Grigorovich. Grigorovich's The Village (1846) and Anton Goremyka (1847) for the first time offered Russian readers a close look at the realities of everyday peasant life, and a look not "downward" but as if from within. In The Village this view-from-within is rendered still more poignant by the doubly vulnerable status of the central character. Akulia is an orphan girl taken in, very reluctantly, by a neighbor's household when her mother dies. Akulia's life is one of unmitigated oppression not so much by her owners who for the most part are scarcely aware of her existence, though they do, by blindness and caprice rather than malice, later force her into an unsuitable marriage) as by other peasants - first her step-parents and then her husband and in-laws. And even that oppression, it increasingly transpires, is mostly a by-product of the overwhelming social fact about the Russian countryside: poverty.
For most Russian peasants in the nineteenth century were poor. Their wretched houses were smelly, dark, drafty, and crowded. The peasant diet was extremely limited: cabbage soup, kasha (porridge), potatoes, and rye bread were the staples, and in years of bad harvests there was real hunger and even starvation. Few could afford real shoes or boots, instead making do in winter with bast wrappings, made from the inner bark of lime trees. Defenses against disease were those of folk medicine: herbs and magic incantations. Until the zemstvo reforms of the 1860s schools for peasant children were almost non-existent. Serfs were subject to the capricious authority of their owners and could be sold with or without land. Corporal punishment was widely used. Life was bleak and without much prospect of improvement, at least until industrialization late in the century made : »ssible a mass migration of peasants into the cities to become industrial workers. In the meantime the chief escape and entertainment, at least for men, was consumption of alcohol, a practice which unproductively siphoned off the small amount of disposable income the peasants had.
Most of these woes are exhibited in Anton Goremyka, whose hero, an exceptionally kind, responsible peasant, is driven by both malice and circumstances to the last limits of despair. We have the testimony of Lev Tolstoi, then a university student, of the "great impression" made on him by this tale.8 Its colors, however, must have seemed unbearably dark to most of the reading public. Surely not all peasants were "poor wretches"; surely the sun sometimes shone on the Russian village. Perhaps in quest of this more balanced view Ivan Turgenev shouldered his gun and undertook to explore the countryside of Orel Province. The ultimate result was his splendid The Sportsman's Sketches (1852), perhaps his greatest book.
Turgenev's work, like Grigorovich's, is an extension to the countryside of the so-called "physiologies," already applied to urban environments in
Nekrasov's Petersburg Miscellanies (1845-46). As a literary form, the physiology was an early manifestation of the developing school of Realism: a basically descriptive rather than narrative genre, in which high value is placed on "truth." In his rural physiologies Turgenev dealt not only with peasants, but with gentry as well, and even with some of the intermediate classes, though he avoids the clergy. In general, he finds an inverse relationship of virtue and attractiveness to social standing. Turgenev's peasants, for the most part, are agreeable, responsive, complex, articulate human beings, whereas landowners are eccentric, self-indulgent, twisted, and incomplete in their humanity, with no special qualifications at all for the function they are supposed to fulfill in rural life, that of agricultural managers.
The very first of the sketches, "Khor and Kalinych" (1847), offers a contrast of two very different human types, showing that male peasants, far from being an undifferentiated mass of bearded look-alikes, offer a wide range of varieties. Khor is as far removed as could be imagined from Anton Goremyka. No doubt highly exceptional in his achieved independence and prosperity, he is an intelligent, enterprising peasant businessman, a markedly successful manager of his domain, allowed a large degree of freedom by his owner as long as his substantial quitrent payments are kept up. His friend Kalinych, on the other hand, is by nature a romantic, a true child of nature, more at home in the woods than under a roof, utterly uninterested in "getting ahead."
Turgenev's roving camera reveals numerous examples of the cruelty and pain engendered by the serf system itself, quite apart from the nearly universal poverty. Particularly injurious is the capricious interference by owners in their serfs' private lives, such as refusal to allow love-marriages, as is the case in "Ermolai and the Miller's Wife." More egregious cruelty is not unknown. In "The Bailiff" the landowner Arkadii Penochkin, a refined, French-speaking aesthete, has a servant flogged because the wine has not been warmed to his satisfaction; and when a family of peasants in a distant village appeals to him against a bailiff whose extortions have reduced them to despair, Penochkin angrily dismisses their complaint, leaving the infamous bailiff free to exact his revenge.
Turgenev is also at pains to show that Russian peasants are by no means lacking in what the educated classes call "culture." Though different and unwritten, their oral culture is no less real and meaningful than the literate one taught to the gentry in schools. In "The Singers" Turgenev's persona, along with an intensely involved audience of peasant enthusiasts, witnesses a musical contest between two expert vocal acrobats, either of whom, had their circumstances been different, might well have graced the operatic stage.
Some of the finest pages in A Sportsman's Sketches are devoted to nature herself, seen apart from the human fauna that exploit and often despoil her. The hunter's last sketch, "Forest and Steppe," is an early instance of those virtuoso nature descriptions that became a much admired feature of all Turgenev's art, displaying his acute perceptions, his detailed, almost scientific knowledge of plant and animal life, his painterly eye for nuances of shading and color, and his unsurpassed power over the rich resources of the Russian language, by means of which he transforms literature into a graphic art.
Country scenes play an important part in most of Turgenev's novels more narrowly defined, such as Rudin (1856), A Nest of Gentlefolk (1859), On the Eve (1860), and Virgin Soil (1877), though he never again invoked the peasant theme as centrally as he had done in A Sportsman's Sketches. In Turgenev's greatest novel, Fathers and Children (1862), the action is again exclusively concentrated on the life of the gentlefolk in their several nests. They are, however, themselves differentiated by class: the plebeian "nihilist" student Bazarov, son of a country doctor, introduces a disruptive force into the tranquil world of the more aristocratic Kirsanov family, giving them the implied message that they are both parasitic and outmoded. Though he may partly agree with this assessment, Turgenev seems to take malicious satisfaction in showing that the plebeian Bazarov is no more successful than the aristocrats at communicating with real peasants.
Moreover, Bazarov is no more immune than the Kirsanov brothers to the charms of the lovely Fenechka, the softly deferential plebeian beauty Nikolai Kirsanov has taken as mistress and later makes his wife. Bazarov's flirtation with Fenechka provokes an absurd duel with Pavel Kirsanov, who is himself guilty of lusting after Fenechka. These scenes take place in a series of idyllic settings evoked in Turgenev's typical lyric prose, mostly on the Kirsanov estate, but with contrastive excursions both to the neighboring town and to the modest property of Bazarov's parents. All the landscapes are summer ones, incidentally; Turgenev tends to avoid winter scenes.