Fiction and the European Peasantry: The Realist Novel as a Historical Source

Author(s): Jerome Blum

Source: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society , Apr. 8, 1982, Vol. 126, No. 2
(Apr. 8, 1982), pp. 122-139
Published by: American Philosophical Society

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/986356

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 Fiction and the European Peasantry: The
Realist Novel as a Historical Source*
JEROME BLUM

Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, Emeritus, Princeton University

In the five or six decades before the out-
break of World War I the peasants of
Europe, for the first time in their long
history, emerged as an independent force.
Till then, though they formed an over-
whelming majority of Europe's population
as much as 95 percent in some lands-they
had been scorned and mocked or completely
ignored by the upper orders of society. The
abolition during the first seven decades of
the nineteenth century of the bonds that had
for so long held most of the peasants of the
continent in servile dependence upon their
seigniors opened a new era in the history of
the people of the rural world. Their acquisi-
tion of the status of citizens, the spread of
representative government and the accom-
panying extension of the suffrage, the ad-
vances of popular education, and the open-
ing up of the countryside by improvements
in communications, drew the attention of
those who had in the past shown little or no
interest in the peasantry. Now political par-
ties and pressure groups sought the peasants'
support; politicians, professors, and philos-
ophers extolled their virtues; governments
sponsored rural credit institutions and co-
operatives; and ideologues of both the far
right and the far left proclaimed the peas-
antry as, respectively, the repository of the
traditional values of the society, or the ve-
hicle that would carry the nation into the
promised land of socialism.
* From a paper read at the Autumn General Meeting
of the Society, 12 November 1981.
PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY, VOL. 126, NO. 2, 1982
The transformation taking place in many
European lands from a rural agricultural so-
ciety to an urban-industrial one intensified
the new concern with the peasantry. The
declining importance of agriculture in these
countries created pressing social and eco-
nomic problems. Many peasants fled from
the land and many of those who remained
were reduced to landless rural proletarians.
The falling farm prices that characterized the
so-called Great Depression of the last quarter
of the nineteenth century, and the entry into
the European market of foodstuffs from
overseas, made matters worse.
Scholars, responding as always to the is-
sues of their own times, turned their atten-
tions to the peasantry in whom they had
hitherto shown at best only the slightest in-
terest. From England across to Russia noted
historians and economists and their disciples
sought to explain the contemporary rural
scene by studying the past history of the
peasantry of their respective nations and its
present condition. Their task proved difficult
because the illiterate peasants left no histor-
ical record of their own and their obscure
lives had held no interest for the chroniclers.
So the scholars had to rely on statutes, court
and parish records, land surveys, estate ar-
chives, travel accounts, and the like, and they
wrote about the legal, economic, and social
relationship between the peasants and the
rest of society rather than about the peasants
themselves. The actual life of the peasants,
their day-to-day existence, what they thought
and believed, and how they viewed the out-

122

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 FICTION AND THE EUROPEAN PEASANTRY 123
side world, lay unrevealed, and given the
constraints of orthodox scholarship, were
unrevealable.
Fortunately, the new interest in the peas-
antry was not limited to scholars. Novelists,
too, in increasing numbers turned to rural
themes. An industrious German scholar
counted 194 Bauernromanen written by 113
German authors between 1871 and 1918. Less
exhaustive studies show a similar if perhaps
not as numerous outpouring in other Euro-
pean lands.' Most of these novels were, like
most fiction, of inferior quality. A significant
number, however, were works of major lit-
erary importance written by some of the
most gifted artists of the era, including five
who in later years were awarded the Nobel
Prize in Literature.2 A few of these outstand-
ing novelists chose historical themes. Most
wrote about their own times in what was
then a new and revolutionary mode called
realism that emerged in the middle third of
the nineteenth century. It is the argument
of this essay that the works of these authors
can serve as valuable sources for the social
history of the European peasantry in the
decades before World War I.3
I P. Zimmerman, Der Bauernromanen (Stuttgart, 1975),
pp. 60-62; A. Demedts, De Boer in de Literatur (Leuven,
1966), pp. 14-31; K. Schulz, Bauernromane (Stettin, 1933),
pp. 41-56 [Beiheft no. 13, Bucherei und Bildungspflege].
David Craig has mistakenly claimed that the first
"sustained, international attention to the peasantry on
the part of writers able to use all the resources of modern
literary artistry to create large and complex pictures of
their themes" did not occur until the 1930s. D. Craig,
"Novels of Peasant Crisis," The Journal of Peasant Studies,
2 (1974): 48.
2Henrik Pontoppidan, 1917; Knut Hamsun, 1920;
Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont, 1924; Grazia Deledda,
1926; Ivan Bunin, 1933.
3The novels and stories by country, with dates of first
publication and titles of translations when used, are:
Belgium: C. Buysse, Het leven van Rozeke van Dalen, 1905
(German transl., Rose van Dalen); C. Lemonnier, Un coin
de village, 1879; C. Lemonnier, Un mdle, 1881; S. Streu-
vels, De Vlaschaard, 1907 (German transl. Der Flach-
sacker); S. Streuvels, Langs de Wegen, 1902 (English transl.
Old Jan); S. Streuvels, Minnehandel, 1904 (German transl.
Liebesspiel in Flandern); S. Streuvels, Zomerland, 1900
(German transl. Das heisse Leben). Denmark: H. Pontop-
pidan, Muld, 1891 (English transl. Emmanuel; or Children
of the Soil); H. Pontoppidan, Det forjettede land, 1892
(English transl. The Promised Land). England: T. Hardy,
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The realists, of course, were not the first
literary artists to choose rural themes. From
classical times onward writers had presented
a nostalgic image of pastoral life as an idyllic
existence. At the same time they nearly al-
ways portrayed the peasants as bumpkins,
deserving only of contempt or ridicule, or
ignored them completely, or, as Hippolyte
Taine put it, negligently sketched them in
one corner of the picture.4 Then late in the
eighteenth century, and increasingly in the
first half of the nineteenth, novelists turned
their attentions to village life.5 Nearly always
Far from the Madding Crowd, 1874; T. Hardy, Jude the
Obscure, 1896; T. Hardy, The Return of the Native, 1878;
T. Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, 1891; T. Hardy, "The
Withered Arm," 1888; T. Hardy, The Woodlanders, 1887.
France: H. de Balzac, Le cure de village, 1839; H. de Balzac,
Le medecin de campagne, 1833; H. de Balzac, Les paysans,
1855; R. Bazin, Le ble qui live, 1907; R. Bazin, Gingolph
l'abandonne, 1914; R. Bazin, Les Noellet, 1889; R. Bazin,
La terre qui meurt, 1899; E. Guillaumin, Pres du Sol, 1905;
E. Guillaumin, La vie d'un simple, 1904; E. Zola, La terre,
1887. Germany: W. von Polenz, Der Biuttnerbauer, 1895.
Italy: G. Deledda, Dopo il divorzio, 1902 (English transl.
After the Divorce); G. Deledda, La Madre, 1920 (English
transl. The Mother). Norway: A. Garborg, Fred, 1892
(English transl. Peace); K. Hamsun, Born av Tiden, 1913
(English transl. Children of the Age); K. Hamsun, Markens
Grode, 1917 (English transl. Growth of the Soil); K. Ham-
sun, Konerne ved Vandposten, 1920 (English transl. The
Women at the Pump). Poland: W. S. Reymont, Chlopi, 4
vol., 1904-1909 (English transl. The Peasants). Russia:
I. A. Bunin, "Antonovskie iabloki," 1900 (English transl.
"Apple Fragrance"); I. A. Bunin, "Sukhodol," 1911 (En-
glish transl. "Sukhodol"); I. A. Bunin, Derevnia, 1910
(English transl. The Village); A. Chekhov, "Skripka Rot-
shil'da," 1894; "Student," 1894; "Rasskaz khudozhnika,"
1896; "Moia zhizn," "Rasskaz provintsiala," 1896; "My-
zhiki," 1897 (English transl. "Rothschild's Fiddle"; "The
Student"; "The Artist's Story"; "My Life"; "Peasants");
L. N. Tolstoi, Utro pomeshchika, 1852 (English transl. A
Morning of a Landed Proprietor).
