As the poet Alexander Blok wrote (with just a touch of irony) in 1908:
… the intelligentsia cram their bookcases with anthologies of folk-songs, epics, legends, incantations, dirges; they investigate Russian mythology, wedding, and funeral rites; they grieve for the people; go to the people; are filled with high hopes; fall into despair; they even give up their lives, face execution or starve to death for the people's cause.17
The intelligentsia was defined by its mission of service to the people, just as the noble class was defined by its service to the state; and the intelligentsia lived by the view, which many of its members came to regret, that 'the good of the people' was the highest interest, to which all other principles, such as law or Christian precepts, were subordinate. Such attitudes were so endemic that they were even shared by members of the court, the state administration and the aristocracy. The liberal spirit of reform which had brought about the emancipation continued to inform the government's approach towards the peasantry in the 1 860s and 1870s. With the peasant's liberation from the gentry's jurisdiction there was a recognition that he had become the state's responsibility: he had become a citizen.
After 1861 the government set up a whole range of institutions to improve the welfare of its peasant citizens and integrate them into national life. Most of these initiatives were carried out by the new assemblies of local government, the zemstvos, established at the district and provincial level in 1864. The zemstvos were run by paternal squires of the sort who fill the pages of Tolstoy and Chekhov -liberal, well-meaning men who dreamed of bringing civilization to the backward countryside. With limited resources, they founded schools and hospitals; provided veterinary and agronomic services for the peasantry; built new roads and bridges; invested in local trades and industries; financed insurance schemes and rural credit; and carried out ambitious statistical surveys to prepare for more reforms at a future date.* The optimistic expectations of the zemstvo liberals were widely shared by the upper classes of society. There was a general attitude of paternal populism - a sympathy for the people and their cause which induced the high-born from all walks of life to support the students radicals.
The Minister of Justice, in a report to the Tsar, listed a whole catalogue of foolish acts in the 'mad summer' of 1874: the wife of a colonel in the Gendarmes had passed on secret information to her son; a rich landowner and magistrate had hidden one of the leading revolutionaries; a professor had introduced a propagandist to his students; and the families of several state councillors had given warm approval to their children's revolutionary activities.18 Even Turgenev, who saw the solution to the peasant problem in liberal reform, could not help admiring (and perhaps envying) the idealistic passion of these revolutionaries.19 He mixed in their circles in France and Switzerland, and he even gave some money to the Populist theorist Pyotr Lavrov
* The hopes of the zemstvo liberals were never realized. After the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, the powers of the zemstvos were severely curtailed by the government of the new Tsar, Alexander III, who looked upon the zemstvos as dangerous breeding grounds for radicals. Many of the students who had taken part in the 'going to the people' ended up as zemstvo employees - teachers, doctors, statisticians and agronomists whose democratic politics attracted the police. Police raids were carried out on zemstvo offices - including even hospitals and lunatic asylums - in the search for such 'revolutionaries'. They even arrested noblewomen for teaching peasant children how to read. (A. Tyrkogo-Williams, To, chego bol'she ne budet (Paris, n.d.), p. 153).
(whose writings had inspired the student radicals) so that he could publish his journal Forwards! in Europe.20 In his novel Virgin Soil (1877), Turgenev gave a portrait of the types who answered Lavrov's call. Though he saw through the illusions of the Populists, he managed to convey his admiration, too. These 'young people are mostly good and honest', he wrote to a friend on finishing the novel in 1876, 'but their course is so false and impractical that it cannot fail to lead them to complete fiasco'.21
Which is just how it turned out. Most of the students were met by a cautious suspicion or hostility on the part of the peasants, who listened humbly to their revolutionary sermons without really understanding anything they said. The peasants were wary of the students' learning and their urban ways, and in many places they reported them to the authorities. Ekaterina Breshkovskaya, later one of Russia's leading socialists, found herself in jail
after the peasant woman with whom she was staying in the Kiev region 'took fright at the sight of all my books and denounced me to the constable'.22 The socialist ideas of the Populists were strange and foreign to the peasantry, or at least they could not understand them in the terms in which they were explained to them. One propagandist gave the peasants a beautiful account of the future socialist society in which all the land would belong to the toilers and nobody would exploit anybody else. Suddenly a peasant triumphantly exclaimed: 'Won't it be just lovely when we divide up the land? I'll hire two labourers and what a life I'll have!'23 As for the idea of turning out the Tsar, this met with complete incomprehension and even angry cries from the villagers, who looked upon the Tsar as a human god. 'How can we live without a Tsar?' they said.24
Rounded up by the police, forced into exile or underground, the Populists returned from their defeat in deep despair. They had invested so much of their own personalities in their idealized conception of the peasantry, they had hung so much of their personal salvation on the 'people's cause', that to see them both collapse was a catastrophic blow to their identity. The writer Gleb Uspensky, to cite an extreme and tragic example, eventually became insane after many years of trying to reconcile himself to the stark reality of peasant life; and many of the Populists were driven to the bottle by this rude awakening. It was suddenly made clear that the idea of the peasantry they had in
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