Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-8mjnm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T08:44:08.069Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

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*
Affiliation:
Bates College in Lewiston, Maine

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
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

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

1. Turgenev, I. S., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati vos'mi tomakh (Moscow, 1960-68; hereafter PSS), 4:123 Google Scholar. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.

2. Ibid., 4:214-15.

3. Ibid., 4:7.

4. Ibid., 4:53.

5. Paul, Alec, “Russian Landscape in Literature: Lermontov and Turgenev,” in Mallory, William E. and Simpson-Housley, Paul, eds., Geography and Literature: A Meeting of the Disciplines (Syracuse, 1987), 122 Google Scholar. I am grateful to J. Alexander Ogden for this reference.

6. “Kratkoe statisticheskoe opisanie lesov Orlovskoi gubernii,” Lesnoi zhurnal, 1847, no. 23: 181-86.

7. Palimpsestov, I., “Prava na les,” in Sbornik statei o sel'skom khoziaistve iuga Rossii (Odessa, 1868), 718 Google Scholar.

8. Zhuravlev, V., “Opyt sokhraneniia lesa ot naprasnago istrebleniia,” Lesnoi zhurnal, 1849, no. 8:61 Google Scholar.

9. Mel'nikov, Pavel I. [Pecherskii, Andrei], Vlesakh (Moscow, 2000), 257 Google Scholar.

10. Kluchevsky, V. O. [Kliuchevskii], A History of Russia, trans. Hogarth, C.J., 5 vols. (New York, 1931), 5:245 Google Scholar.

11. Marina Tsvetaeva, “Kedr: Apologiia (O knige kn. S. Volkonskogo Rodina)” accessed at http://tsvetaeva.niv.ru/tsvetaeva/proza/kedr.htm (last consulted 29 October 2008). My emphasis.

12. Glotfeldy, Cheryll, “Introduction,” in Glotfelty, Cheryll and Fromm, Harold, eds., The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens, Ga., 1996), xix Google Scholar.

13. Coupe, Laurence, “Introduction” to “Ecocritical Principles,” section 4, Coupe, Laurence, ed., The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism (London, 2000), 157 Google Scholar.

14. The literature of ecocriticsm is now vast, ranging from critical studies of wilderness and other landscapes to critiques of gendered constructions of the natural world, speculative engagements with new technologies, bioregional approaches, and studies of particular authors. Of particular interest for this essay are calls for ecocriticism to expand its cultural and linguistic reach. Greg Garrard provides a useful critical introduction in Ecocriticism (London, 2004); and Ursula K. Heise gives a brief overview of debates regarding the role of science and cross-cultural perspectives in Heise, , “The Hitchhiker's Guide to Ecocriticism,” PMLA 121, no. 2 (March 2006): 503-16CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Cohen, Michael P., “Blues in the Green: Ecocriticism under Critique,” Environmental History 9, no. 1 (2004): 936 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. The lengthening list includes work by Rachel May, ed., Russian Nature: Essays on Landscape and Nature Writing in Russia, a special two-volume issue of Russian Studies in Literature 39, nos. 2 and 3 (Spring and Summer 2003); Ely, Christopher, This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, 2002)Google Scholar; Helfant, Ian, “S. T. Aksakov: The Ambivalent Proto-Ecological Consciousness of a Nineteenth-Century Russian Hunter,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 13, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 5570 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hodge, Thomas P., “The ‘Hunter in Terror of Hunters': A Cynegetic Reading of Turgenev's Fathers and Children ,” Slavic and East European Journal 51, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 453-73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rosenholm, Arja and Autio-Sarasmo, Sari, eds., Understanding Russian Nature: Representations, Values and Concepts (Helsinki, 2005)Google Scholar; Amy Nelson and Jane Costlow, “The Other Animals: Situating the Non-Human in Russian Culture and History” (under consideration); Newlin, Thomas, The Voice in the Garden: Andrei Bolotov and the Anxieties of Russian Pastoral, 1738-1833 (Evanston, 2001)Google Scholar; Alexander Ogden, J., “The Woods of Childhood: Forest and Fairy Tale in Pavel Zasodimskii's Nature Writing,” Russian Review 64, no. 2 (April 2005): 281-98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. The list here would be far too long for this occasion. Recent work on nature in Russian culture includes Olekhova, I. P. and Stroganov, M. V., Dary prirody ili plody tsivilizatsii: Ekologicheskii al'manakh, 2d ed. (Tver', 2008)Google Scholar; Smirnova, A. I., ed., Priroda i chelovek v khudozhestvennoi literature: Materialy Vserossiiskoi nauchnoi konferentsii (Volgograd, 2001)Google Scholar; Grinfel'd, T. Ia., Kozhukhovskaia, N. V., and Gurlenova, L. V., eds., “Chuvstvo prirody“v russkoi literature (Syktyvkar, 1995)Google Scholar; and Epstein, Mikhail, Priroda, mir, tainik vselennoi … Sistema peizazhnykh obrazov v russkoi poezii (Moscow, 1990)Google Scholar.