4H. Taine, "The World of Balzac," G. J. Becker, Doc-
uments of Modern Literary Realism (Princeton, 1963), pp.
107-108; J. Caro Baroja, "The City and the Country: Re-
flexions of Some Ancient Commonplaces," J. Pitt-Rivers,
ed., Mediterranean Countrymen (Paris, 1963), pp. 27-28,
37; G. Franz, Geschichte der deutschen Bauernstandes vom
friuhen Mittelalter bis zum 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1970),
p. 125; G. G. Coulton, The Medieval Village (Cambridge,
1925), pp. 234, 237; A. Donskov, The Changing Image of
the Peasant in Nineteenth Century Russian Drama (Hel-
sinki, 1972), p. 19.
5 R. Zellweger, Les debuts du roman rustique. Suisse-
Allemagne-France, 1836-1856 (Paris, 1941), pp.. 7-30; U.
Bauer, Dorfgeschichte (Munich, 1978); Donskov, Changing
Image, p. 19.
 124 JEROME BLUM
their books, in contrast to the earlier litera-
ture, idealized the peasant as the unique pos-
sessor of antique virtues and fundamental
goodness.
Sometimes these novelists wrote their
books to serve as propaganda. Baron Joseph
Eotvos, author of The Village Notary (1846),
was an important Hungarian political figure
and an ardent nationalist. His book, a lively
tale of intrigue, political skullduggery, love,
and violence, was a protest against the in-
ferior social and political status of the Hun-
garian peasantry. The reader soon discovers
that Baron Eotvos, for all his good intentions,
knew little about the peasantry and was in-
terested in them only in an abstract fashion.
Jeremias Gotthelf, a devout Swiss parson of
conservative patriarchal views whose real
name was Albert Bitzius, did know the peas-
antry and wrote a number of so-called peas-
ant novels.6 He depicted the peasantry as the
foundation of an ideal hierarchical society,
with each order secure in its place, and with
a Christian sovereign ruling over all. George
Eliot's absorbing pastoral novels, Adam Bede
(1859) and Silas Marner (1861) celebrated an
idealized past and simultaneously preached
a high order of morality. Her central char-
acters serve as protagonists who prove that
good can come out of evil, that man needs
love, and that sinners come to a bad end. She
paid little attention to the anonymous men
and women who peopled the village or to
the details of their daily lives. Her's are sto-
ries of emotions rather than of rural life, de-
spite their rural settings.
In Russian literature, too, from the late
eighteenth on into the late nineteenth cen-
tury, novelists idealized the peasant, above
all as the protector of the "Russian soul"
against the corruption of urban life and of
foreign cultures.7 Ronald Hingley, the trans-
6E.g., Uli der Knecht glucklich wird, 1841; Geld und Geist,
1843; Anni BMsNi Jowager, 1843-1844; Uli der Pachter, 1847.
7Donskov, Changing Image, pp. 34-36, 117-118; A.
Donskov, "The Peasant in Tolstoi's Thought and Writ-
ing," Canadian Slavonic Papers, 21, (1979): 183-187; T. G.
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lator and editor of The Oxford Chekhov, has
suggested that this exaltation of the peasant
by Russian novelists was explained by "a
certain compensating mechanism in the hu-
man brain whereby an oppressed class (be
it Russian peasant, or American Negro, or
former colonial people in Africa) is conceived
by sentimental representatives of the op-
pressing or former oppressing class to pos-
sess some kind of ill-defined superior vir-
tue-quite independent of any actual virtue
which observation might reveal."8
In France George Sand's three pastoral ro-
mances9 inaugurated a new genre of rustic
novels that looked for escape in an imagined
vision of rural life. In a foreword to an 1851
printing of La Mare au Diable the author de-
clared that her aim in these novels was to
show the beauty and simplicity of the coun-
try and "especially what is good and beau-
tiful in peasant life." In a prefatory chapter
of that book she wrote that she believed that
"the mission of art is a mission of sentiment
and love . . . Art is not a study of positive
reality; it is a search for the ideal truth."l1
The realists emphatically rejected this con-
cept of art. They wanted to show life as it
really was, to portray truthfully the actions
and ambitions, the strivings and the disap-
pointments, the kindnesses and the brutal-
ities, the triumphs and tragedies of everyday
life. To achieve these ends they wrote about
what they themselves had observed at first
hand. That meant that their fiction dealt al-
ways with their own times, the half-century
or so that preceded World War I. To reinforce
their representation of reality they chose to
write about ordinary men and women and
especially about the lower orders. They be-
lieved that the banal lives of these people
truly revealed the substance of everyday life.
Marullo, "Ivan Bunin's Derevnia: the Demythologization
of the Peasant", Russian Language Journal, 31 (1977): 79.
8 The Oxford Chekhov, (London, 1965), Introduction, 8:
3-4.
9 La Mare au Diable, 1845; Franpois le Champi, 1847; La
petite Fadette, 1848.
10 Sand, La Mare au Diable (Paris, 1964), pp. 23-24, 30.
 FICTION AND THE EUROPEAN PEASANTRY 125
They dealt frankly with such commonplaces
as sex and death and what H. G. Wells called
"the jolly coarseness of life" that had long
been taboo in the literary world.11 They
avoided romanticization or exaggeration and
they shunned both pathos and patroniza-
tion. Their books had no heroes; as Ivan
Bunin said of his work, they presented peo-
ple without make-up.12
Instead of subtle psychological explana-
tions and probings of mental attitudes and
perceptions, the realists wanted to let the
facts tell the story. To lend verisimilitude they
paid close attention to the milieu in which
the story took place. They painstakingly de-
scribed the details and even the minutiae of
rural life, facts often peripheral to the novel's
plot but vitally significant in providing the
reader with the sense of reality. In addition,
a number of the novels, such as those by
Tolstoi, Garborg, Guillaumin, Lemonnier,
and Bunin, contained much autobiographi-
cal material. To make sure that they had it
right the realists closely observed the people
about whom they wrote, made field trips,
and did research to gather data. They thought
of themselves as objective observers, "as the
secretary recording the history of a society,"
to quote Balzac, first and greatest of the real-
ists.13 Emile Zola in a letter to a friend ex-
plained that in the novel he was then writing
about peasants he wanted "to get hold of all
our peasants, with their history, their cus-
toms, their role . . . to encompass all of the
life of the peasants in my book, work, love,
politics, past, present, future."14 Being merethat fiction did have historical value but only
mortals, however, the realists could not free
themselves of all subjectivity and didacti-
cism-any more than can historians. Their
"1 Some so-called realists, such as William Dean How-
ells, still steered clear of these topics, as Sinclair Lewis
observed in his Nobel Prize Lecture. Nobel Lectures In-
cluding Presentation Speeches and Laureates' Biographies,
1901-1967 (Amsterdam, 1969), p. 287.
12 Ibid, p. 317.
13 H. de Balzac, Oeuvres complJtes, 1: 14.
14 Quoted in F. L. Schoell, "Etude sur le roman paysan
naturaliste d'Emile Zola a Ladislas Reymont," Revue de
la litte'rature comparee, 7 (1927): 266.
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writings bore a message, whether reformist
or radical, whether revulsion against the new
commercial-industrial society or nostalgia for
the traditional ways that had only so recently
vanished, whether pity for the exploited or
outrage at the oppressor.15
There were many writers who could lay
claim to the title of realist. To mirror reality,
however, was not enough. The great figures
of realism, like all great artists, possessed the
extra dimension of genius. That endowed
them with a vision to see and to understand
that was far beyond that possessed by the
rest of mankind, and the power to capture
the truth by weaving together reality and
imagination. Even more remarkably, their
gift allowed them to transcend the spatial
and temporal boundaries of their fiction and
to provide their readers with revealing in-
sights and new understandings of the hu-
man condition.
