{"id":865,"date":"2020-03-27T02:52:24","date_gmt":"2020-03-27T02:52:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/?p=865"},"modified":"2020-03-27T02:52:24","modified_gmt":"2020-03-27T02:52:24","slug":"khor-and-kalinyich-the-accomplishments-and-pitfalls-of-objective-narration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/ewallace\/khor-and-kalinyich-the-accomplishments-and-pitfalls-of-objective-narration\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Khor and Kalinyich&#8221;: the accomplishments and pitfalls of &#8216;objective&#8217; narration"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The story \u201cKhor and Kalinyich\u201d presents a positive narrative on Russian peasants. While peasants in Russian society were treated in a demeaning manner that solidified their lower status, this text humanized them and emphasized their social importance. By interacting with the peasants, the narrator is able to convey how the peasant\u2019s labor is vital to society through agricultural work and assisting their masters. While the narrator is generally appreciative of the peasants, I read the text as somewhat glorifying peasant labor and overlooking their hardships. Khor is described as \u201calways busying himself with something\u201d implying he voluntarily chooses to engage in a constant state of labor, overlooking the impact of the master-peasant power dynamic (33). The narrator also exercises subtle judgements on the peasants. Khor tells the narrator that most of his family cannot read or write (32). While the narrator acknowledges that Khor himself is intelligent, he also calls out his hatred for and prejudices against women, implying that peasants have both high mental capacity but also are in some ways more socially and morally backward than higher classes. The narrator also questions Khor\u2019s decision to stay with his master rather than buying his own freedom (25). This judgement is ignorant of the social and economic limitations of peasants\u2019 status and minimizes the peasants\u2019 dependence on their masters. Overall, the text allows a humanistic lens of the peasants\u2019 lives, regarding them as individuals rather than generalizing and degrading the entire social class. Yet the seemingly open and objective narrator exercises judgements that serve to ignore the daily hardships faced by the peasants and the overtly unequal power dynamic between the peasants and their masters. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The story \u201cKhor and Kalinyich\u201d presents a positive narrative on Russian peasants. While peasants in Russian society were treated in a demeaning manner that solidified their lower status, this text humanized them and emphasized their social importance. By interacting with the peasants, the narrator is able to convey how the peasant\u2019s labor is vital to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1026,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-unit-8-russian-revival-social-critique"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1026"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=865"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/865\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}