17. Nivat, Georges, “The Russian Landscape as Myth,” in May, ed., Russian Nature, 59 Google Scholar.

18. As William Cronon, one of the most astute and influential historians of U.S. environment and culture, puts it: “Because I care so much about nature and storytelling both, I would urge upon environmental historians the task of telling not just stories about nature, but stories about stories about nature.” Cronon, William, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (March 1992): 1375 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19. Semenov, K. S., Istoriia ksov Iasnoi Poliany za sto let i zadacha sokhraneniia i vosstanovleniia ikh (Moscow, 1954)Google Scholar. On the zaseki, see Bobrovskii, M. V., Kozel'skie zaseki: Ekologoistoricheskii ocherk (Kaluga, 2002)Google Scholar.

20. Tolstoi, Lev, “Perepiska Tolstogo s lesnym ob”ezdchikom A. Luzinovym,” Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 3738 (Moscow, 1939), 359 Google Scholar.

21. Ibid., 360.

22. Turgenev, , PSS, 4:167 Google Scholar.

23. Biriuk, as Turgenev tells us in a footnote, is the Orel region's term for a “solitary and gloomy man.” Turgenev, , PSS, 4:169 Google Scholar.

24. Ibid., 4:172.

25. Ibid., 4:566.

26. An acre is 4,840 square yards; thus a “soul” in the Briansk region would have vastly more woodland to work with. “Kratkoe statisticheskoe opisanie,” 181, 194.

27. Turgenev, , PSS, 4:194 Google Scholar.

28. Ibid., 4:173.

29. Harrison, Robert Pogue, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago, 1992), 69 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30. Turgenev, , PSS, 4:173, 174Google Scholar.

31. As Tom Hodge most graciously reminded me, many of Turgenev's late stories traffic heavily in the gothic (“Klara Milych,” “Prizraki“), and earlier works like “Bezhin lug” and Rudin use foreboding landscapes as aspects of characterization, as well as to suggest realms of passion or fate beyond rational understanding. See also Leon Burnett's discussion of gothic motifs in Turgenev's 1853 short story “Faust.” Burnett, Leon, “The Echoing Heart: Fantasias of the Female in Dostoevskii and Turgenev,” in Cornwell, Neil, ed., The Gothic-Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature (Amsterdam, 1999), 235-56Google Scholar.

32. Allen, Elizabeth Cheresh, Beyond Realism: Turgenev's Poetics of Secular Salvation (Stanford, 1992), 141-42Google Scholar.

33. See, in particular, O'Bell, Leslie, “The Pastoral in Turgenev's ‘Singers’: Classical Themes and Romantic Variations,” Russian Review 63, no. 2 (April 2004): 277-95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Masing-Delic, Irene, “Philosophy, Myth, and Art in Turgenev's Notes of a Hunter Russian Review 50, no. 4 (October 1991): 437-50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34. Botting, Fred, Gothic (London, 1996), 11 Google Scholar.