The notion of using novels as sources runs
up hard against a highly regarded canon of
historical scholarship. This maintains that
conclusions about what happened in the past
can be established only by referral to events
that have actually occurred and for which,
preferably, there were at least two indepen-
dent witnesses. Obviously fiction cannot
meet this standard. In an article of some
years ago William 0. Aydelotte solemnly
warned that "the attempt to tell the social
history of a period by quotations from its
novels is a kind of dilettantism which the
historian could do well to avoid." He allowed
for the history of opinions in that the nov-
elist's attitude "constitute one datum in our
total picture of a climate of opinion."16 Al-
15 This brief discussion of realism in literature owes
much to F. W. J. Hemmings, ed., The Age of Realism
(Baltimore, 1974); G. J. Becker, Documents of Modern Lit-
erary Realism (Princeton, 1963); G. J. Becker, Realism in
Modern Literature (New York, 1980); R. C. Cowen, Der
Naturalismus. Kommentar zu einer Epoche (Munich, 1973);
R. Wellek, Concepts of Criticism (New Haven, 1963).
16 W. 0. Aydelotte, "The England of Marx and Mill
as Reflected in Fiction", Journal of Economic History,
suppl. 8 (1948): 42-58.
 126 JEROME BLUM
exander Gerschenkron, in a consideration of
Soviet novels, said that Aydelotte's harsh
verdict on the novel as a historical source
might be generally valid, but pointed out
that the evidence supplied by novels "can
be disdained only if the flow from other
more important sources is plentiful."'17
The charge that the novelist's reports of
social conditions are subordinated to his ar-
tistic purposes and so are distorted by his
imagination and his sensibilities explains in
large part the rejection of fiction as a histor-
ical source. The same charge, however, albeit
to a lesser degree, can be made and sustained
against the historian. Historians long ago
abandoned the belief that their studies were
free of bias and preconceptions. They realize
that their writings are subjective and im-
pressionistic, and as much a product of self-
expression as a work of fiction, or any other
art form. Like the novelist the historian has
his own worldview that is essentially the
product of his private environment, his ed-
ucation, and his life experience. It seems par-
adoxical that historians who would reject
realist novels as sources readily accept travel
accounts as trustworthy, even though the
life. "21 Contemporary reviewers of Emile
traveler, unlike the realist author, often could
Guillaumin's La vie d'un simple (1904) hailed
not speak the language of the people about
whom he wrote, was ignorant of the local
culture and mores, knew few or none of the
indigenes, and spent only a short time in the
country. It is worth noting, too, that some
long-trusted historical sources have proven
to be scarcely less fictional, and sometimes
more fictional than the novels of the real-
ists.18
The realist authors themselves and some
of their critics recognized the usefulness of
17 A. Gerschenkron, "A Neglected Source of Economic
Information in Soviet Russia", Economic Backwardness in
Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), pp. 296-
297.
"8 Recent scholarship, for example, has undermined
the credibility of some of Mary B. Chestnut's diary and
Frederick Law Olmsted's The Cotton Kingdom, long re-
garded as basic sources for the history of the American
South. See also A. Nevins, The Gateway to History (Chi-
cago, 1963), pp. 137-170.
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their novels as historical sources. Balzac in
1842 in his foreword to his collected works
lamented that historians had failed to write
social history-l'histoire des moeurs, as he
called it. He declared that he wanted to write
the social history of the France of his own
day "by assembling the principal facts about
passions, by portraying character, by select-
ing the chief happenings of social life, by
creating typical characters through combin-
ing the traits of homogeneous characteris-
tics ...."19 Friedrich Engels said that he
learned more about French society from Bal-
zac than from "all the professional histori-
ans, economists and statisticians of the pe-
riod put together."20 Thomas Hardy wrote
of his Wessex novels that "At the dates rep-
resented in the various narrations things
were like that in Wessex; the inhabitants
lived in certain ways, engaged in certain oc-
cupations, kept alive certain customs, just as
they are shown in these pages . . . I have
instituted inquiries to correct tricks of mem-
ory, and striven against temptation to ex-
aggerate, in order to preserve for my own
satisfaction a fairly true record of a vanishing
it as a superlative historical work. "The peas-
ant of France has at last found his historian"
wrote one reviewer; another called it "the
best, the only history written about the
French peasant"; a third called it a "social
document"; and so on.22 Ronald Hingley
wrote that "Part of Chekhov's originality in
approaching the peasant lay simply in trying
to describe what he saw-not what he
thought he ought to see . . . (S)o accurate is
Chekhov as an observer that a social histo-
rian should in fact be unlikely to make any
19 Oeuvres completes, 1: 12, 14-15.
20 Quoted in J. Freville, Sur la litte'rature et l'art. Karl
Marx, Friedrich Engles (Paris, 1936), 1: 149.
21 The Works of Thomas Hardy in Prose and Verse, (Lon-
don, 1912-1914), 1: ix-x.
22 Quoted in R. Mathe, Emile Guillaumin, I'homme de
la terre et l'homme de lettres (Paris, 1966), pp. 226-227.
 FICTION AND THE EUROPEAN PEASANTRY 127
serious mistakes if he should draw on Chek-
hov as a source."23
The historian has to exercise selectivity in
the choice of novels as sources. Romantic
authors who idealized the peasant and glo-
rified rural life obviously are unsuited, but
others generally considered realists must be
used with caution. For example, Turgenev's
beautifully evocative A Sportsman's Sketches
(1852) is actually a polemic against the ex-
ploitation of the Russian serf by his master.
The peasants appear as models of humanity,
of native wisdom, and of calm resignation
to suffering, while the serf owners are alike
in their conscious and unconscious cruelties,
their inadequacies, and their ineffectiveness.
The stories tell little or nothing about such
matters as the family and village life of the
peasants, their moral and religious values,
their economic activities, or even the interior
of their huts. Similarly, in the many novels
of Tolstoi in which peasants appear they are,
with the exception of one of his earliest
works, A Morning of a Landed Proprietor
(1852), usually portrayed as the possessors of
moral and religious qualities that make them
superior to everyone else in the society.
The realists selected here as sources for the
social history of the peasantry avoided this
kind of caricature. Instead, they sought to
present an unadorned and accurate picture
of village life. All of them had firsthand and
close knowledge of the rural world and its
people. Nearly all of them had been born in
the country. Some lived all or most of their
lives in rural settings, others spent their for-
mative years there. In later life some of them
settled as residents in the country and in-
volved themselves with their peasant neigh-
bors, like Chekhov as their doctor, Pontop-
pidan as their teacher, Lemonnier as their
hunting, fishing, and poaching companion,
and Polenz and Tolstoi as their squires. Oth-
ers made frequent visits to rural districts, like
Balzac and Bazin.
The experience of country life seems to
have been the only personal quality common
23 The Oxford Chekhov, 8: 2, 3.
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to these writers. They belonged to nine dif-
ferent nationalities and came from widely
different social backgrounds. Arne Garborg,
Emile Guillaumin, Knut Hamsun, and Wlad-
yslaw Reymont were born into peasant fam-
ilies. Stijn Streuvels, the pseudonym of Frank
Lateur, was the son of a village tailor, and
Thomas Hardy's father was a village stone-
mason. Grazia Deledda, daughter of a Sar-
dinian landowner; Anton Chekhov, son of
a city shopkeeper; and Honore de Balzac,
whose father held a responsible government
post, were the grandchildren of peasants.
