Ivan Turgenev. He was Russia’s Great Emancipator, helping abolish serfdom; he helped bring freedom to the serfs by an ingeniously devastating method: writing short stories that showed what their lives were like…
…In Russia, at least, the prospects for emancipation had suddenly improved with the accession of Alexander II. Turgenev was in Paris when, on February 19,1861,the manifesto abolishing serfdom was proclaimed, and he attended a special service of Thanksgiving at the Russian church. Standing next to him was his relative, the old Decembrist, Nicholas Turgenev. As words of the proclamation were read, he and Nicholas wept. “I still can’t beleive that we have lived to see this day,” he wrote a friend in Russia. But the two Turgenev’s were almost alone in their enthusiasm. As the sermon explaining he act began, most of the congregation of nobles who had just lost their “baptized property” without compensation walked out.
The serfs were equally disappointed by the terms of the proclamation. The one thing they wanted most, land, was denied them. Turgenev saw from the first that without such distribution, there could not be a stable and progressive country. During a visit to Russia a year after the emancipation he found conditions throughout the country to be most chaotic. Agriculture, if anything, was declining and not improving. The aristocrats were suddenly land poor, while the embittered serfs were being forced to pay exorbitant rents for their houses, garden plots and wood lots.