35. See also Smith, Andrew and Hughes, William, Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre (New York, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36. Botting, Gothic, 16. On the leshii, see Krinichnaia, N. A., Lesnye navazhdeniia: Mifologicheskie rasskazy ipover'ia o dukhe—“khoziaine” lesa (Petrozavodsk, 1993)Google Scholar.

37. Boreiko, Vladimir I., Ekologicheskie traditsii, pover'ia, religioznye vozzrenia slavianskikh i drugikh narodov (Kiev, 1996), 32 Google Scholar.

38. Frierson, Cathy, “Crime and Punishment in the Russian Village: Rural Concepts of Criminality at the End of the Nineteentiht Century,” Slavic Review 46, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39. Dal', Vladimir, Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka (1882; reprint, Moscow, 1980), 3:324 Google Scholar.

40. Ozhegov, S. I. and Shvedova, N. Iu., Tolkovyi slovar’ russkogo iazyka (Moscow, 1999), 566 Google Scholar.

41. Istomina, E. G., “Lesookhranitel'naia politika rossii v XVIII—nachale XX veka,” Otechestvennaia istoriia, 1995, no. 4: 42 Google Scholar. For an intriguing discussion of lawlessness and resistance to forest conservation efforts in the United States, see Jacoby, Karl, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley, 2001)Google Scholar.

42. Maier's reputation as an agronomist and experimental forester was considerable; he gave particular attention to methods of tree planting in steppe regions. Sovetov, A., “Maier, Frants Khristoforovich,” in Brokgauz, F. A. and Efron, I. A., eds., Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ (Moscow, 1890), 35:369-70Google Scholar.

43. Polnoe sobraniesochinenii Frantsa Maiera, 3 vols. (Moscow, 1850), 1:122, 124, 126.

44. Ibid., 1:130.

45. For a discussion of the relationship between specialists’ warnings on deforestation and nineteenth-century literature and painting, see Costlow, Jane, “Imaginations of Destruction: The ‘Forest Question’ in Nineteenth-Century Russian Culture,” Russian Review 62, no. 1 (January 2003): 91118 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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), 7689 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.

49. Ibid., 3:188.

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.

53. Korolenko, , “V pustynnykh mestakh,” 3:197-98Google Scholar.

54. Ibid., 3:197.

55. Scott, James C., Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, 1998), 14, 21Google Scholar.

56. The relevant sections of the Russkaia pravda may be found in Medieval Russian Laws, trans. George Vernadsky (New York, 1947), 49. Dorothy Galton gives an excellent overview of the history of beekeeping in Russia in her Survey of a Thousand Years of Beekeeping in Russia (London, 1971).

57. Turgenev, , “Poezdka v Poles'e,” PSS, 7:65 Google Scholar.

58. Aleksandr Papichev, “Bortnye ukhozhiia,” at Pchelovodnyi portal (http://apis.euro-honey.com/modules.php (accessed 14 December 2007; no longer available). On Peter the Great and forestry, see Red'ko, G. I. and Shlapak, V. P., Petr I ob okhrane prirody i ispol'zovanii prirodnykh resursov (Kiev, 1993)Google Scholar, and Istomina, “Lesookhranitel'naia politika,” 35-38.

59. For a brief, engaging survey of the role of bees in western culture and agriculture, see Preston, Claire, Bee (London, 2006)Google Scholar.

60. Discussed in Kelley, Donald R., “The Metaphysics of Law: An Essay on the Very Young Marx,” American Historical Review 83, no. 2 (April 1978): 359 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a brief discussion of wood poaching and discourse on private property in nineteenth-century Germany and its refraction in literature of the period, see Gray, Richard T., “Red Herrings and Blue Smocks: Ecological Destruction, Commercialism and Anti-Semitism in Annette von Droste-Hulshoff's Die Judenbuche,” German Studies Review 26, no. 3 (October 2003): 515-42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Gray points out that timber poaching in von Droste-Hülshoff 's novella is allied to commercial interests, involving a band of poachers rather than impoverished peasants.

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.

62. Istomina, “Lesookhranitel'naia politika,” 44.

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, 5375 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.