True Songs of Freedom: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in Russian Culture and Society by John MacKay (review)

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s most popular book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), captivated the American public in the years preceding the Civil War. Although Stowe wrote this antislavery novel to bolster the abolitionist cause in the United States, it became the world’s best-selling novel of the nineteenth century.

In his engaging new book, John MacKay assesses the influence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Russia and the Soviet Union, where more than one hundred editions have been published since 1857. Four years before Congress abolished American slavery, Tsar Alexander II freed the serfs who made up 80 percent of the Russian population. In the decades following emancipation, both nations grappled with the integration of the former bondspeople during an era of modernization, geographic expansion, and industrialization. These comparable experiences make Russia an excellent case study for calculating the impact of a revolutionary text like Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

MacKay joins a growing number of scholars who explore features of nineteenth-century American and Russian history such as slavery, serfdom, imperial expansion, postwar reconstruction, and conceptions of race. Influenced by the work of Peter Kolchin, Allison Blakely, Jane Burbank, and Frederick Cooper, MacKay has produced a transnational analysis that maps the range of responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and charts the ways in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian and Soviet educated elites harnessed this work of literature to facilitate their political and social goals.

True Songs of Freedom will appeal to scholars interested in serfdom and slavery, the development of the book market, literacy education, and political writing. MacKay sees the reception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Russia as “a field of struggle and debate” where state censors, editors, and publishers revised and produced different versions of the text that often conveyed political ideologies or ethical ideas to specific groups of readers (98). He examines a range of sources including Russian translations and adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, book reviews, articles, and correspondence that detail the attitudes of Russian publishers, censors, and writers.

MacKay posits that three broad forces in Russia and the Soviet Union shaped readers’ responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; these are “the emergence of the book and journal trade . . . the gradual rise of the nation-state as a universal form of social belonging; and a new drive . . . toward a radical universalization of equality and liberty” (97). Within this historical context, MacKay contends, Stowe’s novel possessed three functions. In the mid-nineteenth century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin served as a morally instructive text that urged readers to ponder ethical questions about bondage. During the late nineteenth century and the twentieth, Russian and Soviet educated elites used the book to teach readers about the historical similarities and differences between American slavery and Russian serfdom. Finally, as a literary work of art, Uncle Tom’s Cabin inspired writers who wished to construct a national literature of their own.

State censors permitted the publication of Russian editions of the book between 1857 and 1859, a tumultuous period when Russian political elites began to craft the terms of the serfs’ manumission. Stowe’s condemnation of slavery resonated with writers like Ivan Turgenev and Nikolai Nekrasov, who called the serfs “our own Negroes” (27). But not all elites were persuaded by Stowe’s argument, including one Russian who recognized the irony of the book’s popularity when he criticized women who he saw “weeping inconsolably over Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but who [were] never struck by the real misery and poverty so often encountered in [Russian] villages” (23). Nevertheless, Uncle Tom’s Cabin prompted some to consider the unsettling parallels between slavery and serfdom.

After emancipation, the book elicited responses in Russian readers that ranged from abhorrence to adoration and from ambivalence to apprehension. Although some educated elites viewed the book as sententious, others recognized its utility as an edifying text. For example, many...