Henrik Pontoppidan came from a long line
of Protestant preachers and theologians. Rene
Bazin's family were bourgeois landowners;
Emile Zola's father was a civil engineer; Cy-
riel Buysse's father ran a successful manu-
facturing business; Camille Lemonnier's fa-
ther practiced law; and Leo Tolstoi, Wilhelm
von Polenz, and Ivan Bunin were scions of
the landowning nobility of their respective
countries. Their political views, too, covered
a wide spectrum, from the radicalism of Gar-
borg, Zola, Lemonnier, and Buysse to the
reactionary convictions of Balzac, Hamsun,
and Bazin, and the nostalgia of Bunin and
Polenz for the days when their forebears had
ruled over the serfs on their estates.
In light of the diversity of nationality,
origins, social status, and political orientation
among the realists one might expect a similar
disparity in their descriptions of village life.
Instead, the reader discovers a remarkable
congruity in their portrayal of the peasants
and of the rural world. They all delineate a
clearly identifiable universal type of Euro-
pean peasant, with essentially the same char-
acteristics and behavior patterns that tran-
scended national boundaries and that, to
quote Georg Lukacs (who posited the type
as the central category and criterion of realist
literature) "organically binds together the
general and the particular both in character
and situations."24
Perhaps the most striking generality about
24G. Lukacs, Studies in European Realism (New York,
1964), p. 6.
 128 JEROME BLUM

the peasantry as type that emerges from
these novels defines the peasants as a dif-
ferent and inferior order of humankind. It
was not that they differed from the rest of
society in place of residence or in occupation
or in legal rights. It went much deeper than
that. As the realists saw them they acted and
thought differently, had a different ordering
of values and a different morality, and they
even looked different. They were alien
beings. Even Rene Bazin, who admired the
peasants and thought that other realists
treated them unfairly, called them a separate
race. Tolstoi's idealistic (and autobiographi-
cal) Prince Nekhliudov, confronted by the
perversity of his peasants, finally realized
that they were entirely unlike anyone he had
ever before encountered. In Bunin's The Vil-
lage Tikhon Ilitch, peasant landowner and
principal character of the tale, meditates on
the acute differences between other people
and his own kind. Balzac wrote that peasants
lived "a purely material life that approaches
the savage state." A half century later Jules
Renard published a volume of short stories
about the peasantry that he called Nos fre'reswhich peasant women always adopt in com-
farouches (Our Savage Brothers) and that re-
ceived much critical praise for its accuracy.
The protagonist in Chekhov's "The Artist's
Story" was more charitable. He said of the
peasants that "they've no time to think of
their souls or remember in whose image and
likeness they were created. Famine, cold,
blind terror and overwork-those are the
avalanches that seal off all roads to spiritual
activity, the one thing that distinguishes
man from animals and makes life worth liv-
ing." Arne Garborg grew up among the Nor-
wegian peasants who farmed the harsh
coastland along the North Sea. He described
them as a strong and stubborn folk "who dig
their way through life with back-breaking
toil, who busy themselves with the earth,
The peasants of Durnovka in Bunin's
novel drink from and bathe in a pond that
they share with their cows, the water so pol-
luted that a passerby's thirsty horse refuses
to drink from it. Peasant woman like Inger
and Barbro in Hamsun's Growth of the Soil
and Lise Buteau in Zola's La Terre drop their
young like animals, unattended. Lise and a
cow gave birth at the same time and both
Lise, though in great pain, and her husband
show far more concern about the cow's safe
delivery than about Lise's. In Pontoppidan's
Emmanuel the daughter of the rector of a ru-
ral Danish parish tells the newly-arrived cu-
rate that peasants were semi-human crea-
tures, little removed from dumb animals.
Hardy called peasants "clowns" and the rus-
tics of his novel were, with rare exceptions,
clods whom he portrayed as not quite as
human as people of higher stations.26 Their
skin was like leather, wrote Pontoppidan,
they were of ungainly stature, their hands
were purple and swollen, their young girls
had stiff red fingers, their women talked to
one another in "the usual lachrymose voice
pany." Reymont described the older men of
the Polish village of Lipka as being "as
ponderous as moss-grown boulders in a field,
rugged, tough-sinewed, ungainly," and
Chekhov saw peasants as "great, lumbering
beasts."27
The peasant as a different and inferior or-
der of being possessed traits that were pe-
culiar to his kind. He was insensitive, like
Hamsun's Isak who had "few feelings," or
A Morning of a Landed Proprietor. The Complete Works
of Count Tolstoi, 2 (Boston, 1904), passim; I. A. Bunin, The
Village (New York, 1933), pp. 105-106; H. de Balzac, Les
paysans. Oeuvres completes, 18: 520; J. Renard, Nos freres
farouches (Paris, 1908); T. Zeldin, France 1848-1945. Am-
bition and Love (Oxford, 1979), p. 133; Oxford Chekhov,
8: 106, 168; A. Garborg, Peace (New York, 1929), p. 4.
26 Bunin, The Village, p. 40; K. Hamsun, Growth of the

and read the Scriptures, who force corn from Soil (New York, 1966), pp. 24, 56; E. Zola, La terre (Paris,
1973), pp. 252-261; H. Pontoppidan, Emmanuel (London,
the soil and hope from their dreams, who 1896), pp. 71, 80-81; T. Hardy, The Return of the Native
believe in Mammon and trust in God."25 (New York, 1967), pp. 200, 203, passim.; idem, Far from
the Madding Crowd (New York, 1959), passim.
27 H. Pontoppidan, The Promised Land (London, 1896),
25R. Bazin, La terre qui meurt (Paris, 1907), pp. 106- pp. 4, 34; W. Reymont, The Peasants (New York, 1924-
107; R. Bazin, Les Noellet (Tours, n. d.), p. 78; L. Tolstoi, 1925), 2: 107; Oxford Chekhov, 8: 170.

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 FICTION AND THE EUROPEAN PEASANTRY 129
old Mathias Boryna of Reymont's saga, or
Traugott Buttner who, wrote Polenz, was
"a coarse and humdrum fellow, a peasant"
incapable of appreciating the beauties of na-
ture. "He was no sentimental dreamer; there
was no room for this in his dull, peasant
nature." In a conversation between the doc-
tor and lawyer of the small Norwegian town
that is the setting of Hamsun's Children of
the Age, the lawyer says of the newly ap-
pointed pastor that he was "a peasant, of
course, but he has worked his way up to
culture."28
The novelists portrayed the peasant as
stubborn, stupid, and perverse to the point
sometimes of harming themselves. Old Butt-
ner in Polenz's book refuses to take advan-
tage of the opportunity to gain a new hold-
ing in exchange for his old one and in the
end loses everything. Prince Nekhliudov's
peasants in Tolstoi's story choose to remain
in their decaying hovels rather than move
to the new houses the Prince wanted to build
for them. The obduracy of the parents in
Guillaumin's Pre's de Sol drives their only
daughter to suicide. In The Return of the Na-
tive the peasants of Egdon Heath suffered
physical discomfort and minor injuries at the
hands of Fairway, the amateur barber, yet
persisted in going to him. Misail Poloznev
in Chekhov's "My Life," after living a while
among the peasants, decides that they are
ignorant men, with limited, dull horizons, they
all had the same obsession with grey earth, grey
days, black bread. They tried to cheat but showed
as much sense over it as an ostrich sticking its
head in the sand and thinking that it can't be
seen. They couldn't even count. They wouldn't
take twenty roubles to help with our haymaking,
but would do it for half a keg of vodka, when for
twenty roubles they could buy four whole kegs.9
Other realists, however, like Reymont, Bal-
zac, and Garborg discerned a native shrewd-
28W. von Polenz, Der Biittnerbauer (Berlin, 1895), pp.
161, 272; K. Hamsun, Children of the Age (New York,
1924), p. 235.
`9 Oxford Chekhov, 8: 159-170.
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ness and cunning that enabled the peasant
to assume the role of the lout if that would
help him gain his end.
