City Folk and Country Folk Read online

  City Folk and Country Folk depicts a slightly glamorous pseudo-autobiographical portrait of the two writing sisters as the Malinnikovs, who are thirty and thirty-five years old (Sofia and Nadezhda were thirty-eight and forty). They own a poor local estate but spend most of their time in St. Petersburg, where they write for journals and publish books under pseudonyms. Their father supplemented the meager earnings from their estate with a civil service job in town and when he transferred to St. Petersburg, the sisters audited classes with their brother at St. Petersburg University. (Their own brother had attended the Polotsky Cadet School.) Women auditors were common from 1855 to 1863, when officials ended the practice, leading to protests. St. Petersburg and Moscow Universities, which were mostly limited to those nobles who could afford the annual fifty ruble fees, were the norm for Herzen, Turgenev, and other men writers. After 1863, women, mostly noblewomen, began going abroad to university. Indeed, by 1873, of the over 300 Russians studying at the University of Zurich, 104 were women.21 Like the Khvoshchinskaya sisters, the Malinnikovs translate from French and German to make money, love books, and know other writers. Poor, they return to the country after eight years (like Sofia after she graduated), where nature amazes them; they work all the time, except for going to the theater, and will remain spinsters. This fictional autobiography of the sisters is given in the disapproving account of a traditional mother, who represents local opinion. She and other neighbors are afraid of being portrayed in the Malinnikovs’ fiction, as the Khvoshchinskaya sisters’ neighbors were in Ryazan.

  With the occasional exception of Nadezhda and a few others, women novelists have been mostly written out of Russian literary history in English.22 In 1891, the bibliographers Prince Nikolai Golitsyn and Sergei Ponomarev recorded over 1,900 women who participated as writers, translators, and publishers in all subjects and aspects of the Russian literary market.23 This is about half of the number found in nineteenth-century English literature, long recognized for its women writers.24 The current Russian bio-bibliographic dictionary of nineteenth-century writers will include over 3,500 writers, with approximately 12 percent women.25

  These women completely disappeared in the twentieth century as the Bolsheviks nationalized the works of fifty-seven writers, all men, for publication in greater quantities than Soviet literature. The People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros) issued lists of forbidden “bourgeois,” “religious-moral,” “historically idealized,” “mystical,” “humorous,” and “adventure” novels and authors that included various women writers.26 Without the Russian critical editions that foster research on their male colleagues, nineteenth-century women writers lie buried in literary history, in research libraries and archives. At the same time, many continue to believe in the nineteenth-century Romantic ideal of genius as the measure of a nation’s greatness and promote only a chosen few men.27

  City Folk and Country Folk is a panorama of provincial noble estates set in the summer of 1862 during the beginning of the emancipation of the serfs. Like the novels of Nadezhda, her rival Nadezhda Sokhanskaya, Alexander Pushkin, Evgeniia Tur, Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov, Leo Tolstoy, and many others, all of Sofia’s works touch on different aspects of the lives of the nobility, whether they are abroad in Europe or in St. Petersburg and Moscow or on their provincial estates, which were settled with the serfs that provided the money to support their lifestyles. Indeed, Pushkin, Sokhanskaya, Turgenev, and Tolstoy were among the one hundred thousand nobles who, together with the state, owned approximately fifty out of the sixty-nine million people (70 percent) who were serfs.28 By comparison, the United States had four million slaves in a total population of thirty million.

  The serious side of City Folk and Country Folk requires an understanding of who Nastasya Ivanovna Chulkova, her relative Anna Ilinishna Bobova, and her neighbors Erast Sergeyevich Ovcharov and Katerina Petrovna Repekhova-Dolgovskaya are and the situation they all find themselves in. The comedy turns on the fact that everyone depends on Nastasya’s well-run estate, traditional Russian hospitality, and Christian virtue for shelter, food, loans, and kindness. Although they are all poor and indebted, they are so blinded by their relative noble wealth and status that none of them feels any gratitude toward Nastasya. Nor does she feel deserving of thanks, until her daughter Olenka reminds her of her good deeds and their neighbors’ hypocrisy. Nastasya takes heart by telling herself that she too is a noble; in fact, like the Khoshchinskaya sisters, she is from an ancient noble family.

