concept
Emancipation of the Serfs (1861)
Emancipation Reform
also: Крестьянская реформа 1861 года, отмена крепостного права
Alexander II's 1861 decree freeing Russia's roughly 23 million serfs, ending legal bondage but leaving most former serfs poor, land-poor, and still economically dependent on their former owners through redemption payments and communal land arrangements. By the 1880s, two decades on, the paternalistic manner of landowners like Vosmyorkin toward 'his' people -- proprietary, sentimental, and still assuming a natural hierarchy -- reflects how incompletely the reform had changed the texture of rural social relations.
Reading notes
- On Official Business §27 the emancipation
The 1861 abolition of serfdom, from which Loshadin dates the start of his thirty years' service as constable.
- The Whistlers §11 Antip
The coachman Antip's fawning speech -- insisting that even an undeserving man like Filka is showered with the masters' 'kindness,' and that peasants should bow and kiss their masters' hands -- performs precisely the deference a servant might calculate is expected of him in front of his employer. Whether Antip believes his own flattery or is shrewdly playing to Vosmyorkin's mood is left ambiguous; either way it is a portrait of the unequal, still-feudal-feeling texture of landowner-peasant relations two decades after legal emancipation.
- The Whistlers §17 We're the dark ones! ... We understand mostly by the nose
Antip's self-deprecating description of peasant ignorance ('temen'', literally 'darkness/benightedness') was a common self-abasing trope peasants could adopt when addressing gentry -- whether sincere humility, learned habit, or calculated flattery, it mirrors back to the masters exactly the hierarchy of 'us learned, them dark' that Vosmyorkin has just spent the scene claiming to reject.