Balzac, Tolstoi, and Chekhov all remarked
on the peasant's unique attitude to death, so
unlike that of the rest of society. Balzac's Dr.
Benassis explained that among peasants
"death is looked upon as an expected occur-
rence which has no effect on the course of
family life. . . ." Chekhov, himself a phy-
sician, wrote that the poorer peasants were
not afraid to die, but that the richer they
became the more they feared death. Balzac,
too, noted that phenomenon. On the other
hand, Chekhov wrote that peasants had "an
exaggerated horror of all illnesses.. . . They
were always talking about colds, tapeworms
and tumors going around the stomach and
moving up to the heart.. . ."30 In The Death
of Ivan Ilyitch Tolstoi contrasted the attitude
of the dying man's upper bourgeois family
who acted as if he were not dying with that
of Gerasim, the peasant who attended Ilyitch
and who accepted the impending death as
a natural event.
The realists represented rural life as harsh,
joyless, filled with unending labor, torn by
quarrels, envy, and misdeeds. Bunin's Tikh-
on Ilich declared that the people of the vil-
lage were "lewd, lazy, liars, and so shameless
that not one of them believes the other." In
Chekhov's "Peasants" the city-bred Olga re-
turns with her ailing peasant-born hus-
band to his native village. The villagers seem
to her
to live worse than beasts. They were frightful
people to live with-rough, dishonest, filthy,
drunken. Holding each other in mutual disre-
spect, fear and suspicion, they were always at log-
gerheads . .. (the peasant) steals from his neigh-
bors, sets fire to their property and perjures
himself in court for a bottle of vodka.
Reymont, Polenz, Zola, Balzac and Guillau-
min gave much the same picture of the peas-
30 H. de Balzac, Le medecin de campagne. Oeuvres com-
pletes, 13: 360-361; Oxford Chekhov, 8: 218-219.
 130 JEROME BLUM
ants who people their novels. The villagers
sought escape by heavy drinking and by
frantic celebrations but, according to Bunin,
"ahead lay boredom, remote wilds, an empty
street, smokey chimneyless hovels, water-
casks with putrid pond water, and then more
fields, the blue mist of the chilly distance,
the dark forest on the horizon, low-hanging
storm clouds." Chekhov thought that was
the way it had always been and always
would be.
The same thatched roof with the holes in them,
the same ignorance and misery, the same deso-
lation on all sides, the same gloom and sense of
oppression. All these horrors had been, still were,
and would continue to be, and the passing of an-
other thousand years would make things no
better.31
The farm laborers lived especially desolate
lives. They were entirely dependent upon
their peasant employers who customarily
showed scant regard for them. They usually
began their careers as children, starting out
perhaps as a cowherd and when reaching
maturity becoming a permanent farmhand.
They ate with the family but slept in straw
in the barn or stable of their employer. Their
lives seemed scarcely different from that of
the farm animals with whom they lived and
worked. "Their thoughts," wrote Streuvels,
"did not probe into the deep inner meaning
of life and they had no understanding of its
complexities."32
The realists' dark picture of rural life
aroused attacks from contemporary and from
later critics.33 Comparisons of disparate cul-
tures are always open to question, but it
seems worth noting that modern studies by
31 Bunin, The Village, pp. 169-170; Oxford Chekhov, 7:
p. 105, 8: p. 221; cf, Guillaumin, La vie pp. 189-193.
32 S. Streuvels, Der Flachsacker (Leipzig, n. d.), pp. 54-
55; idem, Old Jan (London, 1936), pp. 7-9, 13, 23; idem,
"On Sundays", The Path of Life (New York, 1915), pp.
214-217; R. Bazin, Le ble qui leve (Paris, 1907), pp. 44, 48-
49, 51; C. Buysse, Rose van Dalen (Leipzig, 1917), p. 219;
Reymont, The Peasants, 1: 36, 239-241, 255, 3: 267-268.
33 E.g., M. A. Gelson, An Analysis of the Realistic Ele-
ments in the Novels of Rene' Bazin (Washington, 1942);
Nobel Lectures, p. 317; G. Grigson introd. to T. Hardy,
Under the Greenwood Tree (London, 1974), pp. 19-20.
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assorted social scientists of peasants in less
developed lands of Asia and Latin America
bear close resemblances to the picture of the
European peasant of the pre-World War I era
presented by the realists. Most of these stud-
ies find the peasants to be socially and cul-
turally deprived, "suspicious, distrustful, and
envious of others, viewing the universe
around them as essentially hostile." They
look upon their environment as one in
which all desired things were in short supply
so that each social unit, whether family or
individual "sees itself in perpetual, unre-
lenting struggle with its fellows for posses-
sion of or control over what it considers to
be its share of scarce values."m Long ago Bal-
zac called attention to the relationship be-
tween scarce resources and peasant culture
when he wrote "Morality, which must not
be confused with religion, begins with a
competence. The absolutely honest and moral
man is a rarity among the peasantry. ...
Their poverty is their raison d'etat. . ..35
The novels of Balzac, Zola, Guillaumin,
Polenz, Reymont, and Tolstoi show that the
extended family often persisted with par-
ents, married and unmarried children, and
grandchildren making up the household.
The family stood at the center of peasant life.
It was the social and economic unit upon
which the well-being and the security of
each family member depended. They lived
and ate together, worked the family holding
together, pooled their resources, and stood
together against their neighbors. The close
family unity and cooperation, however, was
not by choice. In the hard world of rural life
it was forced upon the peasants as the only
way to survive. "The children of the peas-
ant," wrote Balzac, ". . . are his capital, the
means of his support." The father ruled over
the household with what Zola called "the
rough despotism of the head of a peasant
family."36 Polenz's Traugott Buttner, Guillau-
34G. M. Foster, "Peasant Society and the Image of
Limited Good," J. M. Potter, et al., eds., Peasant Society
(Boston, 1967).
35 Balzac, Les paysans, p. 221.
3' Balzac, Les paysans, 519; Zola, p. 57.
 FICTION AND THE EUROPEAN PEASANTRY 131
min's Etienne Bertin and Louis Vaureil, Ba-
zin's Julien Noellet and Touissant Lumineau,
Reymont's Mathias Boryna, Streuvel's Ver-
meulen, Garborg's Enok Haave, Tolstoi's
Dutlov, all claimed the same kind of supreme
authority, expecting always to be obeyed by
the members of their households because
that was the way it had always been.
In fact, the novelists showed that the fam-
ily's apparent solidarity was a facade. Behind
it lay disloyalty, dissatisfaction, quarreling,
ill-will, and even hatred. Two of the grown
children of Touissant Lumineau decide to
leave for the city. They do not bother to tell
their father of their decision until the night
before their departure and showed no con-
cern about the effects of their leaving upon
the family's wellbeing. The children of Trau-
gott Buttner showed the same lack of con-
cern, leaving home without consideration of
the effect this had upon their father. Daugh-
ters-in-law in the extended family often be-
came sources of trouble, each envious of the
other, each fearful that the other's family was
getting more than her family.37 Endless bick-
ering and feuds among members of the
household marred life in the Fouan hut in
Zola's La terre, in the Boryna household of
Reymont's The Peasants, and in the Chikil-
deyev's hut in Chekhov's story "Peasants."
Expressions of love and sacrifice for a kins-
man occur rarely. A Russian peasant return-
ing from his wife's funeral remembers that
in fifty-two years of married life he had
never shown his wife any affection and, in
fact, "had never given her a thought in all
that time, he had no more noticed her than
a cat or dog." Barbelle Vermeulen tells her
husband, a prosperous Flemish peasant, that
in the many years of their marriage he never
once has called her by her name, and, she
continues, before her marriage neither her
father nor her brothers showed her any af-
fection. A French peasant berates his wife
because her pregnancy keeps her from work-
ing with him so that he has to hire a helper.
