Onegin has, however, brought with him, both in his luggage and within himself, some of the trappings of urban culture; these set him apart from the local gentry, whose conversation inescapably turns around such prosaic rural concerns as haymaking and hunting dogs. Their greater cultural sophistication draws together Onegin and Lenskii, the latter fresh from his studies at Gottingen, although Lenskii, unlike Onegin, is willing to let the charms of love draw him into rustic social life. Eventually even the anchorite Onegin is caught in the toils of love, as Tatiana follows up her letter with direct confrontation in the garden. The manor garden as a locus of love declarations, later an almost automatic reflex in the nineteenth-century Russian novel, especially Turgenev's, thus makes an early appearance in Evgenii Onegin, although in an image reversed from the conventional one, with the female offering love and the male rejecting it.
Pushkin takes us through the whole sequence of seasons in the country, showing not just the spring and summer idylls, but also chilly, rainy autumn, and best of all, the crisp, clear Russian winter, felt as exhilarating both by the "triumphant" peasant who opens the first sleigh-road and the frolicsome lad who harnesses himself to the sled on which his dog gets a ride. The winter, the time of nature's death, is the appropriate time for the fatal duel that ends Lenskii's brief life and propels Onegin onto his "journey." A year later Tatiana is taken over the same sleigh-roads to Moscow, to be auctioned off at the "bridal fair."
The majority of inhabitants of the Russian countryside, the actual peasant farmers on whom the country's life depends, make only the briefest cameo appearances. Onegin's perhaps urban-generated liberalism induces him to shift his serfs from barshchina ("corvée," i.e. work for the landlord) to obrok ("quitrent," i.e., payment to the landlord in money or in kind),5 much to the consternation of his conservative neighbors; but it never seems to occur to him to question his right to live as a complete parasite and in comparative luxury off the labor of these slaves.
It will be almost two decades before Russian literature will bring these slaves into literary focus. In the meantime, Onegin's journey, retracing the
poet's own exilic wandering, takes him into the more exotic regions of the expanding Russian empire, the picturesque Crimea, with its memories of ancient Greek settlements and Tatar seraglios, and most of all the Caucasus, which served beautifully as Russia's answer to Byron's Near East: towering, majestic peaks, dramatic waterfalls and colorful natives, admirable in the reckless dash of their brave warriors, the exotic charm of their women, the alluring otherness of their (mostly) Muslim customs.
These scenes, already etched into the Russian consciousness from Pushkin's Prisoner of the Caucasus (1822), were given their classic novelistic incarnation in Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (1840), where the Caucasus provides an ideal backdrop for another tragic romance between a callous, "burned-out" Russian officer and a vulnerable Circassian maiden, and also for a classic, purely Russian "society tale" of sexual rivalry, set in one of the region's fashionable watering places.
Back home in Russia proper, the idyllic setting of the gentry estate was given a much less benevolent exposure by Gogol. In his story "Old-world Landowners" (1835) Gogol had already, under the guise of what masquerades as an idyll, in fact vividly epitomized what Marx and Engels later called the "idiocy of rural life."6 If looked at too closely, Gogol's lovable Baucis and Philemon are actually walking exemplars of the grossest gluttony and empty-headed futility. Now the same theme was writ large in his great novel Dead Souls (1842). Even the plot of this satirical masterpiece was indicative of the fatal weakness that before the end of the century would bring ruin to so many Russian gentlefolk: their addiction to living on borrowed money. The attempt of Gogol's anti-hero, Chichikov, to swindle the state by mortgaging dead instead of live serfs is only an outré, criminal instance of the egregious fiscal irresponsibility characteristic of most gentlemen.
Chichikov's acquisitive excursions outward into the countryside from the town of NN confront him and the reader with a series of stupefying specimens of degenerate gentry whose environs are perfect metonymies of their lifeless souls. In the garden of bland, sentimental, pretentious Manilov, for example, there is a gazebo ludicrously labeled "Temple of Solitary Meditation." The bully, windbag, and liar Nozdrev lives among kindred spirits - a huge pack of dogs to which he was "like a father," while his human children interest him little. Solid, stolid Sobakevich is at least a good manager of his domain, viewing his peasants as an extension of himself. Their no-nonsense homes have no carved ornaments or other frills, but are built to last. In contrast, the huts of miser Pliushkin's serfs have deteriorated to the point of disintegration, their occupants having absconded to the tavern or the open road. In Pliushkin's neglected garden,
however, nature has created a wonderful, tangled wilderness, described by Gogol in wonderful, tangled sentences. In that garden the remnants of human plans and efforts to impose order on nature have long since been submerged to the point of obliteration in luxuriant verdure.
The second volume of Dead Souls was supposed to embody a less negative image of the Russian countryside, a world peopled by landowners some of whom, at least, were trying to realize the practical program of beneficent agricultural and serf management that Gogol later outlined in his Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (1847). The ideal is presumably realized on the estate of Konstantin Kostanzhoglo, where everything is orderly and in good repair, the peasants have "some sort of intelligent expression on their faces," and the manor house is crowned by a huge (pre-electric) spotlight that lights up his lands for fifteen versts (ten miles) around. The spotlight aptly symbolizes the "enlightening" aspect of Kostanzhoglo's benign concentration camp, which bears a startling resemblance to the regime of peasant control and agricultural management actually instituted a century later on Soviet kolkbozy and sovkhozy. Russian peasants, Gogol clearly believed, were by nature lazy dolts who required the strictest supervision from their God-appointed masters. If all landowners were like Kostanzhoglo, he thought, then serfdom could be the basis for a society not merely tolerable, but actually ideal.
The winds of history, however, were blowing in a different direction. By the late 1840s it was becoming increasingly clear, even in the upper reaches of Nicholas's hidebound government, that serfdom would eventually have to go. It was wasteful and inefficient; as agricultural managers the gentry were negligent, ill-qualified, and ineffective; the peasants had neither incentive nor adequate opportunity to improve their lot by hard work, thrift, and investment. And of course serfdom was flagrantly inhumane. Peasants were helplessly subject to the whims of their owners or the latter's deputies, who not only managed the peasants' labor and disposed of its fruits, but had almost unlimited power over their lives and bodies. In the 1840s Russian literature at last assumed the task of opening the country's eyes to the cruel realities of the peasant's lot.7
To be sure, peasants were something of an international fashion at the time, as witness famous novels by George Sand, Berthold Auerbach, and Harriet Beecher Stowe; but no doubt harsh economic conditions in the Russian countryside and a growing recognition of the inhumanity of the serf system independently impressed on Russian writers the timeliness for them of the peasant theme. At any rate, the Russian reading public was jolted in the mid-1840s by two powerful, pioneering novellas produced by a writer long respected in Russia, but little known abroad, Dmitrii