Literature and Poverty: From the Hebrew Bible to the Second World War by David Aberbach

Author:David Aberbach [Aberbach, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367112486
Google: 56ebuwEACAAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-09-15T21:10:09+00:00

In his novel, Fathers and Sons (1862), written after he left Russia for Western Europe, Turgenev raises the perennial Russian question: what is to be done? As in the West, education, science, and progress are answers given by Bazarov, the novel’s central character, through which social problems can ultimately be solved. But how to apply science to the immediate problems of the newly freed Russian peasants, who need land to survive on, and a tolerable tax burden to escape debt? Bazarov as student of science and medicine is a nihilist in his refusal to accept anything at face value. Instead, he repudiates everything, convinced of the need to tear down existing social and psychological structures, to start anew. This violent revolutionary Bakunin-like stance has little practical value amid the miserable reality of life, exemplified by the family estate of Bazarov’s friend, Arkady. He sees the ragged peasants with their miserable nags, their thin, sickly cattle, as a vision of endless unbearable winter: ‘“No,” thought Arkady, “there is no prosperity here, no sign of contentment or hard work. It just can’t go on like this: this must all be transformed … but how are we to do it, how should we begin?”’77

So great is his pessimism that Arkady comes to hate the peasants for their intractable poverty: if all peasants were given tidy cottages they would be ungrateful. The reality of emancipation for most serfs was the transfer of one form of servitude and exploitation to another: from the arbitrary landowner to the rationalizing government. These Russians and their children were left with growing resentment at unjust land distribution and consequent debt, with the added woes of taxation and conscription, as their numbers grew. Poverty was at the root of the 1917 revolution.

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