37 Bazin, La terre, ch. 4, 5; Tolstoi, A Morning, pp. 24,
54; Guillaumin, La vie, pp. 175-177, 199-200.
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The lack of family affection as recounted by
the novelists was especially evident in the
treatment accorded to elderly parents. When
parents turned their holding over to a son,
as was a common custom, the son and his
wife became the masters. When Prince
Nekhliudov expressed concern over the cruel
mistreatment of an aged woman by her chil-
dren his steward explained that "the old
woman has to earn her bread as best she can.
Of course, the children have no tender feel-
ings, but that is the common rule among
peasants." Peasants in the novels of Guillau-
min, Zola, and Reymont exhibited the same
callousness; as one of Reymont's characters
put it, "turn over what you have to your
children, they will give you just enough to
buy a rope to hang yourself with, or tie a
stone around your neck."38
Physical violence seemed a constant of
family life. In Bunin's The Village Rodka ad-
ministered terrible beatings to his wife with
a leather knout. Reymont's Antek Boryna
nearly kills his father in a vicious fight over
a woman, Joseph Vahnik fought his father
"every other day," Staho Ploshka broke his
father's leg, and Bartek's son-in-law beat him
so fearfully that "he pined away and lay
moaning" until he died. In Streuvel's
Flachsacker disputes between the father, en-
vious of the youth and vitality of his twenty-
year old son, who tries to preempt some of
his father's authority, ends with the father,
in a rage, killing the son. Karl Buttner nearly
beats his wife to death because she refused
him money to spend on drink. In Zola's La
terre old Fouan's son and daughter-in-law
smother him and one sister slays another in
a jealous rage.
The peasants of the novels, however, were
not incapable of showing love and fellow-
feeling and of helping one another in times
of crisis. In Reymont's great novel neigh-
boring villagers plow the fields of the jailed
peasants of Lipka. Violent tempered Antek
38Oxford Chekhov, 7: 97; Zola, pp. 239-240; Streuvels,
Flachsacker, p. 183; Tolstoi, A Morning, pp. 37-38; Rey-
mont, 1: 13-14.
 132 JEROME BLUM
Boryna helps an old and tired Jewish peddler
push his barrow and refuses to take money
for it. In Hardy's The Woodlanders Marty
South, secretly in love with Giles Winter-
bourne, stands at his grave and vows that
she will never forget him for "you was a
good man, and did good things."39 The peas-
ant wife of Emmanuel Hansted in Pontop-
pidan's The Promised Land insists that he take
their children with him when he leaves her
for the city because she knows they will have
a better life there than if they remained with
her. The warm and sacrificing love of Maria
Maddalina for her son suffuses Grazia De-
ledda's The Mother. Anna, wife of Enok
Haabe in Garborg's Peace tries to protect her
son Gunnar from the unintentional cruelties
inflicted on him by his father who is a re-
ligious fanatic. Enok, himself, one day sud-
denly embraces the boy, who had long
feared and detested his father, and told him
"I love you so, Gunnar. You don't know how
much."4O Etienne Bertin of Guillaumin's La
vie d'un simple had pity for his retarded sister
and cared for her for many years until her
death, and the Schemels of Streuvel's
Zomerland show great love for the retarded
and deformed eldest child of the family.
The crowded dwellings in which most
peasants lived must have had much to do
with the quarreling and unhappiness of fam-
ily life. Privacy was impossible. The one or
two room huts, as the realists described
them, were small, often without a chimney
but with a hole in the roof to let out the
smoke from the hearth, evil smelling, with
earth as the floor, and in such disrepair that
they seemed ready to collapse. Barnyard an-
imals and fowl often had the run of the hut.
The yard was littered with all manner of
debris. In contrast, the homes of the better-
off peasants of the village had several well-
furnished rooms, wooden floors, white-
washed walls, a proper fire place, and a stor-
age area.41
39T. Hardy, The Woodlanders (London, 1887), p. 354.
40 Garborg, pp. 209-210.
41 Cf. Reymont, 1: 19-20, 2: pp. 13, 27; Bazin, La terre,
pp. 21-22; Tolstoi, A Morning, pp. 8, 13,29; Pontoppidan,
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Above all else, the peasants of the realists'
novels craved land. "A man without land,"
said an old Polish villager, "is like a man
without legs: he crawls about and cannot get
anywhere."4 Land, whether owned or rented,
guaranteed the maintenance of the family.
Its primary purpose was subsistence; the
novels contain strikingly little about the
marketing of farm products. Land also
brought social status. The amount of land
held by a household determined the impor-
tance of its members in the community. The
consuming passion for land combined in
varying proportions love of the land for its
own sake, attachment to it because it was the
only form of economic security that the peas-
ant knew, and unashamed and unvarnished
greed. The peasants of Lipka, returning
home from imprisonment for rioting, passed
by their fields. "And how their eyes gloated
over their land, their true foster-mother.
Some even saluted it with doffed caps; all
knelt down in spirit, mutely and fervently
worshipping Her, the Hallowed, Her, the
Much-Desired!"43 Novels of Hamsun, Hardy,
and Streuvels told of a mystical union of the
peasant with the land and with nature. Isak,
the central figure of Hamsun's Growth of the
Soil, Streuvels' Old Jan, Marty South and
Giles Winterbourne in Hardy's The Wood-
landers, and Gabriel Oak in Hardy's Far from
the Madding Crowd were alike in their un-
derstanding of and identification with na-
ture. Streuvels perhaps explained it best
when he wrote of Jan, "In the open air he
lived to himself again, dumbly, unthink-
ingly, and with infinite peace in his heart.
. . .The still activity of nature moved him
and filled him with happiness.""
Promised Land, p. 16; Oxford Chekhov, 8: 195-196; Ham-
sun, Growth, p. 19; Bunin, The Village, pp. 238-239; Zola,
pp. 66, 90, 120-121, 136-137; Balzac, Le medecin, pp. 311-
312; Buysse, pp. 159-160; Guillaumin, Pre's, p. 16; Guil-
laumin, La vie, p. 122-123; G. Deledda, After the Divorce
(New York, 1905), p. 48.
42Reymont, 2: 77.
43Reymont, 3: 207-208; cf. H. de Balzac, Le cure de
village. Oeuvres compltes, 13: 678; Zola, pp. 51, 203; K.
Hamsun, Look Back on Happiness (New York, 1920), p.
67; Polenz, p. 161.
" Streuvels, Old Jan, pp. 171-172.
 FICTION AND THE EUROPEAN PEASANTRY 133
Religion was another facet of village life
illuminated by the realists. In many of their
novels the peasants appear lackadaisical about
or indifferent to spiritual matters. They
might attend church services regularly or tip
their hats when they passed a roadside
shrine, but that was because it was an act of
custom rather than conviction. Others, like
the peasants of Egdon Heath in Hardy's Re-
turn of the Native, never attended services;
the church was two-three miles away and
they thought it too much trouble to go. In
Bazin's Le ble' qui le've, the church in the vil-
lage of Fonteneilles was nearly empty even
on Easter Sunday; a few peasants worked,
some went fishing, most of the men spent
the day drinking in the inns. Chekhov wrote
that in the village of Zhukovo in central
Russia, "few believed and few understood."
On feast days the villagers celebrated by
drinking save for a brief recess on a holiday
in August when a sacred icon was carried
though the village and the villagers watched
the procession go by. Abbe Goddard told the
people of Rognes in Zola's La terre that their
cows had more religion than they had and
refused to return to the village. The villagers
found that they saved money thereby, that
things did not get any worse than they had
before, the harvests were unaffected, and no
one died any sooner. Nonetheless, some vil-
lagers wanted a priest because Rognes had
always had one, and because neighboring
villages would mock them as being too cheap
to support a priest.45
In other accounts religion and worship
played important roles in the lives of the
peasants. In Garborg's autobiographical
novel, Peace, lay preachers had much influ-
ence among the people of Jaeren in Norway.
