Tag Archives: Peasant

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Communal Living

Perhaps the biggest change to a peasant’s daily life after the revolution took place in Russia was the idea of living on worker’s collectives, complicated institutions where Russians would live and share the work as well as the profits communally. Both “Matryona’s Home” and  “Harvesting” shows the profound beauty of a simple and elegant life such as this, but they also show how easy this way of life is to overly-romanticize and how it frequently falls short of it’s ideals.

In “Harvesting”, the action of sleeping is described a lot more than one would normally expect in a plot-driven fictional short story like this, and it is described as full and peaceful. This shows the satisfaction of an honest days work, and the serenity of being in harmony with the Earth. “My blood hums pleasantly, then I’m out of my body swimming somewhere, and I experience a sensation of perfect bliss. It’s strange, but I am aware that I’m sleeping-I am consciously, sweetly asleep. The earth carries me swiftly along on her bosom, but I am sleeping, I know that. Never again in all my life have I slept like that-with my whole body, to my heart’s content, without measure.”

Even the dog feels this satisfaction of being a part of a working machine: “Far away, beyond the forest, the large red sun slowly sinks into the deep blue haze. It’s good here on earth, pensive, peaceful. Under the chairman’s table, Borzya, our infinitely good-tempered scamp of a dog, lies curled up, sleeping peacefully.” This quote is essential because it hows how beautiful and untroubled a moment in life can be. It implies that there can be a harmony between living things on earth, drawing on themes of bounty and plenty, arguing that there is plenty for all of us on ‘good earth’.

However this peaceful way of thinking about life is interrupted by the realities of a boss, Chairman Alekseich, fruitlessly trying to feed a starving nation by trying desperately to up the farm’s production and cracking down on insubordination to increase the efficiency. This shows the conflict reality has with this utopic lifestyle, and thus its frequent shortcomings.

This contrast between the moments of ‘bliss’ the workers experience, and the unwavering outside forces making this bliss largely impossible and unsustainable is also shown in “Matryona’s Home” in the difference between how the narrator expects Matryona’s life to be and how it actually is. It is clear that Matryona believes in the importance and dignity of her work, yet she still gets caught up in the dissatisfaction of the peasants and takes part in their destructive drunken revelry. And the narrator himself is shocked by the stink of the factories and harshness of the deforestation, as opposed to the peaceful Russian countryside he had pictured.

The Masquerading Modern

Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Matryona’s Home” is an exhaustive description of an old peasant women Matryona and her way of life. The text is almost more ethnographical than it is plot driven and seems to work equally as the text of preservation as one of fiction. In small moments through Matryona, Solzhenitsyn acknowledges the doomed eventual extinction of the rural peasant way of life.

In response to hearing a new technological invention on the radio, Matryona remarks, “New ones all the time, nothing but new ones. People don’t want to work with the old ones anymore, where are we going to store them all?” (456). Within industrialization, old technology is constantly being replaced by new, better, and more efficient machines.  If the end goal is the increased production of a commodity, there is no point in maintaining an old less efficient mode of production. Matryona, however, who belongs to a generation presumably before Russia’s industrialization questions the waste this constant innovation. To put it in idiomatic terms, Matryona is thinking in an “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” mindset. Matryona herself has taken actions against the expansion of production. She does not own a cow in fear that it will consume more than she can provide. She does not manure the soil and consequently only has small potatoes. She works for free for the good of others without asking for pay. Matryona’s actions are not only anticapitalistic, but more specifically against development. Matryona cannot conceptualize the necessity for growth; instead, she is content with her simple extravagant life.

Solzhenitsyn follows Matryona’s comments on machines with comments on new and classic renditions on Russian folk-songs, highlighting her affinity to the old preindustrial Russia, and linking her way of life to the preindustrial. After listening to the modern Chaliapin cover of a folk song, Matryona comments, “’Queer singing, not our sort of singing.’ ‘You can’t mean that, Matryona Vasilyevna… Just listen to him’ She listened a bit longer, and pursed her lips, ‘No it’s wrong. It isn’t our sort of tune, and he’s tricky with his voice’” (456). Although masquerading behind a classic Russian tune, Chaliapin’s folk song is not Russian to Matryona. Instead, his rendition is “tricky,” deceiving the listener to seem as if it represents this rural identity. Matryona, however, sees through this disguise, and is disgusting at the semblance of the rural in the modern.

