Aleksandr Nikitenko. Up From Serfdom: My Childhood and Youth in Russia, 1804-1824. Translated by Helen Saltz Jacobson with foreword by Peter Kolchin. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001. xxiv + 228 pp. $26.95, cloth, ISBN 978-0-300-08414-6.
Reviewed by Alexander M. Martin
Published on H-Russia (September, 2001)
A Serf in the Provincial Intelligentsia the time when he was emancipated from serfdom In the literature on Russia in the period in 1824, at the age of nineteen or twenty. The title 1700-1861, one of the greatest lacunae involves that Jacobson gave the book, Up From Serfdom, is the middling strata of society, those who mediated explicitly intended as an allusion to Booker T. between the cultures of the elite (or intelligentsia) Washington's 1901 autobiography, Up From Slav‐ and the narod, and who occupy such a central ery. The parallels between Russian serfdom and place in the historiography of the other countries American slavery are developed by Peter Kolchin, of the Atlantic world. While we are fairly well in‐ whose preface revisits key ideas from his seminal formed about court politics, high culture, and Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian peasant society, we know little about the evolu‐ Serfdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, tion of Russia's counterpart to the middle classes 1987) and applies them to the case of Nikitenko. of the West, and of course, we have few autobio‐ Nikitenko was born to Ukraininan parents in graphical narratives by serfs. Voronezh Province in 1804 or 1805. They were Helen Saltz Jacobson's translation of Aleksan‐ serfs of the spectacularly wealthy Sheremetev dr Vasil'evich Nikitenko's account of his childhood family; the father was the son of a village cobbler, and youth represents a major contribution to the while the mother's parents were poor farmers. English-language literature in both felds--the pro‐ That, however, is the only way in which the fami‐ vincial "middle classes" and serfdom. A kind of ly was "ordinary" by the standards of serf society. "prequel" to Nikitenko's well-known Diary of a Nikitenko's father was recruited at an early age to Russian Censor (Amherst: University of Massa‐ go to Moscow to sing in Count Sheremetev's choir. chusetts Press, 1975), likewise translated and edit‐ There, he received an education that enabled him ed by Jacobson, the present volume--originally to pursue serious intellectual interests in the fu‐ published in several Russian editions between ture, as well as aspirations for respect and dignity 1888 and 1904--deals with Nikitenko's life up to that, in his son's view, made him permanently un‐ H-Net Reviews ft to accept the indignities that serfdom entailed tion of local oligarchs is reproduced in the experi‐ once he returned to his native village. Carried ence of his son, the author, who excels at the low‐ away by his idealistic impulses after his return er public school in Voronezh only to be denied ad‐ home, he used his position as village clerk to em‐ mission to a gimnaziia because of his serf status. bark on a quixotic crusade against the corrupt lo‐ When well-meaning teachers ofer to issue him a cal power structure only to fnd himself de‐ certifcate of graduation that would falsely identi‐ nounced by the faraway Count Sheremetev and fy him as the son of a bureaucrat, it only com‐ "exiled," with his family, to another Sheremetev pounds the humiliation. Repeatedly, he is accept‐ votchina in Smolensk Province, which Nikitenko ed by enlightened members of the provincial in‐ describes as though it were located in the depths telligentsia only to be reminded eventually of his of Siberia. fatally inferior social status. However, even at the This early experience established a pattern darkest moments, he fnds benevolent patrons that Nikitenko sees continued throughout his fa‐ willing to lend him a helping hand. He is fnally ther's life: driven by the noblest of impulses, and manumitted in 1824 thanks to the dedicated inter‐ sufciently literate to interact with the mighty by cession of the powerful Prince Aleksandr Nikolae‐ serving as an estate administrator, engaging in vich Golitsyn, but only after a long, humiliating lawsuits, or petitioning the governor and even struggle in which his master--a shallow, spoiled, Empress Mariia Fedorovna, the father continually self-indulgent aristocrat--tries to retain him as his sufers mistreatment and humiliation at the serf simply to remind the world of his own power. hands of landlords and ofcials but refuses to see Nikitenko's story thus revolves around serf‐ how deeply bribery and arbitrary despotism had dom but does not involve the situations or cast of etched themselves into the structures of Russian characters one might expect, since he is neither a society. The father is rendered morose by repeat‐ peasant nor a domestic servant or migrant work‐ ed failures, while his bitterness and frustration er, and agriculture or the village community play fnd a release in both periodic outbursts against no signifcant role in his account. Instead, we see his family and hopeless romances with beautiful a family that, had it not been for serfdom, ought widows whom he selfessly rescues from distress. to have formed