Product of Nature
Nikolai Leskov was the prolific author of novels and essays on many aspects of Russian imperial life. He wrote about peasant recruits, forensic medicine, the alcoholism of the lower classes, and other social questions. On top of that, he was interested in religion, both high and popular. He started his career as a small official in the provincial courts in Kiev and later became a local representative for the military draft. But then, his British relative, Alexander Scott, who was married to his aunt, changed Leskov's life. Scott managed the enormous estate of the Minister of Internal Affairs, Lev Perovsky (see Chapter 8), and owned the commercial company Scott and Wilkins, which sold British agricultural equipment to Russian landlords. In 1857, the young Leskov left governmental service to work for Scott. An entrepreneurial Brit, Scott failed in his Russian business despite his high connections. He turned into a bitter old man who, looking at a collection of unused, top-end machinery, addressed to his nephew, the future writer, the classical complaint of an unsuccessful imperialist: "Machines do not work in Russia. . . . Nothing good works here because the people living here are wild and vicious." Leskov thought that his uncle was joking, but he was not. Much later, in 1893, Leskov remembered the amazing words of his British relative:
You are Russian and you do not want to hear it, but I am foreign and I can judge: these people are vicious, but this is not the worst. What is the worst is that these people are deceived. They are led to believe that what is bad is good, and what is good, bad. Remember my words: the retribution will come when you least expect it! (p. 368)[12]
Under Scott's supervision, Perovsky's estate "exploited everything the land could provide," which first and foremost was the peasants. At the start of his new career, Leskov had to oversee the resettling of serfs, whom Perovsky bought from small owners in two central provinces, Orel and Kursk, and transferred to his estates in the southern steppes. The count had died a few months earlier and passed his estate to one of his brothers; the manager, Scott, used the opportunity to populate the land in anticipation of the coming Emancipation of 1861. There was nothing unusual in this operation. In previous transfers, Perovsky's peasants were moved thousands of miles by horse carts, so that about half of them fled or died on the way. This time, Scott hired barges to carry the serfs, whom he called "a product of nature," down the great rivers, the Oka and the Volga. He commis-
Figure 18: Nikolai Leskov, by Ilia Repin, 1888.
sioned his nephew to oversee the action in an improvised regime of indirect rule. "Be a tsar, not a ruler," Scott instructed his nephew. The ruler was a strong man, Piotr, whom Scott called, in a colonial manner, 'Pizarro' after the sixteenth-century conqueror of Peru. Writing about the horror of this type of resettlement, which was formative for the Russian Empire, Leskov presented it in a way that suggested the transportation of the black Africans across the Atlantic. Reimagining Piotr-Pizarro many decades later, Leskov described everything in him - his eyes, hair, beard, and more - as black. All the white men in the story - the dead Perovsky, the British Scott, the feeble Leskov, and the self-proclaimed policeman - were absent, weak, or fake. The only strong man was this black-colored leader of the peasants' Middle-Passage.
When Leskov and Pizarro loaded the peasants on barges, they asked the police for help. Otherwise, they were left with three barges and several hundred peasant families, on the long trip down the great rivers. According to Leskov, the peasants did not look unusually desolated:
They were sitting on the barges barefoot, half-dressed, as pathetic and unfortunate as they usually appear in the Russian village. Then I still believed that everywhere peasants had to be in the same condition as we were accustomed to seeing them in Russia. They were as humble as they usually were. (p. 345)
During the trip, everyone was busy with one kind of entertainment, called "searching." The peasants combed their bodies looking for lice; there was no way to get rid of them. They could not start a fire on the barge to treat the clothing and they did not swim in the river because they believed that the water was bad for people and good for lice. They suffered immensely and eagerly demonstrated their horrible scratches. Leskov tried to help, but in vain. When he expressed his concern to Pizarro, he received the response: "He who has pity for the people should not be in charge of them." Leskov felt it was true; however, he prevented Pizarro from flogging the peasants on board. Once, the peasants spotted a bathhouse on the bank and begged Leskov to let them go to it. They swore that they would return right away; how could they not return, leaving their wives and children on the barge? Leskov allowed 40 of the men to go. Reaching the bank of the river, they did not go to the bathhouse but ran home, which was hundreds of miles away. Leskov had to call the police; three Cossacks caught and flogged these 40 men. While the peasants were being punished, the head of the local police (later he turned out to be an impostor) invited Leskov to his home, and locked him in so that he would not be a nuisance. Trapped there, Leskov browsed the books from his library, which included texts by the illustrious Russian democrats Herzen and Granovsky. Then, everyone returned to the barge:
It was nighttime but I saw how they led them. It rained before and the clay was slippery and it was funny and pitiful to see how they splashed through the mud and their feet shuffled and slid over the wet clay, and if the front pair slid and fell down all the rest did the same, as if it was a Cotillion. (p. 351)
As a salesman in his uncle's company, Leskov traveled across the Russian provinces. He published compassionate novels about the people and satirical essays about the intelligentsia, which made him a controversial figure. But always a practical man, he loved a quotation that he attributed to Heinrich Heine: "He who loves the people should take them to the bathhouse."
Horse Trading
Marlow talked to his colleagues on the deck of the yawl as a peer to peers. He was telling them about those who were unequal to them, the blacks in the ivory country, and about the European superman there, Kurtz. His story is unusual but his interlocutors and we, the readers, believe Marlow. With Fliagin, the narrator of Leskov's novella, The Enchanted Wanderer (1873), it is different. As he tells his long story, the random group of passengers becomes increasingly critical toward him and his message. However, they are uniformly curious, indeed more curious about him than he was about the natives among whom he lived. Scholars also perceive him in various ways, which range from "the Russian superman" (McLean 1977: 241) to "the Russian Everyman" (Franklin 2004: 108). On deck, Fliagin looks like a monk, though actually he is a groom; the enchanted passengers gradually recognize an impostor, similar to that fake monk whom Vladimir Dal recognized by his accent (see Chapter 8). Beginning as an exchange among peers, the situation turns into a cultural encounter between Europeans and a noble savage.
Fliagin tells his life story on board a ship that is carrying pilgrims and supplies to the island monasteries on the lake of Ladoga. They are about a day-trip's distance from St. Petersburg, north of the source of the Neva. The way to the heart of Russia goes through this ancient land. Like the Thames, the Neva has had its moments of darkness, light, and flickering. Like England, Russia was a colonized and a colonizing country. The Romans never reached these banks, but Finns, Russians, Swedes, and Germans came and left, some of them more than once. If Rurik did come from his Scandinavia, he would have sailed there, through the Neva and Ladoga to Novgorod. The medieval fur trade went in the opposite direction. Now, Fliagin narrates on this great lake the story of his nomadic life, which carried him across Eurasia, from the Russian heartlands to the Central Asian deserts and the Caucasus and, then, to the lakes and islands of the north. For Marlow, going from England to Europe and then to Africa meant crossing high seas and political borders. Fliagin's adventures all happened within Russia. Crossing steppes, deserts, and mountains, finding himself among strange and hostile peoples, Fliagin never left what he believed was his "land." Marlow is a critical, self-conscious imperialist, one of those who took part in the colonialist endeavors and also in decolonizing the world. Epically strong and competent, Fliagin is destitute of curiosity and critical ability.