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Chapter Four Spreading the Word O! will there come a time (Do come, you longed-for time! . . .) When the peasant will learn at last That not all pictures are alike, Nor is every book a book? When from the village fair he’ll bring Not General Blücher’s picture, Nor the dumb “Milord Georg,” But Gogol and Belinsky? —Nikolai Nekrasov, Who Lives Well in Russia? THE OPENING TALE of Gogol’s collection Evenings on a Farm near Dikan’ka, “The Fair at Sorochintsy,” leads the reader into a world where chaos and discord resolve into momentary harmonies, only to disintegrate again into incomprehensibility or nostalgic longing. Here was the village fair of the early nineteenth century, at once sublime as a waterfall and grotesque as a many-headed monster: “Noise, swearing, bellowing, bleating, roaring—all blend into one discordant babble. Oxen, sacks, hay, gypsies, pots, peasant women, spice cakes, caps—everything is bright, variegated , discordant, thronging in piles and dashing about before your eyes” (1:115). Not just a backdrop for a comic-fantastic story in which the devil’s work removes the obstacles blocking the marriage of two young lovers, the fair pulses like a microcosm of the world, an image of its disordered plenitude . As the epigraph to chapter 2 exclaims: “Good Lord! What isn’t there at the fair!” (1:115). In fact, what could not be found at Gogol’s Sorochintsy, but proliferated at village fairs across Russia by the end of the century, were books. The atmosphere of the bazaar had changed little in the intervening decades, but now amidst the crockery, grain, livestock, sweets, baubles, and bolts of cloth lay rows of printed matter: brightly colored illustrated broadsheets called lubki, saint’s lives, commercial popular fiction, and even the works of the national literary classics. Among these last, “The Fair at Sorochintsy” tended to sell particularly well. And no wonder: Gogol had taken its archetypical plot and stock characters from popular comedy and folklore, the very soil 75 from which the tastes of the newly literate provincial readers grew.1 The agreeably familiar situation—love at first sight met enthusiastically by a dullwitted father, then maliciously thwarted by a shrewish stepmother—was punctuated by bursts of slapstick humor and resolved with the aid of a fearsome gypsy and a legend about the devil’s red jacket. “The Fair at Sorochintsy ” also had the gratifying allure of a looking glass: kaleidoscopic in its evocation of atmosphere, it richly portrayed the very milieu in which it was sold. Thus, some fifty years after its original publication, when it had been received by its educated urban readers as an example of folkloric exoticism, Gogol’s tale returned to its roots. A SYMBOLIC ECONOMY We might describe the Russian literary classics as the symbolic gold standard of Russia’s post-Reform civic culture. Historically, literature had been one of the rare domains where individual public expression was allowed and, as a result, it became coextensive with citizenship, “that imaginary but socially and politically palpable space where the power of government encounters the fullest complement of the citizen’s rights implied in a ‘modern rational state.’”2 In the early nineteenth century this overlapping of aesthetics and politics found its most compelling incarnation in the Decembrists , who formed a “unique civic school” in which their literary activity and behavioral style intertwined with their social and political programs.3 When the surviving members of the movement received amnesty in 1856, the era of the Great Reforms recovered their civic example. However, by this time the intellectual leadership of Russian society had passed from the gentry, the estate to which the Decembrists had belonged, to the raznochintsy, imperial subjects who did not have a place in one of the four official estates: the gentry, clergy, merchants, or peasantry. A group of these raznochintsy, educated at the universities but dedicated to serving the people as opposed to the state, fashioned themselves as the “embodied ‘intelligence ,’ ‘understanding,’ or ‘consciousness’ of the nation” and so became known as the “intelligentsia.”4 Numbers of them worked in the so-called liberal professions, law and medicine, but the intelligentsia’s group identity truly coalesced around the literary activities of its members. After the passage of the Great Reforms, the institution of literature continued to make up the nucleus of what is called civil society: the socially active public whose opinions and voluntary associations create a bulwark against the tyrannical exercise of power by the state...

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