part of an upwardly mobile pro‐ The father is thus, in his son's account, an ad‐ vincial middle class: the grandfather was a shoe‐ mirable fgure whose faws are the product of maker, the father became a clerk and estate ad‐ tragic circumstances created by an unjust social ministrator, and Nikitenko himself makes his liv‐ order that grants him education and knowledge ing as a teacher. The family wears "urban" yet keeps him in bondage. Nikitenko's mother rep‐ (rather than peasant) clothes, cultivates genteel resents a very diferent archetype: stoic, loving, manners in its daily life, and associates with no‐ commonsensical, and frmly rooted in her peas‐ bles, clerics, and merchants whose common tie is ant background, she holds the family together and an interest in cultural refnement and intellectual stands by her man despite his faws and misfor‐ inquisitiveness. tunes, out of respect for the purity of his motives One of the book's most interesting features is and the depth of his pain. precisely the light that it sheds on the early-intelli‐ The Nikitenko family sufers from the oppres‐ gentsia milieu in such seeming backwaters as siveness of serfdom precisely because no cultural Boguchar and Ostrogozhsk, two towns south of divide separates the father, and later the son, Voronezh, where a cultivated local society that from their social betters. The ease with which the crossed soslovie boundaries evidently already ex‐ father is exiled or jailed for exposing the corrup‐ isted in the early nineteenth century. Nikitenko
2 H-Net Reviews evokes this milieu with great skill and verve, and Kanatchikov's; at the same time, growing up in a gives us a sense of their response to some of the period still marked by enlightened absolutism, seminal historical developments of the time, in‐ Nikitenko advocates no sociopolitical program be‐ cluding the 1812 Napoleonic invasion, about yond the right to live in freedom and dignity. which his protagonists seemed surprisingly un‐ From the vantage point of his old age, as a man concerned; the rise of the Russian Bible Society who had escaped serfdom and achieved a success‐ and post-1814 religious mysticism, to which ful career in Imperial Russia, Nikitenko focuses Nikitenko was at frst strongly attracted; the ex‐ his social commentary on a specifc critique of periment with clustering groups of provinces into serfdom in times past, not the utopian vision of a governor-generalships, which Nikitenko consid‐ post-revolutionary future that animates ered a failure; the school system that came out of Kanatchikov. the reforms promulgated by Catherine II and This book is an excellent addition to the liter‐ Alexander I; the resistance to reform by the no‐ ature on serfdom, pre-reform provincial society, bles, bureaucrats, merchants, and clerics who Russian history in the early nineteenth century, formed the local oligarchy; and the Russian army and the development of sociopolitical thought of the era of Arakcheev and "paradomania." among non-elite groups during that period. The At times, the reader is reminded of the auto‐ translation is smooth and idiomatic, the illustra‐ biography of Semen Kanatchikov (A Radical tions concerning rural society are highly evoca‐ Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of tive, and the maps are also helpful (though it Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov, trans. Reginald E. would have been useful to include one that shows Zelnik [Stanford: Stanford University Press, Boguchar, Ostrogozhsk, Alekseevka, and the other 1986]). Both of them feel a tinge of nostalgia for specifc locales where the story takes place). For the lost, innocent rural world of their childhood, the non-specialist, Peter Kolchin's foreword and which Nikitenko expresses in the form of an in‐ the explanatory endnotes provide useful back‐ tense attachment to the folkways, national charac‐ ground. We can only hope that a paperback ver‐ ter, and landscape of "Little Russia" (which is ex‐ sion is in the works as well for use as a course plicitly contrasted with a grim, unfriendly "Great text. Russia"). At the same time, they are anxious to as‐ similate the manners, attitude and identity of an intermediate social level that stands between the peasantry and the ruling stratum--the provincial intelligentsia for Nikitenko, the working class for Kanatchikov. In both cases, any desire that might exist to join the upper classes is ofset by a deep suspiciousness toward the elite's values and morals. Both authors thus seek to achieve a so‐ cioeconomic middle ground that is also conceived as an ethical high ground. However, living at op‐ posite ends of the nineteenth century, their re‐ sponses to these challenges are diferent and re‐ fect the profound transformation of Russian soci‐ ety: Nikitenko's world is still split in two by the in‐ sitution of serfdom, a social reality that is central to his worldview but is absent from
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Citation: Alexander M. Martin. Review of Nikitenko, Aleksandr. Up From Serfdom: My Childhood and Youth in Russia, 1804-1824. H-Russia, H-Net Reviews. September, 2001.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5494
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