Forms of the Peasant: Aesthetics and Social Thought in Russian Realism, 1847-1877

At the center of this dissertation’s inquiry is Russian realism’s construction of what I call “the form of the peasant.” Created by writers, this mythic image emerged in tandem with the movement’s signature formal innovations in narrative perspective, poetic voice, and descriptive style. It also gave shape to the very ideas of history, national identity, subjectivity, and language which defined Russian realism as a literary movement. The three chapters approach several major texts – Ivan Turgenev’s Zapiski okhotnika [Notes from a Hunter] (1847-1852), Lev Tolstoy’s “Utro pomeshchika” (1852-1856) and Anna Karenina (1874-1877), and Nikolai Nekrasov’s Komu na Rusi zhit’ khorosho [Who in Russia Can Live well] (1866-1877) – from a historical and formalist perspective, offering a history of realist forms in the social and intellectual context from which they emerge and to which they contribute. Close readings of narrative and poetic texts are performed alongside analyses of a range of theoretical texts that are central to Russian social thought in the mid-nineteenth century, including works by Vissarion Belinsky, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Dobroliubov, Alexander Potebnia, and G. W. F. Hegel. At the intersection of these analyses emerges a myth of agrarian life structured by social anxieties in three interpretative frameworks. First, realism is illuminated in its parallel development to serfdom abolition. Second, social identities (e.g., master and serf; peasant and intellectual) are shown to inhere in forms of narrative and lyric subjectivity. Finally, literature’s engagement with myths of peasant life as pre-modern or timeless belies a central preoccupation with the concept of history understood in terms of non-teleological change. Building on work across disciplines at the intersection of social thought and literary form and reassessments of realism across national traditions, this work is grounded in the belief that it is the nature of literary forms to complicate ideology, expressing ideas obliquely and exploring contradictions. My aim is to show how realism works at once to establish normative frameworks and undermine them, locating Russian realism’s engagement with the peasant myth in precisely this point of tension. Here, the “form of the peasant” expresses an escape from modernity as well as a confrontation with it. In “Forms of the Peasant,” Russian realism emerges as a literary movement with strong connections to other national traditions and historical epochs – connections based in paradigms of empire, class conflict, systems of bondage, and their aftermath