The following article, a translation of an essay by Romanian historian David Prodan, summarizes his research concerning three and a half centuries of serfdom in Transylvania, a subject on which he has worked in minute detail for fifty years. The essay presents a global image of the Transylvanian variant of European serfdom, a variant that shows serfdom in its gravest form–that of personal servitude, in which the peasant is bound to both the lord and the soil–and considers how this bondage came about. In this brief introduction, I will place the essay within the context of Academician Prodan's writings and of other work on serfdom in Eastern Europe.

Communist governments have traditionally contended that "negative" phenomena, including drug abuse, were alien to socialism and could flourish only within the exploitation, moral depravity, and spiritual vacuousness of capitalism. Recent accounts in official media of Eastern Europe–often employing lurid and perhaps hyperbolic language–now admit that the New Socialist Man can, like his capitalist counterpart, become a victim of what the media themselves often call "narcomania."1 Regimes in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, the U.S.S.R., and Yugoslavia, to varying degrees, are willing to acknowledge the existence of drug abuse in their societies. A Soviet source explains why: "Concealing an illness will not make it go away; it will only drive it inward. We have come to realize that openness is needed in the struggle against drug addiction; that we must look the truth in the eye, no matter how unsavory it is.

Literary history has to some extent spoiled our apprehension of the work we know as Mertvye dushi. Thanks to the author's letters, his friends' memoirs, and the carefully assembled fragments of his projected sequel, we cannot escape the awareness that Nikolai Gogol' left the novel incomplete, unachieved.1 In fact, however, when viewed in the context of other works by Gogol', this "unfinished" novel is marked by a special type of closure and formal unity. The text is modeled on the riddle, particularly the type of riddle known as parable, and the illusion of open-endedness is designed to mock the thirst for an answer awakened by the enigma.

At the close of the nineteenth century, the tsarist government faced an increasingly restive reading public, well-informed on a variety of issues through the proliferation of mass-circulation newspapers. A punitive censorship served as the basis for the autocracy's policies toward the press, but by 1900 it had long outgrown the requirements for dealing with a society undergoing modernization. As public opinion tacitly began to be recognized as a factor in national development, some officials realized that they must adapt to the changing journalistic demands of Russia's readers. Hoping to gain public support for the government, they knew that the prohibition of certain controversial topics would not generate the backing they sought. Following the example of successful commercial publishers, they argued that the government should take an active lead in supplying news.

The most vulnerable member of the peasant household was reported to be the soldatka, the soldier's wife. The quintessential outsider in a community based on married couples, the soldatka suffered from the general coldness of the village toward single women. Stereotyped as abused, neglected, and without resources, she was seen as a loose woman who drank and the bearer of illegitimate children. We know little about her. Popular imagination has been informed largely by the soldatka's plaintive voice in folk "recruit" laments. Historians have paid scant attention to the marginal members of peasant society. Yet focusing on the weaker persons in the peasant household provides insight into little-known subjects: family antagonisms, interpersonal relationships, and the status of women.

For well over a century scholars with a variety of concerns have inquired into the level of literacy in pre-Petrine Russia with mixed success at best. The problem is well known: The array of sources upon which historians of other cultures typically rely to estimate levels of literacy–parish records, wills, service records, and tax lists–either do not exist for pre–Petrine Russia or do not provide the volume of data necessary for computing literacy in a statistically meaningful way.

In October 1985, when I first began research on the case of Academician Luzin, rumors had surfaced in the Soviet Union that new official regulations would require scientific articles containing no classified information to be published in Soviet journals before they could be cleared for publication abroad. The rumors were true. The effect of these new regulations clearly resembled the campaign against the mathematician Nikolai Nikolaevich Luzin, which had taken place fifty years before. Luzin was the victim of the first Soviet mass media campaign against such publication. The case against him appears to be an insignificant moment in the witch-hunting mania of the 1930s, since the propaganda was apparently aimed only at one full member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and his alleged misconduct.