THE MODELS OF PEASANT AGENCY IN FICTION FOR COMMON PEOPLE IN THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE, 1839–1861

Abstract

The traditional narrative on the history of public education and reading in the Russian Empire considers books for “common people” as a genre appeared not earlier than in the 1860s, and en masse only in the 1880s. This article substantially corrects this notion and uses the material of 15 fictional texts created by the educated elite (Mikhail Zagoskin, Vladimir Sollogub, Vladimir Dal’, Vladimir Burnashev, Nikolaj Uspensky, Maria Korsini, Mikhail Mikhailov, Marko Vovchok, etc.) for folk reading in 1839– 1861 to prove the existence of the early stage of this type of didactic literature for the people. Using the method of determining so called ‘elementary plots’ for fiction texts, the author identifies 4 groups of texts with different types of plots (plotless, type “Temptation”, type “Violence”, texts about love and marriage), which embody different ideas of whom the peasants were as subjects, how they were to interact with each other, with the law, and the authorities. The analysis of the stories becomes the starting point for interpreting the model of peasant agency that the authors of the stories elaborated for the folk. The study shows that while the patriarchal model of the peasant agency dominated in the 1840s and first half of 1850s, on the eve of the abolition of slavery in 1859–61 the democratically minded authors (Marko Vovchok and Mikhail Mikhailov) tried to construct in stories for peasants an emancipated type of agency, with human dignity at its core. The special section of the article describes the intersection of literature for common people of the 1840s with children’s literature of the 1830s.

Keywords: reading for peasants, popular literature, agency, didactic literature, theory of modernization