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Who Holds the Axe? Violence and Peasants in Nineteenth-Century Russian Depictions of the Forest

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Jane Costlow
Jane Costlow*
Affiliation:
Bates College in Lewiston, Maine
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Abstract

In this article, Jane Costlow considers the ways in which Ivan Turgenev and Vladimir Korolenko use literary conventions—from gothic setting and narrative voice to metaphors of natural community—to reflect on poaching, violence, usufruct, and rational forestry. While both authors demonstrate concern for the fate of Russia's forests, the narratives discussed here (two stories and a travel memoir) are tempered by a sense of complex moral and political context, and the realities of property law and class both before and after 1861. Costlow considers foresters' advice and assumptions about peasant violence and the need for “enlightened” surveillance but focuses on imaginative writing that refuses simple solutions to vexed questions. Turgenev's narrative emphasizes the moral entanglements of a narrator who wants to intervene and protect, whereas Korolenko's account of the trans-Volga woodlands balances critique and ecological vision in dialogic form.

Type
Nature, Culture, and Power
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 68 , Issue 1 , Spring 2009 , pp. 10 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2009

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References

I would like to express my gratitude to Thomas Hodge and the anonymous reviewers for Slavic Reviewfor dieir comments on this essay.

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2. Ibid., 4:214-15.

3. Ibid., 4:7.

4. Ibid., 4:53.

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46. Cathy Frierson's work on Alexander Engel'gardt describes how his use of the term rational agronomy shifted from a focus on gentry specialists to traditional peasant methods. See Frierson, Cathy A., “The Peasant as Rational Man of the Land,” Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia (New York, 1993), 76–89 Google Scholar; and Aleksandr Nikolaevich Engelgardt's Letters from the Country, 1872—1887, trans, and ed. Cathy A. Frierson (New York, 1993).

47. Korolenko, V. G., Povesti i rasskazy (Moscow, 1953), 175 Google Scholar. An imagination of the landscape as witness to social injustice also appears in postcolonial Caribbean literature. Perfetti, Lisa, “The Postcolonial Land That Needs to Be Loved: Caribbean Nature and the Garden in Simone Schwartz-Bart's Pluie et Vent sur Telumee Miracle ,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 14, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 92 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48. The reference is to Mel'nikov-Pecherskii's work as a government official charged with curtailing Old Belief; his bureaucratic functions gave way in the late 1850s to work as an antiquarian and author whose portrait of Old Believer culture was largely positive. Korolenko, V. G., “V pustynnykh mestakh,” Sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh (Moscow, 1954), 3:114 Google Scholar.

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50. Ibid., 3:188-89.

51. Ibid., 3:191-92.

52. Kliuchevskii's Course in Russian History was published from students’ lecture notes after the historian's death in 1911; he lectured at the University of Moscow from 1879 to 1910. Riasanovsky, Nicholas, “Kliuchevskii, Vasilii Osipovich,” in Wieczynski, Joseph L. and Rhyne, George N., eds., Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1976), 49:128, 131Google Scholar.

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61. Comparing late nineteenth-century Russian courts and forestry with sixteenth-century English law, Peter Solomon notes that “what was special to Russia was not the premodern fragmentation for dispute resolution and social control, but the suddenness of transition to a unified system.” Solomon, Peter H. Jr., “Criminalization and Decriminalization in Soviet Criminal Policy, 1917-1941,” Law and Society Review 16, no. 1 (1981-1982): 13 Google Scholar.

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63. Preston gives a witty, comprehensive account of the numerous ways in which bee activity has been taken as exemplary for human societies. Preston, , “Political Bee,” Bee, 53–75 Google Scholar.

64. “Wild alludes to a process of self-organization that generates systems and organisms, all of which are within the constraints of—and constitute components of—larger systems that again are wild… . language does not impose order on a chaotic universe, but reflects its own wildness back.” Snyder, Gary, “Language Goes Both Ways,” A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds (Washington, D.C., 1995), 174.Google Scholar

65. Much ecocritical attention has focused on metaphorical language and the meaning of tropes in relationship to wider social contexts. As Garrard notes, “these are not fixed entities but develop and change historically.” This is as true of scientific discourse as of literary and political writing. Garrard explores a number of “key structuring metaphors“— pollution, dwelling, pastoral—but also looks at particular authors’ use of enabling metaphors: for example, Wendell Berry's use of the trope of marriage to characterize fidelity to land and place. Garrard, Ecocriticism, 8, 14, 113-14.

66. Written in 1920, these letters were first published in Paris in 1922; their first Soviet publication came in Novyi mir, 1988, no. 10. The edition quoted here is Korolenko, V. G., Zemli! Zemli! Mysli. Vospominaniia. Kartiny (Moscow, 1991), 172 Google Scholar.

67. Ibid., 176-77.