The Polish peasants of Reymont's novel and
the Sardinian villagers in Deledda's books
were intensely religious. The Flemish peas-
ants of Streuvel's Flachsacker, once they had
45Polenz, p. 159; Guillaumin, La vie, 198-199; Streu-
vels, Old Jan, pp. 165-166; Hardy, Return, pp. 241-242;
Bazin, Le ble, pp. 175-176; Oxford Chekhov, 8: 217-218;
Zola, pp. 269, 332; Hardy, Far, pp. 270-271.
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sowed their fields and aware that everything
now depended upon the weather, put their
trust in the annual church procession that
went from farm to farm and in their own
fear of God. Yet, interestingly enough, the
church itself, as an institution, often had lit-
tle influence on the lives of the villagers,
principally because of the social and cultural
gap that separated the pastor from his flock.
The peasants of Lipka venerated their priest
and wept when he chided them in his ser-
mons, but they paid scant heed to his advice.
Their priest, for his part, absented himself
at times of crisis in village life, was much
more interested in the well-being of his bull,
his bees, and his glebe than in the well-being
of his parishioners, was stingy with his alms,
and was selfishly demanding even in small
things. Emmanuel Hansted, newly arrived
as curate in a Danish rural parish, quickly
learned that "a deep, impassable gulf divided
him from these children of the soil . . .
whose very being was a riddle, whose
thoughts, words, dreams, sorrows and hopes
were known to no one."46 The choir mem-
bers in Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree
resented their new vicar who preferred or-
gan music to choir singing and who paid
frequent parish visits. They yearned for their
old vicar who "never troubled us wi' a visit
from year's end to year's end," and who told
the choir "blare and scrape what you will,
but don't bother me."47
Actually, superstition and a firm belief in
magic, witchcraft, and the evil eye often
seemed of more concern to peasants, even
to the most devout among them, than did
formal religion. In After the Divorce Grazia
Deledda told of the strange rituals followed
by the Sardinian peasants of Nuoro to cure
a man of the bite of a tarantula, this despite
the stern disapproval of the village priest.
The peasants of the village of Aar believed
that their priest practiced sorcery but were
too frightened to bring any charges against
him because they believed that the devil, in
46Pontoppidan, Emmanuel, p. 71.
47Pp. 85-86.
 134 JEROME BLUM

person, protected him.48 Hardy's fiction tells Within the village there was much social
of the credence given by the peasants of stratification that, as the realists showed,
Wessex to the supernatural. Other realists, stood in direct relation to the wealth, or lack
too, told of magic and witchcraft and of spells of it, of each peasant household. The villagers
to ward off evil fortune among the peasants accorded respect on a sliding scale that began
of their respective lands.49 with the wealthiest peasant in the commu-
The realists' novels have value, too, for nity and ended with the landless farm la-
their accounts of the social gatherings and borers who were nearly always harshly ex-
the recreations of the peasants about whom ploited and regarded with contempt by their
they wrote. The group activities of the vil- fellow villagers. When Kuba, an old farm-
lagers that included seasonal festivals, mum- hand in Reymont's Peasants, so forgets
mers, church processions, and the like, served himself in church as to push through the
both to entertain and to preserve customs worshippers to the altar rail where only
peculiar to the locality. Wedding celebrations landowning peasants kneeled he was
of prosperous peasants sometimes lasted for "taunted and upbraided and scowled at as
several days, with much eating, dancing, one scowls at a dog that goes where it is not
drinking, and brawling.`0 Reymont told of wanted."52 The villagers were acutely con-
how Polish village matrons came together scious of the stratification in their society.
in winter evenings to gossip or to listen en- Touissant Lumineau keeps on working and
raptured to tales of the supernatural re- remains silent when his landlord's agent ap-
counted by a wandering holy man, all the proaches, to show the superiority of a chef
while busily sewing or spinning. Streuvels de ferme to a wage employee.53 Lumineau's
reported the words sung by women weeding daughter, Marie-Rose, loves and wants to
and harvesting in the flax fields of Flanders marry the family's hired man but her father
and described their dance when the crop had and brothers oppose the match because they
been taken in. The village tavern figured consider it socially degrading to the family.
prominently in nearly all of the novels. Here Old Agatha, mortally ill, wants to go to the
the villagers came to talk, to argue, to con- house of a landowning kinsman to die but
spire, to discuss personal and communal thought to herself that it would disgrace him
problems, to dance and flirt, and to carouse. to have a relative who was a beggar die un-
Fairs, held periodically in nearby market der his roof.`4 Young Louis Vermeulen looks
towns, gave the peasant a chance to get away longingly at a pretty girl working in his fa-
from their villages, to buy and sell, to learn ther's fields but knows that she would re-
of outside happenings, and to engage in rev- pulse his advances and tell him to seek out
elry that nearly always included much a rich peasant's daughter as his equal.55 The
drinking and, usually, brawling.51 prosperous Vaureils are outraged when their
daughter receives a love-letter from a neigh-
bor who is a day laborer and the son of a
48Deledda, After the Divorce, pp. 239-248; G. Deledda,
The Mother (New York, 1928), pp. 13-15. day laborer and a washerwoman.56 Enok
49 R. A. Firor, Folkways in Thomas Hardy (Philadelphia,
Haave, landowning peasant, chides his
1931), ch. 1-4; Hamsun, Growth, pp. 65-66; Reymont, 1:
daughter for allowing the local schoolmaster
p. 11, 2: pp. 80, 83; Buysse, pp. 141-146.
who is the son of a cottager to court her.57
5 Garborg, pp. 14-26; Guillaumin, La vie, pp. 46-51;
Reymont, 1: 207-237; Oxford Chekhov, 8: 218; T. Hardy,
Tess of the D'Urbervilles. A Pure Woman (London, 1920),
Flachsacker, pp. 192-194; Streuvels, Liebesspiel, pp. 48,
ch. II; Hardy, Return, pp. 454-456; Hardy, Far From the
101-102.
Madding Crowd, pp. 144-145; Buysse, pp. 87-101, 138-52 Reymont, 1: 65.
140; S. Streuvels, Liebesspiel in Flandern (Stuttgart, 1936),
53 Bazin, La terre, p. 3.
pp. 15-46, 219-259. 54 Reymont, 3: 12.
51 C. Lemonnier, Un mdle (Vervier, 1977), pp. 75-79; 55 Streuvels, Flachsacker, pp. 252-254.
Zola, pp. 176-188; Bunin, The Village, pp. 26-31; Guil- 56 Guillaumin, Pr's, p. 168.
laumin, La vie, pp. 34-43; Reymont, 2:192-214; Streuvels,57 Garborg, p. 215.

