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- shaped arches. 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: Silver siren 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
