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P. (Petr O.) News about Russia I n August of 1849, a thick packet was given to the main post office in Saint Petersburg, addressed to Prince Petr Georgievich Ol’denburgskii , a liberal-thinking aristocrat and relative of the tsar whose family estate was in the district of Iaroslavl’, northeast of Moscow. The half-literate scribblings on the packet, the cheap paper of which the envelope was made, and the absence of the name of the sender, all struck the prince’s subordinate officials as suspicious, and the packet was not accepted. The packet was kept at the post office for seven months, in the expectation that the sender would return for it. In March of 1850, the packet was to be destroyed by the “dead letter” office. Before burning unclaimed mail, however, the usual practice was to open the letters and see what was inside. On this occasion, the postal officials found a notebook inside a covering of canvas, filled with verses. On the cover of the notebook were the following words:“This book, called News about Russia, is taken from the life of the mir [peasant community ], from the deeds and words of the people, with an appendix in verse, by Petr O. . . . I would now like to dedicate my verse to the sovereign Emperor Nikolai under the following conditions: (1) that he read everything contained in the manuscript; and (2) that after reading it, he not prosecute the writer. Without prior agreement to these conditions, the manuscript is not be read by the sovereign emperor Nikolai I and his exalted royal family, but consigned to the flames. The writer of the manuscript is a half-literate serf, belonging in body to a lord but in soul to Christ, Petr.” 38 X 39 News about Russia After reading the verses and finding their contents “blameworthy,” postal officials sent the packet to the Third Department (the political investigation and surveillance service) of the tsar’s chancellery.1 Count Aleksei Fyodorovich Orlov, the boss of the Third Department from 1844–56, looked at the verses and informed Prince Ol’denburgskii of them. Orlov ordered his subordinates to look at other suspicious texts to see if “they could not find a similar hand or comparable forms of expression .” But they failed to find the author of the verses, and the notebook was put into a file in the archive of the Third Department, where it was kept until the twentieth century. News about Russia was published only once, in 1961 (the centenary of the emancipation of the serfs), under the editorship of T. G. Snytko, who apparently rediscovered the manuscript.2 News about Russia was not the only piece of verse protest sent to the tsar, but it was, it seems, by far the longest and most ambitious.3 The basic text is divided into three parts: a short preface “On the Life of the Author, P.”; the long central section, “News and Prophecy about Russia,” of which the central event is the serf narrator’s failed attempt to marry a free peasant girl; and “News about Russia” proper, devoted to the recollections of the matchmaker Solomónida about how her serf parents sold her as a child to a free, childless peasant couple. The simple frame structure of the poem is richly complicated by the generous insertion of dream visions, songs, and especially “side” narratives told in what appear to be semi-fictionalized voices other than the narrator’s. Thus, within a tale told by the matchmaker Solomónida, a 1. For more on this organization, see P. S. Squire, The Third Department: The Establishment and Practices of the Political Police in the Russia of Nicholas I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). 2 T. G. Snytko, ed., Vesti o Rossii: Povest’ v stikhakh krepostnogo kres’ianina (Iaroslavl’: Iaroslavskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1961). I have included a number of Snytko’s explanatory notes here. The manuscript is in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), archive 109, file 100, from the year 1850. The poem was clearly thought to be authentic by the original investigators and has been treated as such by later historians, including Daniel Field in his Rebels in the Name of the Tsar (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989) and Peter Kolchin in his Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987). 3. Others included the “Historical Tale” by one Semyon Oleinichuk, and the anonymous “Voice of a Russian...

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