Opaque Mind, Muteness, and Melodrama: Dmitry Grigorovich’s Invention of Peasant Subjectivity in The Village (1846)

Slavic and East European Journal. 2022. Vol. 66. No. 3. P. 373–391.

Vdovin A.

The article explores how Dmitry Grigorovich invented peasant subjectivity in his novella The Village (1846). The author operationalizes Jacques Rancière’s and G. Didi-Huberman’s concept of ‘the sensible’ and their studies of the representation of subaltern people in art and literature to trace how speech, feelings, and thoughts are represented in Grigorovich’s narration. Unlike his predecessors in the genre (Karamzin, Pogodin, Polevoi, and others), Grigorovich splits introspections into the heroine’s inner world into feelings and thoughts, depicted separately. While the feelings are portrayed as available for “reading” by the narrator, the latter prove to be at best semi-transparent, but mostly opaque. Protagonist Akulina appears in the story almost wordless: serfdom and family violence harden her and lead to a refusal to speak. The heroine’s “muteness” and the chain of sufferings refer to what Peter Brooks called the melodramatic mode of representation, which affects and plays with the feelings of readers. All this together explains how Grigorovich managed to create an innovative narrative about peasants, and why it is possible to consider his representation a new type of peasant subjectivity

Keywords: subjectivity, melodrama, peasants in literature, muteness, Russian fiction, Grigorovich

Publication based on the results of: Literature and Society: a Sociocultural Descriptions (2022)