turgenev: fighting for the serf on his turf

Ivan Turgenov was Russia’s great emancipator. He helped bring freedom to the serfs by the devastating method of showing what their lives were like through his short stories…

..As A Sportman’s Sketches appeared one by one in The Contemporary, their full implication fully if slowly, dawned on the government, and an angry Czar Nicholas awaited a chance to punish their troublesome author. He did not have to wait long. In October, 1851, Turgenev was introduced to Gogol. “We should have become acquainted long ago,” were Gogol’s first words to the thirty-three year old Turgenev. But four months after this meeting, Gogol was dead, and the government he had satirized so effectively refused to permit any public show of mourning.

---Young Russian peasant women in front of traditional wooden house, in a rural area along the Sheksna River near the small town of Kirillov. Early color photograph from Russia, created by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii as part of his work to document the Russian Empire from 1909 to 1915.---source: WIKI

—Young Russian peasant women in front of traditional wooden house, in a rural area along the Sheksna River near the small town of Kirillov. Early color photograph from Russia, created by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii as part of his work to document the Russian Empire from 1909 to 1915.—source: WIKI

In a brief obituary, published in the Moscow News, Turgenev wrote, “Yes, he is dead, this man whom we have the right, the sorrowful right granted to us by his death, to call great.” Nicholas, who could not bear to hear the word “great” applied to any other Russian, personally ordered Turgenev’s arrest.

For a month he was imprisoned in a tiny cell, next to the chamber where convicted serfs were flogged. With their cries ringing in his ears, he wrote “Mumu.” It is the tale of a serf, a deaf mute named Gerasim, who is the caretaker of the Moscow mansion of a rich old woman whose “day, joyless and overcast, had long passed away, but her evening too was blacker than night.”

The one bright thing in Gersaim’s life is a little spaniel he finds nearly dead on a riverbank, nurses back to health, and names Mumu. For a year the two are inseparable. Then one day Gersaim’s mistress sees the little dog and calls it to come to her, but Mumu growls. Unable to tolerate anything that is not subservient, the old woman orders the spaniel killed. At first Gersaim hides his pet, but when Mumu is discovered still alive, he gives her a last meal, picks up two bricks, and goes in a boat upon the river:

At last Gerasim sat up hurriedly with an expression of painful bitterness on his face, tied the bricks he had taken with a rope, made a running noose, put it round Mumu’s neck, lifted her up over the river, and looked at her for the last time. She looked at him trustingly and without fear and wagged her tail slightly. He turned away, shut his eyes, and opened his hands. . . . Gerasim heard nothing, neither the quick shrill yelp of the falling Mumu nor the heavy splash of the water; for him the noisy day was soundless and silent as no still night is silent to us, and when he opened his eyes again, little waves as before were hurrying over the river, as though chasing each other and, as before, rippled against the two sides of the boat, and only far away behind some wide circles were spreading out towards the bank….

The story had a basis in fact. Vavara Petrovna, Turgenev’s mother, had, under similar circumstances, forced her own deaf-and-dumb caretaker to drown his beloved dog. ( to be continued)…

This entry was posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Literature/poetry/spoken word and tagged , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

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