Pisemsky’s Sketches from Peasant Life: An Attempt at a Non-Partisan Reading

Abstract

A. F. Pisemsky’s reaction to Annenkov’s review of his Sketches from Peasant Life (Ocherki iz krest’ianskoi zhizni)² highlights problems of the relationship between creative literature and social comment, and of the relationship between writer and critic, which were fundamental to Russian literature in his time and have remained so to this day. It was the failure of readers to perceive what he actually wrote in his ‘anti-nihilist’ novel, Troubled Seas (Vzbalamuchennoe more; 1863), which destroyed his reputation. Critics read his earlier peasant stories, too, for their ideological content and truth to reality, ignoring not only what he said in them, but also the technical means by which he strove to find a way of dealing with this difficult subject-matter. Because Pisemsky has been pigeonholed as a second-rate and (merely) ‘realist’ writer, critical approaches to his work have tended to focus on perceived content rather than on form. The effect of this approach is not only to devalue his artistry and craft, but also to encourage a superficial reading of his work. The present essay will attempt a close reading of the Sketches from Peasant Life, giving an account of them in terms of the approaches and values embedded in their structure rather than those which are suggested by a superficial reading.

Instead of thinking about the work he was discussing, he began with the preconceived idea that the life of the people cannot be turned into a pearl of creation, in Gogol’s words, and was prepared to distort everything in the light of that notion. I could slaughter him for his review of my ‘Petersburger’, because he completely failed to understand what I had written.¹