Zlatovrátskiy and other Folk-Novelists: Naúmoff, Zasódimskiy, Sáloff, Nefédoff

One of the great questions of the day for Russia is, whether we shall abolish the communal ownership of the land, as it has been abolished in Western Europe, and introduce instead of it individual peasant proprietorship; or whether we shall endeavour to retain the village community, and do our best to develop it further in the direction of coöperative associations, both agricultural and industrial. A great struggle goes on accordingly among the educated classes of Russia upon this question, and in his first Samára sketches, entitled From a Village Diary, Uspénskiy paid a great deal of attention to this subject. He tried to prove that the village community, such as it is, results in a formidable oppression of the individual, in a hampering of individual initiative, in all sorts of oppression of the poorer peasants by the richer ones, and, consequently, in general poverty. He omitted, however, all the arguments which these same poorer peasants, if they should be questioned, would bring forward in favour of the present communal ownership of the land; and he attributed to this institution what is the result of other general causes, as may be seen from the fact that exactly the same poverty, the same inertia, and the same oppression of the individual, are found in an even greater degree in Little Russia, where the village community has ceased to exist long since. Uspénskiy thus expressed — at least in those sketches which dealt with the villages of Samára — the views which prevail among the middle classes of Western Europe, and are current in Russia among the growing village bourgeoisie.

This attitude called forth a series of replies from another folk-novelist of an equally great talent, ZLATOVRÁTSKIY (born 1845), who answered each sketch of Uspénskiy’s by a novel in which he took the extreme opposite view. He had known peasant life in Middle Russia from his childhood; and the less illusions he had about it, the better was he able, when he began a serious study of the peasants, to see the good features of their lives, and to understand those types of them who take to heart the interests of the village as a whole — types that I also well knew in my youth in the same provinces.

Zlatovrátskiy was accused, of course, of idealising the peasants; but the reality is, that Uspénskiy and Zlatovrátskiy complement each other. Just as they complement each other geographically — the latter speaking for the truly agricultural region of Middle Russia, while Uspénskiy spoke for the periphery of this region — so also they complement each other psychologically. Uspénskiy was right in showing the drawbacks of the village community institution — deprived of its vitality by an omnipotent bureaucracy; and Zlatovrátskiy was quite right, too, in showing what sort of men are nevertheless bred by the village-communal institutions and by attachment to the land, and what services they could render to the rural masses under different conditions of liberty and independence.

Zlatovrátskiy’s novels are thus an important ethnographical contribution, and they have at the same time an artistic value. His Everyday Life in the Village, and perhaps even more his Peasant Jurymen (since 1864, the peasant heads of households have acted in turn as jurors in the law courts), are full of the most charming scenes of village-life; while his Foundations represents a serious attempt at grasping in a work of art the fundamental conceptions of Russian rural life. In this last work we also find types of men, who personify the revolt of the peasant against both external oppression and the submissiveness of the mass to that oppression — men, who, under favourable conditions might become the initiators of movements of a deep purport. That types have not been invented will be agreed by everyone who knows Russian village-life from the inside.

The writers who have been named in the preceding pages are: far from representing the whole school of folk-novelists. Not only has every Russian novelist of the past, from Turguéneff down, been inspired in some of his work by folk life, but some of the best productions of the most prominent contemporary writers, such as Korolénko, Tchéhoff, Oertel and many others (see next chapter), belong to the same category. There are besides quite a number of novelists distinctively of this class, who would be spoken of at some length in any course of Russian literature, but whom, unfortunately, I am compelled to mention in but a few lines.

NAÚMOFF was born at Tobílsk (in 1838) and, settling in Western Siberia after he had received a university education at St. Petersburg, he wrote a series of short novels and sketches in which he described life in West Siberian villages and mining towns. These stories were widely read, owing to their expressive, truly popular language, the energy with which they were imbued, and the striking pictures they contained of the advantage taken of the poverty of the mass by the richer peasants, known in Russia as “mir-eaters” (miroyéd).

ZASÓDIMSKIY (born 1843) belongs to the same period. Like many of his contemporaries, he spent years of his youth in exile, but he remains still the same “populist” that he was in his youth, imbued with the same love of the people and the same faith in the peasants. His Chronicle of the Village Smúrino (1874) and Mysteries of the Steppes (1882) are especially interesting, because Zasódimskiy made in these novels attempts at representing types of intellectual and protesting peasants, true to life, but usually neglected by our folk-novelists. Some of them are rebels who revolt against the conditions of village-life, chiefly in their own, personal interest, while others are peaceful religious propagandists and still others are men who have developed under the influence of educated propagandists.

Another writer who excelled in the representation of the type of “mir-eaters” in the villages of European Russia is SÁLOFF (1843–1902).

PETROPÁVLOVSKIY (1857–1892), who wrote under the pseudonym of KARÓNIN, was, on the other hand, a real poet of village-life and of the cultivation of the fields. He was born in southeastern Russia, in the province of Samara, but was early exiled to the government of Tobólsk, in Siberia, where he was kept many years, and from which he was released only to die soon after from consumption. He gave in his novels and stories several very dramatic types of village “ne’er-do-well’s,” but the novel which is most typical of his talent is My World. In it he tells how an “intellectual,” “rent in twain” and nearly losing his reason in consequence of this dualism, finds inner peace and reconciliation with life when he settles in a village and works in the same almost superhuman way that the peasants do, when hay has to be mown and the crops to be carried in. Thus living the life they live, he is loved by them, and finds a healthy and intelligent girl to love him. This is, of course, to some extent an idyll of village life; but so slight is the idealisation, as we know from the experience of those “intellectuals” who went to the villages as equals coming among equals, that the idyll reads almost as a reality.

Several more folk-novelists ought to be mentioned. Such are L. MELSHIN (born 1860), the pseudonym of an exile, “P. YA.,” who is also a poet, and who, having been kept for twelve years at hard labour in Siberia as a political convict, has published two volumes of hard-labour sketches, In the World of the Outcasts (a work to put by the side of Dostoyévskiy’s Dead House); S. ELPÁTIEVSKIY (born 1854), also an exile, who has given good sketches of Siberian tramps; NEFÉDOFF (1847–1902), an ethnographer who has made valuable scientific researches and at the same time has published excellent sketches of factory and village life, and whose writings are thoroughly imbued with a deep faith in the store of energy and plastic creative power of the masses of the country people; and several others. Every one of these writers deserves, however, more than a short notice, because each has contributed something, either to the comprehension of this or that class of the people, or to the working out of those forms of “idealistic realism” which are best suited for dealing with types taken from the toiling masses, and which has lately made the literary success of Maxim Górkiy.