Poverty of the Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature about the Po

Notes

Notes INTRODUCTION 1. In Russian-language studies of nineteenth-century Russian literature , the depiction of the lower classes is probably the single most examined topic. Yet for all the attention the matter has received, its very ideological importance in the Soviet era left a number of questions unposable, or in any case unposed. It is perhaps symptomatic of the uniformity of method and focus the topic has inspired that despite its prominence in both original and critical literature, not a single book to my knowledge is wholly devoted to the topic. 2. On philosophical approaches to otherness as such, see Theunissen. 3. There may of course be discrimination based on categories like religion, race, or age, but the states themselves are not presumed to be undesirable. 4. The Russian term here, of course, is bednyi. It denotes all degrees of lack, both moderate and severe. There is a second word in Russian with no sentimental coloring, nishchii, which refers specifically to absolute destitution . The nishchii must beg or perish, while the former may be fortunate enough to be able to work for a modest living. This pairing is somewhat different than that known in the West as the “deserving poor” and the “lazy poor” (on which see Himmelfarb, especially 288–370). 5. This literary indifference is doubled by a sociological one, undoubtedly worsened by censorship restrictions. For a variety of reasons, there are few nonliterary sources that might be used to illuminate literary texts about the poor written before the end of the nineteenth century. Tools which historians or literary critics working with the French or English traditions take for granted seem to be utterly lacking for the Russian. And what little data can be found usually are of doubtful reliability, such as the 1840 police census of Petersburg. One can only envy the commentators of Disraeli’s 1845 novel Sybil, who have traced his knowledge of poverty back to its origins in Parliamentary reports such as “the Children’s Employment Commission, the Select Committee on the Payment of Wages, the Midland Mining Commission, the Sanitary Commission” as well as “speeches in Par213 liament on the Ten Hours Bill, press accounts of the agitation against the New Poor Law, publications of the Chartists and the Anti-Corn League, and the private correspondence of the Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor” (Himmelfarb, 499). Even so simple and necessary a thing as a social history of preemancipation Russia is still to appear, as William Mills Todd noted in Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin (15–16). And it should be noted that by no means do scholars in these more fortunate fields find their task simple. Mollat’s The Poor in the Middle Ages: An Essay in Social History even has a separate “Note on Sources” to guide other scholars toward some 30 types of historical documents from which information on the poor can sometimes be gleaned. Revealing in this connection are two articles in the 1890 Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ of Brockhaus and Efron. The author of the article “Pauperizm ” (the use of a foreign name for the phenomenon is itself suggestive) presents precise statistical data on the extent of the problem in France, Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway , England and Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the United States, and even ancient Rome, but has only some impressionistic comments on poverty in Russia. He concludes, “For Russia no general statistical data are available on the number of those receiving charity and assistance” (45:55). The article ’s list of relevant literature likewise mentions only works in English or French, of which even a Russian translation can be cited for only one (Malthus). Meanwhile, the description of a turn-of-the-century project to expand official welfare institutions in the lengthy entry, “Public Charity” (“Prizrenie obshchestvennoe”), a project for which the author of the entry, V. Ger’e, takes personal credit, affords precise data on the number of employees (1,506), or the amounts collected for the purpose at charity balls in 1895 (14,920 rubles), but not on numbers of the needy served. The recent work by Lindenmeyr does fill some of the former gaps, but, understandably enough, focuses on a later period than that which interests me. The lack of reliable historical data on the poor has doubly influenced my decision to examine poverty in the light of imagination: by making certain other approaches prohibitively difficult but also by suggesting that such approaches at times overlook what is peculiar...