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1. Before Emancipation
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
12 1 Be fore Eman ci pa tion It isn’t so in Ver mont. Miss Ophe lia Tsar Al ex an der II of fi cially abol ished serf dom in Rus sia on 19 Feb ru ary 1861, thus free ing circa twenty-two mil lion men, women, and chil dren (or over 35 per cent of the en tire pop u la tion of the coun try) from the ap prox i mately one hun dred thou sand no bles who owned them. Al though his to rians have argued that the ac tual ab o li tion pro cess began long be fore and ended long after this date, we can for convenience’s sake take it as the pivotal mo ment in the his tory of the dis ap pear ance of this form of chat tel slav ery.1 In the years lead ing up to the proc la ma tion, there was, of course, no “sec tional” jour na lis tic po lemic in Rus sia of the type that helped give birth to Uncle Tom’s Cabin: no North from which to launch ab o li tion ist at tacks on bond age, no South where pro slav ery thought might be nur tured and prop a gated. Under con di tions of ab so lute mon ar chy, the de gree of govern ment inter fer ence with the press (in the form of cen sor ship) was mark edly greater in Rus sia than in the United States, and the num ber of ac tual jour na lis tic or gans con sid er ably smaller.2 The “peas ant ques tion” had been a topic of con cern, how ever, since the late eigh teenth cen tury, with sa lons, govern ment com mit tee meet ings, pri vate oral or epis to lary ex changes, and se cret so ci eties as the main set tings for de bate. And some writ ing openly or obliquely crit i cal of serf dom did ap pear even be fore Alexander’s ac ces sion to the throne in 1855, after which time one can de tect a cer tain sof ten ing in re stric tions on the press, though hardly a full-scale re lax a tion.3 What is clear (from a com par a tive angle) is that Before Emancipation 13 the amount of Rus sian print de voted from what ever per spec tive to the ques tion of bond age was, by US stan dards, very small in deed.4 Al ready by 1857, Uncle Tom’s Cabin had ap peared in Ar me nian (1854; pub lished in Ven ice), Czech (1854), Dan ish (1853), Dutch (1853), Finn ish (1856), Flem ish (1852), French (eleven dif fer ent trans la tions, and more edi tions, in the space of ten months in 1852–53), Ger man (at least twenty-nine edi tions in 1852–53), Hun gar ian (thrice: 1853,1856,1857), Ital ian (1853), Polish (1853), Por tu guese (a Pa ri sian edi tion from 1853), Slo vene (1853), Span ish (six 1853 edi tions, pub lished in Mex ico, Bogotá, and Ma drid), Ro ma nian (1853), and Welsh (1853).5 This dis semi na tion, ex traor di nary by any stan dards and prob ably of greater scope than my sources in di cate, helped to make the novel a point of ref er ence for dis cus sions of bond age inter na tion ally in the 1850s. But Uncle Tom’s Cabin had to wait until very late in 1857 to ap pear in Rus sian, al though it was (as we will see later) al ready fa mil iar to many in in tel lec tual cir cles, usu ally in French or Ger man trans la tion. The rel a tive late ness of the Rus sian ver sion (given the rapid early pro life ra tion of trans la tions) has led some to guess that the book’s pub li ca tion had hitherto been banned.6 And al though we have no ac tual writ ten record of an of fi cial pro hi bi tion, there is in deed some ev i dence, neg a tive and pos i tive, of sup pres sion. Jour nals of all po lit i cal stripes made it a prac tice in the...