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What had given rise to these idealistic hopes was the emancipation of the serfs. Writers such as Dostoevsky compared the Decree of 1861 to the conversion of Russia to Christianity in the tenth century. They spoke about the need for the landlord and the peasant to overcome their old divisions and become reconciled by nationality. For, as Dostoevsky wrote in 1861, 'every Russian is a Russian first of all, and only after that does he belong to a class'.³ The educated classes were called upon to recognize their 'Russianness' and to turn towards the peasants as a cultural mission - educating them as citizens and reuniting Russia on the basis of a national literature and art.

It was such a vision that inspired the students to go to the people. Brought up as they were in the European world of the noble palace and the university, they were on a journey to an unknown land and a new and moral life based on 'Russian principles'. They saw the emancipation as an exorcism of Russia's sinful past - and out of that a new nation would be born. The writer Gleb Uspensky, who joined the Populists in their 'going to the people', vowed to start a new life in 'the year of' 61'. 'It was utterly impossible to take any of my personal past forward… To live at all I had to forget the past entirely and erase all the traits which it had instilled in my own personality.'⁴

Some of the Populists who left their parents' homes to live in labouring communes' where everything was shared (sometimes including lovers) according to the principles set out by the radical critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky in his seminal novel What Is to Be Done (1862). Here was a novel that offered its readers a blueprint of the new society. It became a bible for the revolutionaries, including the young Lenin, who said that his whole life had been transformed by it. Most of these communes soon broke down: the students could not bear the strains of agricultural work, let alone the taste of peasant food, and there were endless squabbles over property and love affairs. But the spirit of the commune, the ascetic lifestyle and material-ist beliefs which the students had imbibed from Chernyshevsky,

continued to inspire their rejection of the old society. This generation gap was the subject of Turgenev's novel Fathers and Children (1862) (often mistranslated as Fathers and Sons). It was set in the student protest culture of the early 1860s when the call of youth for direct action in the people's name opened up a conflict with the 'men of the forties', liberal men of letters like Turgenev and Herzen, who were content to criticize the existing state of affairs without addressing the future. Nineteenth-century Russia had its 'sixties' movement, too.

'The peasants have completely overwhelmed us in our literature', wrote Turgenev to Pavel Annenkov in 1858. 'Yet I am beginning to suspect that we still don't really understand them or anything about their lives.'⁵ Turgenev's doubts were at the heart of his critique of the student 'nihilists' (as they were called). But they applied equally to the intelligentsia's obsession with the 'peasant question', which dominated Russian culture after 1861. With the emancipation of the serfs, the rest of society was forced to recognize the peasant as a fellow citizen. Suddenly the old accursed questions about Russia's destiny became bound up with the peasant's true identity. Was he good or bad? Could he be civilized? What could he do for Russia? And where did he come from? No one knew the answers. For, in the famous lines of the poet Nekrasov:

Russia is contained in the rural depths Where eternal silence reigns.⁶

Armies of folklorists set out to explore these rural depths. 'The study of the people is the science of our times', declared Fedor Buslaev in 1868.⁷ Ethnographic museums were set up in Moscow and St Petersburg - their aim being, in the words of one of their founders, Ivan Beliaev, 'to acquaint the Russians with their own nation'.⁸ The public was astounded by the peasant costumes and utensils on display, the photographs and mock-ups of their living quarters in the various regions of the countryside. They seemed to have come from some exotic colony. In almost every field of serious enquiry - geography, philosophy, theology, philology, mythology and archaeology - the question of the peasant was the question of the day.