Russian Serfdom and American Slavery in Popular Fiction, 1870–1900

My paper, a comparison of literary representations of serfdom and slavery in popular fiction between 1870 and 1900, assesses evolving notions of race, ethnicity, and national identity in two post-emancipation nations, the United States and Russia. Reflecting on the abolition of Russian serfdom (1861) and American slavery (1865), Russian noblemen and Southern planters produced strikingly similar representations of former serfs and slaves during the post-emancipation era. These authors came from a class of men and women who sought to uphold the ideology of civilization in patriarchal, pre-modern societies that were permanently changed by abolition and by the period of modernization that followed. Although Americanists are familiar with Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris, their Russian counterparts, Vsevolod Solov’yov, Evgenii Salias-de-Turnemir, and Grigorii Danilevskii are largely unknown to Western scholars despite their enormous popularity among middle class Russian readers. I argue that these five authors sought to alter popular memories of slavery and serfdom through the production of idealized historical fiction. In their works, they infantilized former bondsmen to justify the supposed paternalism of bondage and produced sentimental images that glossed over the harsh conditions laborers endured. By depicting former bondsmen as contented rural laborers who were devoted to their masters, these writers tapped into audiences’ anxieties about post-emancipation integration. Ultimately, these findings challenge the idea that Southerners' idealization of slavery was exceptional and show how a range of factors including race, class and political/economic power contributed to the creation of corresponding literary representations in disparate countries.