  The Russian service nobility was unusual in a number of important ways. In 1722, Peter the Great instituted the Table of Ranks for military, court, and civil service, a system designed to expand and professionalize the military and administration of the Russian empire that existed until 1917. Although the Russian nobility was only 1.5 percent of the population, it was Europe’s largest, with around 750,000 nobles in the 1860s, compared to, for example, 5,500 noble landowning families in England around 1850, and in 1914, 250,000 nobles in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.29 Service to the state and emperor was initially obligatory for twenty-five years, and after 1762, no longer required. Nevertheless, like Sofia’s father and brother, and like most writers, nobles still served, however briefly, to gain rank and status, which was independent of noble titles.30 In City Folk and Country Folk, Erast graduates from Moscow University, with rank, and takes a civil service job in name only in the governor’s chancellery. Non-nobles could advance to personal and hereditary nobility as officers and civil servants. Women had the rank of fathers and then husbands, but could have their own rank through the court and later as teachers and doctors. Finally, nobility derived not from economic class, but from an elaborate system of legal privileges.31 Hereditary noble privileges for women as well as men included the right to own land with serfs (until 1861), preference in service and the right not to serve (after 1762, suspended between 1796 and 1801), freedom from corporal punishment (until 1863, suspended between 1796 and 1801), exemption from poll tax (until 1883), and the right to be judged by peers and to travel abroad (with permission).32 After 1848, for example, Nicholas I recalled Alexander Herzen from abroad (he refused to return) and no longer allowed nobles to travel easily to Europe. Erast regularly travels abroad in a noble lifestyle that Sofia also parodied in How People Admire Nature (1959), which she wrote upon her return from Europe. Russians’ excitement in traveling abroad reflected a noble privilege that they once again enjoyed after the death of Nicholas I in 1855.

  The instability of a system where non-nobles could become nobles and privileges could be suspended, as they were under Paul I (who reigned from 1796 to 1801), put an emphasis on ancestry and refined, educated behavior, especially knowledge of foreign languages, to show status. In the theater of noble status, ancient noble lineage was especially visible through the titles of prince and princess, which could no longer be bestowed after 1722. In City Folk and Country Folk, Anna, the sanctimonious cousin, is blinded to Nastasya’s virtue by her own sense of self importance, which she derives from her past relations with princesses and bishops. In nineteenth-century Russian noble culture and literature, estate management becomes an important alternative form of national service for noblemen, while absentee landowners are viewed as derelict in their duties to the peasants and Russia by failing to oversee invariably corrupt stewards and peasant commune leaders. As estates became the new literary stages of noble culture, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Goncharov and others aligned love and estate management. Women writers such as Sofia, Nadezhda, and Evgeniia Tur became more interested than men writers in noblewomen as landowners and in the mésalliance, love that transcends class boundaries.33

  Most nobles were relatively poor; among those who owned land with serfs, also known as souls, fewer than twenty-five serfs (only men were counted) meant owners worked with their serfs, while those with fifty or one hundred serfs, like Nastasya in City Folk and Country Folk, lived modestly; those with five hundred serfs, like Erast, were comfortable; and those, like Turgenev, who owned five
thousand serfs, were among the 3 percent who owned 40 percent of serfs. Three-quarters of estates had fewer than one hundred serfs (which added up to 20 percent of the total number of serfs owned by nobles), and therefore order in the countryside rested on the country folk, like Nastasya, who could not afford to live elsewhere.34 Most serfs were mortgaged. Nastasya, unlike Erast, manages a well-ordered estate. Like his parents, who lived beyond their means in their Russian version of the European lifestyle, Erast is an absentee landowner living in St. Petersburg, Europe’s third largest city after London and Paris, and in Europe, while his estate declines. These are the city folk. He takes refuge in and transforms Nastasya’s new bathhouse into an elaborately theatrical study for himself as a noble writer, who does not write for money but because he has something to say. In an earlier tale by Sofia, “Lyskovo Village” (1859), Maria Petrovna Karpova learns to write in the process of trying to save her Edenic estate of twenty-five souls in a one-hundred-year lawsuit; the estate later goes to ruin to provide pocket money to an absentee landowner.35

