Barge Haulers on the Volga
Around the middle and late decades of the 19th century, autobiographical accounts written by serfs were becoming an object of increasing interest in Russian intellectual life, and were accordingly printed in political journals or as stand-alone volumes. Some related stories of remarkable social and economic success after freedom, such as that of Aleksander Vasil’evich Nikitenko, but more typically they gave an account closer to the unassuming, rather humble life of Savva Purlevskii.
“There is probably no other example of a person, who, having just escaped serfdom, remained close to the peasant and petty bourgeois environment and wrote his own memoirs. For that reason alone the pages that follow are worthy of our attention” N. Shcherban (Russkii vestnik editor)
Born in 1800 to an impoverished family, Purlevkskii lived under the institution of serfdom for around thirty years, and in these years his existence was one centerd closely around the local community and family traditions. A broad love of reading, with an especial fondness for poetry, exposed him to contemporary currents of thought, and his responsibility to support his family made him particularly sensitive to the nature of his livelihood and the future of his dependents. Daily injustices paired with a growing awareness of them as such no doubt drove his later escape to the south, beyond the Danube river, during which time he worked as a merchant and sales manager for a sugar corporation. It was not until the 1861 Emancipation, Tsar Alexander II’s edict called The All-Merciful Manifesto, that he returned to his native village and found employment in a guild. His memoirs were written not long before his death in 1868 and are valuable for the vivid portrait they offer not only of life under the institution of serfdom but some of the ideas that were taking hold.
“How to get rid of this centuries-old entrapment and free my family from it as well?” … “What could a married man, with limited knowledge, without money, and without connections and protection, do, and more importantly, what could a serf do…?” Purlevksii
Serfdom, because so widespread, often was determined by regional influences, and often varied from one estate to another; additionally, these local characteristics were further defined by the quality of land or resources available. Although agriculture occupied the majority of serfs, and for the largest part of their laboring hours; there was also a percentage, like Purlevskii (employed in the industrial province of Yaroslavl), who worked at crafts such as ship-building, tanning, oil production and linen cloth-making. While less common for agricultural serfs located in the south, frequent traveling for serfs for the purpose of getting seasonal work was not an unusual phenomenon, and was regulated by a system of passports and migrant fees.
Regardless of this small degree of economic freedom, Enlightenment ideas were already in the air, and the peasants who came into contact with them – whether literate or not, prosperous or poor – understood them in local, concrete terms as freedom from serfdom.
“Reading exposed my ignorance about almost everything” … “I was cautious about reaching hasty agreement with those brave ideas, which could hardly be applied to the actualities of my serf condition” Purlevskii.
Purlevskii, Savva Dmitrievich, and Boris B Gorshkov. 2005. A Life under Russian Serfdom : Memoirs of Savva Dmitrievich Purlevskii, 1800-1868. Budapest ; New York: Central European University Press.