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An Alternative View of the Peasantry: The Raznochintsy Writers of the 1860s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Rose Glickman
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Extract

The 1860s witnessed an important but somewhat neglected stage in the evolution of intelligentsia attitudes toward the peasantry and other lower strata of society. It is best represented by writers who devoted themselves to portrayals of the narod, urban and rural, and who were known collectively (although they were by no means a cohesive group) as the raznochintsy writers of the sixties. They included F. M. Reshetnikov, N. V. Uspensky, N. G. Pomialovsky, A. I. Levitov, N. A. Kushchevsky, and M. A. Voronov. The biographies of these men are remarkably similar. They were all from uneducated families of the lower classes. Caught up in the ferment of the sixties which penetrated even to the most backward and obscure areas of Russia (from which most of them came), they made their way to St. Petersburg, seeking to free themselves from the age-old restrictions which Russian society had imposed on people of their social origins.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 32 , Issue 4 , December 1973 , pp. 693 - 704
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1973

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References

1. Since literary scholars are legitimately concerned with the study and evaluation of first-rate literature, they should not be criticized for ignoring literature which is unsubstantiated nonliterary judgments regarding the intelligentsia's view of the peasantry based solely on their study of the major writers of the nineteenth century. See, for example, Donald, Fanger, “The Peasant in Literature,” in Vucinich, Wayne, ed., The Peasant in Nineteenth Century Russia (Stanford, 1968)Google Scholar, and Serman, I. Z., “Problema krest'ianskogo romana v russkoi kritike serediny XIX veka,” in Serman, I. Z. and Bursov, B. I., eds., Problemy realizma russkoi literatury XIX veka (Leningrad, 1961).Google Scholar

2. Although Soviet intellectual and literary historians have not entirely neglected the raznochintsy writers (especially in the early decades of the Soviet period), they tend to lump them together indiscriminately into the category of “revolutionary democrats.” This categorization seems to have hindered serious investigation of these writers and the attitudes their works reflected. See my doctoral dissertation, “The Literary Raznochintsy in Mid-Nineteenth Century Russia” (University of Chicago, 1967).

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