  In their letters, Sofia and Nadezhda often mention reading and talking about the peasants, which is reflected in their fiction. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 was very different from the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation in the United States that proclaimed slaves “henceforward shall be free.” Russian peasants remained legally tied to the land, for which they paid the government redemption payments of (very) approximately 150 percent of the value of the land for forty-nine years, while the government advanced the money to the nobility and erased noble debts. Redemption payments were generally less than the initial “temporary obligations” referred to in the novel’s first paragraph. This led some landowners to delay conversion to permanent agreements on land for two decades. These injustices led to peasant disturbances, a radicalized intelligentsia, and the populist and revolutionary movements. Payments finally ended and peasants gained freedom of movement after the Revolution of 1905.36 City Folk and Country Folk also alludes to these problems in the description of the Toporischevs’ estate, where the villages were burned three times (by the peasants). Erast does not make any agreement with his restless serfs because he little understands the details, and delays are to his advantage. Nastasya, on the other hand, tries to discuss their adjacent land holdings. Meanwhile, he writes and lectures her on finances and property, unable to recognize her expertise.

  In 1861, Sofia published a short, anonymous biography of Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev (1749–1802), whom she portrayed as an extraordinary, incorruptible statesman whose progressive arguments against serfdom could only now be considered. Radishchev was exiled to Siberia after his exposé of serfdom, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (1789). Published despite having been rejected by the censors in 1859, Sofia’s article led to the closure of Illustration, edited by Zotov, even though several articles had recently appeared about this forbidden writer.37 City Folk and Country Folk opens with praise for the humble provincial civil servants who, like Nastasya, have a direct responsibility to deliver justice to the peasants. Later, in her popular Ursa Major, set during the Crimean War, Nadezhda used Radishchev as a model for an exemplar of noble civil service, Nikolai Stepanych Bagriansky, provincial director of the Chamber of Government Property, responsible for 150,000 government serfs and recruitment of serf militias.

  In one of the most extraordinary scenes in Russian literature, Nastasya, faced with an insurrection of her house serfs, dares to go to their kitchen, where she successfully reasons with them and treats them humanely. Sofia translated John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), which laid out a program for liberal government with the greatest freedom for the individual from government control. Without naming Russia, he exempts backward societies, arguing that “despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians.” Rousseau and others had long considered Russian autocracy despotic. Mill argues that liberal government can only be attained when mankind is “capable of being improved by free and equal discussion” and has “attained the capacity of being guided to their own improvement by conviction or persuasion.”38 Through Nastasya’s enlightened persuasion of her peasants, Sofia offers a rebuttal to those who argued that Russian serfs were not ready for freedom.

  Nastasya and Olenka are unusual Russian heroines in that they are emphatically not extraordinary.39 While Nastasya is traditional, Olenka is an ordinary high-spirited young woman who gets impatient with her mother and teases a potential match in an hour-long game of tag. They are also not readers, a signal trait of noble heroines since Pushkin’s Tatyana in Eugene Onegin, who reads the sentimental classics and peruses Onegin’s library for clues to his Romantic persona. In the “woman question,” the debates over women’s emancipation and education that coalesced around 1860, the Khvoshchinskaya sisters were contrarians. While they disagreed with antifeminists, they also argued with feminists. Nastasya embodies their argument against feminist women, who thought women should have education and careers at the expense of marriage and family. In letters, conversations, essays, and fiction, the sisters argued for self-sacrifice and duty to family, in opposition to the Darwinian struggle of the survival of the fittest.40 Olenka’s concern for her mother demonstrates their belief that decency and common sense are more important than education. In an essay, Nadezhda noted that men writers liked to portray women who read (their) novels and are educated by men.41 Olenka expresses the sisters’ views against such hypocritical feminist men writers as Erast, who appears to argue for women, while telling them they should be obedient to religious, parental, and patriarchal authority. In a striking scene, the sickly Erast grabs Olenka and kisses her, and she shoves him away: “Apparently Olenka really was stronger than he” (160). It rejects a central concern of both the French antifeminist Jules Michelet and the feminist socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon about women’s fundamental inequality to men because of their physical weakness; beginning in 1860 this and other aspects of the woman question were addressed by the radical Mikhail Mikhailov in numerous journal essays that the sisters deplored.42

