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It may seem odd that a work of literature should cause such huge shock waves throughout society. But Russia's identity was built upon the myth which Chekhov had destroyed. The Populist ideal of the peasantry had become so fundamental to the nation's conception of itself that to question this ideal was to throw the whole of Russia into agonizing doubt. The impact of the story was all the more disturbing for the simple factual style in which it was composed. It seemed not so much a work of fiction as a documentary study: the Tsarist censor had referred to it as an 'article'.⁹³

Chekhov's story was the fruit of its author's first-hand knowledge of the peasantry. The villages around his small estate at Melikhovo contained many peasants who went to work as waiters or as other service staff in nearby Moscow. The influence of city life was clearly to be seen in the behaviour of those who stayed behind. Shortly before he wrote the story Chekhov had observed a group of drunken servants in his own kitchen. One of them had married off his daughter, much against her will, in exchange for a bucket of vodka. They were now drinking it.⁹⁴ But Chekhov was not shocked by such a scene. Over the years he had come to know the peasants through his work as a doctor. Sickly peasants came to Melikhovo from many miles around, and he treated them free of charge. During the cholera epidemic that followed on the heels of the famine crisis in 1891 he had given up his writing and worked as a doctor for the district zemstvo in Moscow. The gruelling work had acquainted him with the squalid conditions in which the poorest peasants lived and died. 'The peasants are crude, unsanitary and mistrustful', Chekhov wrote to a friend, 'but the

thought that our labours will not be in vain makes it all unnoticeable.'⁹⁵ Five years later, in 1897, Chekhov helped to collect the statistics for the first national census in Russian history. He was horrified by what he learned - that just a few kilometres from Moscow there were villages where six out of every ten infants would die in their first year. Such facts angered him, a 'small deeds' liberal, pushing him politically towards the left. On learning, for example, that the poor discharged from hospital were dying for lack of proper aftercare, Chekhov delivered a tirade to Yezhov, a well-known columnist for the right-wing daily Novoe vremia, in which he maintained that, since the rich got richer by turning the poor peasants into drunks and whores, they should be made to meet the costs of their health care.⁹⁶

Beneath all the din surrounding Chekhov's story there was a profound question about Russia's future as a peasant land. The old rural Russia was being swept aside by the advance of the towns, and the nation was divided over it. For the Slavophiles and the Populists, who saw Russia's unique virtues in the old peasant culture and community, the growing subjugation of the village to the town was a national catastrophe. But for Westernists, the liberals and the Marxists, who embraced the city as a modernizing force, the peasantry was backward and bound to die away. Even the government was forced to reassess its peasant policy as the influence of the urban market began to change the countryside. The peasant commune was no longer feeding the growing population of the countryside, let alone providing a market-able surplus for the state to tax; and as the agrarian crisis deepened, it became the organizing kernel of the peasant revolution. Since 1861 the government had left villages in the hands of the communes -believing them to be the bulwarks of the patriarchal order in the countryside: its own state administration stopped at the level of the dist rict towns. But after the 1905 Revolution the government changed its policy. Under Stolypin, Prime Minister between 1906 and 1911, it atempted to break up the village commune, which had organized the

peasant war against the manors, by encouraging the stronger peasants to set up private farms on land removed from communal control, and

at the same time helping those who were too weak to farm, or deprived of access to the land by the new laws of private property, to move as labourers into the towns.