If I had more space, I would explore more themes of how Matryona combats aspects of modern Russian culture which camouflage in the rural identity.

The Peasant Cow

A first reading of Platonov’s The Cow might lead one to believe that it simply depicts a sad situation for peasants that witness the slow decline and death of their only female cow on the collective farm. Upon closer examination, and considering the time and context in which this story takes place (likely 1938 or 1939), the text reveals the contemporary peasant condition through the cow’s behavior in a rapidly changing world. In other words, the descriptions of the cow better communicate what the peasants are experiencing during this time than the peasants themselves do.

At the beginning of the story, the cow is described as living alone in a shed in the countryside and having a bull calf of her own (247). Her world is quickly disturbed, as her calf is taken away by her owner peasant to receive treatment by a vet after falling ill (247). This act of taking her calf away, along with her described as giving all her strength for the purpose of producing milk and work, causes the cow to embody the attributes of an exploited peasant under the collective farm system present during this time in history (248). While the peasant boy, Vasya, appears to care for the cow, it is clear that the peasants value the cow just for the milk and work she produces. This especially comes to the fore when Vasya’s father returns without the bull calf, claiming that despite the calf having recovered, it was best to sell “him to the slaughterhouse” as a bull is of little value (254).  The cow, longing for the return of her calf, falls into a depressed mood, while the narrator describes her as “not understand[ing] that it is possible to forget one happiness, to find another and then live again, not suffering any longer” (255). One can extrapolate the description of the cow to the peasants of this time, as it reinforces the idea of the backwards peasant who cannot cope with the loss of their lives as they knew them before collectivization. While the authorities who imposed collectivization may have had the attitude that the peasant could simply forget what they loved in the past and embrace new forms of happiness, Platonov’s work makes it clear that this was not the case.

The cow’s death in the final section of the story highlights the tragedy of the peasant under collectivization. The image of the cow, unable to escape in time, struck by the train running down the line is powerful and evokes the sense that nothing can stop the peasant from in a sense being annihilated by political and industrial forces of the time (257). While the analysis of this ending scene could greatly be expanded, the engine driver sums up the condition of the peasants perfectly with this foreboding statement: “she was running away from the engine, but she was slow and she didn’t have the sense to get off the line… I thought she would” (257).

What Seems vs. What Is

What lies on the surface can be deceiving; once one starts to dig deeper the truth is revealed. Turgenev’s The Singers highlights this idea as it depicts favorable peasant life despite an undesirable country landscape setting. While other works we have examined, such as Uncle Vanya, have presented a strong connection between the natural environment and the character’s behavior, the peasants in The Singers appear to act in a manner contrary to the negative influences of the environment. The narrator begins the story by describing the village of Kolotovka as “poor” and never a “cheerful sight” no matter the season (1,4). He observes the lack of water as well as the oppressive heat near Kolotovka, pointing to the lifelessness of the village and the likely poor condition of its residents (4). The narrator’s description leads one to wonder how and why under such conditions anyone lives in the village.

Instead of continuing with the description of the poor environment, Turgenev turns to the life of the peasants and focuses on their interactions at a local pub. A surprising part of this scene is how the narrator blends into the background and acts as a spectator to the events in the pub by not interacting directly with any of the peasants. Although the narrator is physically present, his removal, yet observation of the situation creates the idea for the reader that one is viewing the peasant in his or her natural environment. The convivial atmosphere around the singing competition within the pub plays out in stark contrast to the miserable country environment. Yashka’s emotional song brings both the narrator and the rest of the peasants to tears, shortly followed by all of them “talking loudly [and] joyfully,” momentarily forgetting about the problems of their past and the present (19). The narrator’s rapid departure from the pub, so as to not “spoil [his] impression” of the peasants, reveals the narrator’s desire to remember the peasants in a positive light despite their terrible environment (20). He wishes to retain this image of the peasants, as it is not plagued by the ills that the environment undoubtedly imposes on them. Particularly since the narrator reveals the difficult pasts of some of the peasants, he wants his memory of them to be this positive experience in the pub, which could very well differ from that of the peasant’s everyday lives given the harsh environment. While the narrator leads one to believe that the peasants lead a satisfying life, there is much that the narrator withholds or does not know about their everyday life, and the poor environment serves as an indicator that the way the peasants appear may not necessarily be the truth.