Russian Peasant Family Life
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What must first of all be noted about the shape that peasant family life in Russia assumed in the last half of the 19th century is that in 1861 Tsar Alexander II formally emancipated the Russian serfs, whose labor and loyalty historically had been bound to the country's land-owning gentry as its labor force. Social change was implicit in the legitimation of individual freedom. But old habits die hard, and Russia from the time of its configuration as the Muscovite state in the 15th century cultivated a culture that was "autocratic, with absolute power in the hands of the grand duke (later the tsar), highly centralized [], and militaristic" (Suny 5) and that effectively enslaved the peasantry.Thus the world really did change for the serfs in 1861, but as the action of The Cherry Orchard suggests, some effects of emancipation were more latent than manifest by the end of the century. The tsar's absolute authority vis-à-vis the nobility was less important to former serfs than the provincial nobility, which saw themselves as "the proper governing class of the empire" (Suny 12). At the Ranevskaya estate in The Cherry Orchard, serfs long in the habit of subservience and/or attachment to the master are not breaking out of customary practices or even rushing to a farm village. Lopahin breaks the cycle of dependence, but nobody else in the play sees that as an achievement. The structure of the Russian peasant family appears to have been largely defined by labor-intensive and strongly
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ousewives customarily "were allowed to retain their dowries and their earnings from certain kinds of work, such as selling eggs or feathers" (Suny 10-11). To be sure, women were expected to "reproduc[e] the relations of power in the household and the commune" (Suny 11), transmitting the cultural traditions down the generations. And for their pains at household management and field labor, they were subject to beating and other abuse (Worobec 13). But some peasant women actually took on the power structure. Worobec begins her text with an anecdote of a widow who lost her land along with her husband to the commune--but retained the right to harvest its grain (3).
Emancipation aggravated family tensions from time to time. Multiple-family households, the preferred form of family life among peasants both before and after emancipation, could nevertheless foster intergenerational tensions between males and/or interfamily tensions between females, sometimes resulting in divisions of family units and dwellings (Worobec 43; 82ff). Thus "the simple nuclear family became more visible in post-emancipation rural Russia" (Worobec 12). For women, that represented risk since widowhood could deprive them of family-based land allotments supervised b
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1498
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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