  Aside from talents for plot, original characters, and theatrical comedy, Sofia’s writing is undergirded by serious interests in history, philosophy, and politics, and overlaid by a gift for various voices. The Khvoshchinsky family, like most noble Russian families, read literature aloud together, and they also celebrated the publications of their novels by reading them aloud. The sisters’ differing literary styles reflect the importance of theatricality and orality. In City Folk and Country Folk, the opening captures the tensions between the city and the country through language. The repetitions in the first sentence and elsewhere reflect a country cadence with a warm, honest folksiness that contrasts with the clichés of high society and faux intellectuals. Clichéd words from the war of ideas in Russian journals include education, ideas, struggle, development, enlightenment, self-perfection, progress, self-development, and analysis.

  City Folk and Country Folk was not reviewed, but in her letters to the writer Olga Novikova, Sofia’s older sister Nadezhda commented on her development as a writer: “We are accomplishing all the same great deeds. Sonia is producing, wait. In March, in Notes of the Fatherland, her novel, read it; I do not boast of this to you, for I am impartial—but do not boast simply because I know what the author is capable of.”43 Later that same year, Nadezhda simply wrote, “Charming,” about Sofia’s novel Domestic Idylls from a Recent Time, about the tragic consequences of a noblewoman’s love for a man from the petty bourgeoisie.44 In 1864, Nadezhda wrote, “Sofia is doing something quite splendid, serious; a creation, indeed. You cannot expect it at all soon, but know that you are waiting for something you have long not read.”45 It is not clear to which work Nadezhda, one of Russia’s great nineteenth-century novelists and critics, was referring, but there is no doubt that City Folk and Country Folk is a work of true quality and craft. It is splendid and serious, and offers a unique portrait of a crucial moment in Russian history and literature.

  NOTES
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  1. Marina Ledkovsky, Charlotte Rosenthal, and Mary Zirin, eds., Dictionary of Russian Women Writers (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 286–91.

  2. On Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya, in English, see: N. D. Khvoshchinskaya, The Boarding-School Girl, trans. Karen Rosneck (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000); Karen Rosneck, “Nadezhda Dmitrievna Khvoshchinskaia (V. Krestovsky),” Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale, 2001); Jehanne M. Gheith, Finding the Middle Ground: Krestovskii, Tur, and the Power of Ambivalence in Nineteenth-Century Russian Women’s Prose (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004); Diana Greene, Inventing Romantic Poetry: Russian Women Poets of the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004); Karen Rosneck, Understanding Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia’s Short Story Collection “An Album: Groups and Portraits”: The Literary Innovations of a Nineteenth-Century Russian Writer (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2010).

  3. Although sources give later years for their births (1824 instead of 1822 for Nadezhda, 1828 instead of 1824 for Sofia, and 1832 instead of 1828 for Praskovia), birth registries indicate that the sisters lied about their ages. P. D. Khvoshchinskaia, “Biografiia,” in Sobranie sochinenii V. Krestovskogo (psevdonim), vol. 1, 5 vols. (St. Petersburg: Izd. A.S. Suvorina, 1892), I–XVIII; Aleksandr Potapov, Neizrechennyi svet (Ryazan’: Novoe vremia, 1996), 52.