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 FICTION AND THE EUROPEAN PEASANTRY 135
The importance of preserving status per-
sisted down into the lowest levels of village
social structure. The young Etienne Bertin,
working as a hired hand, finds himself at-
tracted to another farm worker but decides
not to marry her because he feels she is be-
neath him in status. She is illegitimate and,
more important, he entered service by his
own free will and would lose face by mar-
rying a girl who had no choice but to enter
service. He told himself that as the son of a
sharecropper it was fitting that he should
marry the daughter of a sharecropper. Gil-
bert Cloquet, a farmhand since he was
eleven, had saved his wages and also had
inherited a small sum from an uncle. His
peers considered him a rich man who could
have his pick among the girls of the coun-
tryside. Instead, he married a girl who ev-
eryone thought was beneath him because
she was the daughter of a village shop-
keeper.58
The peasants' acceptance of the hierarchi-
cal arrangement of society extended beyond
the borders of their villages. They acquiesced
in their inferiority to the other orders of so-
ciety as part of the legacy of the past and
they showed a traditional deference to those
above them in the social scale. Rose van
Dalen, a Flemish peasant girl, and the local
baron's daughter had been warm friends
since childhood. Yet when Rose left the bar-
oness she pressed a kiss "of submissive love"
on the noblewoman's hand. Rose's mother
humbly warns the baroness against too close
friendship, saying "Don't want too much
from her, my lady. Peasant men and peasant
women must remain in their places." The
Sardinian peasants in Grazia Deledda's The
Mother looked upon the orphaned young
woman who lived in the manor house as
their mistress and held her in highest regard
and respect. George Melbury in Hardy's
Woodlanders feels honored because Dr. Fitz-
piers who marries his daughter comes from
a family once locally distinguished. He tells
his daughter that she would move to town
58 Guillaumin, La vie, p. 90; Bazin, La ble, p. 61.
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and keep a carriage and should she chance
to see him there "you can drive past me,
looking the other way. I shouldn't expect you
to speak to me . . . unless it happened in
some lonely private place." The other vil-
lagers, however, felt that Dr. Fitzpiers low-
ered his status by the marriage. They used
to accord him "a touching of a hat brim,
promptness of service, and deference of ap-
proach." That ended with his marriage, for
now they no longer considered him their
superior. Etienne Bertin accepted, albeit with
hidden resentment, his landlord's self-invi-
tation to sit with two friends in the Bertin
hut to observe the Bertins at their supper
and be amused by their speech and actions
and take notes. When a peasant rose in the
social scale his fellows remembered his
origins and acted accordingly. In Hamsun's
Children of the Age Lars Lassen, son of a Nor-
wegian peasant family, becomes a pastor and
returns to his native town to take the church
there. He fears, correctly, that the passersby
would not take off their hats to him, as they
would to another pastor, because they knew
him as a fellow peasant.59
Beneath this deference ran a strong cur-
rent of suspicion, mistrust, and even hatred.
Fourchon, peasant leader of the village in
Balzac's Les paysans, tells the local proprietor
"You want to remain our masters; we shall
always be enemies . . . You have everything
and we have nothing. You can't expect to
have our friendship." When a nobleman in
Reymont's The Peasants proposes to give a
gift of lumber and a thousand zloty to an
impoverished peasant the villagers are con-
vinced that the nobleman had a base motive.
One of them asked, "Did anyone ever give
a peasant anything out of love?" In a con-
versation about the local squire, a villager
says ". . . never trust him . . . he and his
like only plot the ruin of us peasants" and
another declares of the nobles that "if they
could, serfdom would be restored tomor-
row." A newly emerging political awareness
59 Buysse, pp. 120, 180, 226; Deledda, The Mother, p..
232; Hardy, The Woodlanders, pp. 190, 192, 219; Guillau-
min, La vie, pp. 127-128; Hamsun, Children, pp. 224-225.
 136 JEROME
leads the Danish peasants of Pontoppidan's
The Promised Land to believe that the elite of
the city were conspiring to restrict the free-
dom of the villagers. One of the peasant lead-
ers remarks "We've been far too ready to
allow ourselves to be led by the nose by those
Copenhagen people." A group of Flemish
harvesters had been singing and chatting
while working when the daughter of the lo-
cal baron and three friends approach. At the
sight of her an oppressive silence descends
on the workers, for though they like the
young baroness she represents the castle,
"the powerful force that they all feared."w
In his Wessex novels Hardy portrays the
upper class men and women who come to
live among the villagers as resented intrud-
ers who bring harm and dissension. In Under
the Greenwood Tree the Reverend Mr. May-
bold, the new incumbent at Mellstock, upsets
the villagers by his arbitrary meddling. Da-
mon Wildeve in The Return of the Native, who
forsakes his profession as engineer to become
the publican on Egdon Heath, is a disruptive
force in the community. Alec D'Urberville
and Angel Clare ruin the life of Tess, the
country girl. In The Woodlanders Mrs. Char-
mond, the owner of the manor house, and
Dr. Fitzpiers, both outsiders, create serious
domestic strife and unhappiness in the till
then peaceful hamlet of Hintock. Sergeant
Troy upsets the even tenor of life at Weath-
erbury in Far From the Madding Crowd.
Neither their deference nor their mistrust
and fear of their "betters" kept the peasants
from taking advantage of the upper orders
whenever they could. Poaching appears as
a common practice in a number of the nov-
els. The villagers of Balzac's Les paysans con-
spire successfully to drive out the local pro-
prietor so that they can divide up his land
for their own use. In Chekhov's story "My
Life" when newcomers, innocent of any
knowledge of estate management, take over
a property the local peasants constantly steal
60 Balzac, Les paysans, p. 547; Reymont, 3: 260, 4: pp.
31-32, 183; Pontoppidan, The Promised Land, pp. 18-26,
260; Buysse, p. 45.
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BLUM
from them and cheat them. In Tolstoi's novel
Prince Nekhliudov's old nurse tells him that
he has been so indulgent with his peasants
that they did not fear him and took advan-
tage of him.61
Finally, the realists revealed the impact
upon the people of the village of the changes
that were reshaping European society in the
latter nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies. They vividly portrayed the human
costs of the tensions that arose between the
old rural world and the new urban and in-
dustrial world. They showed, too, that not
every part of Europe felt the force of the new
or felt it equally. The village of Lipka, a town
that really existed and that Reymont knew
well, barely touched by the changes, retained
the traditional structure, customs, and values
of Polish peasant life. The village of Weath-
erbury in Hardy's Far From the Madding
Crowd was modeled after the village of Pud-
dleton in Dorsetshire, Hardy's home county.
"In comparison with cities." wrote Hardy,
"Weatherbury was immutable. In London,
twenty or thirty years ago are old times; in
Paris ten years or five; in Weatherbury three
or four score years were included in the mere
present and nothing less than a century set
a mark on its face or tone."62
In other rural areas the transformation in
the old way of life proceeded at what seemed
hurtling speed. Patterns of behavior and pa-
rochial attitudes that had marked off the
peasantry from the other orders were erased
within a generation or even less. Toussaint
Lumineau, in need of help, thought of going
to the village priest as he and his forebears
had always done. Then he realizes that the
priest could do nothing. "The old and good
friend . . . was powerless against the men
of the city, the bureaucrats, the administra-
tors, against all the immense unknown that
surrounded the parish." From force of long
habit that reached back for centuries, he next
goes to the chateau of the marquis, his land-
lord, from whose family the Lumineau's had
61 Tolstoi, A Morning, p. 75; Oxford Chekhov, 8: 167.
11 Hardy, Far, p. 136.
 FICTION AND THE EUROPEAN PEASANTRY 137
for generations rented their holding. He ap-
proaches the chateau gate at which so many
times before he had knocked with assurance.
Now there was no answer. The chateau stood
empty, for the marquis had moved to Paris
and had left his peasants without their tra-
ditional protector.A3
The new opportunities for education has-
tened the transformation. In times past
schools had either not been available for
most peasants or had been conducted in a
haphazard and usually unsuccessful fashion.
In any event, most peasants had never felt
the need to read and write. Now there were
schools to which their children could go and
social pressures to educate them. The school-
ing they received produced a literate gen-
eration at the cost of rebellion against the
traditional peasant way of life and of creating
an often unbridgeable gap between parents
and children. Vermeulen, a prosperous
Flemish peasant, to keep up with other well-
off peasants and retain his standing in his
community, sends his two daughters to
boarding school. When they return he is out-
raged by their citified manners. They no
longer seem to him to be peasant girls and
he finds that they no longer accept his au-
thority as head of a peasant household.
When he complains to his wife she tells him
that he is fifty years behind the times and
he realizes that in half a generation every-
thing around him had changed.M4 Louis
Vaureil, a well-to-do French peasant, showed
less understanding. He, too, sent his daugh-
ter to a boarding school. On her return home
she wanted to read in the evenings. But she
knew that her uneducated father, incapable
of comprehending his daughter's tastes,
would not have allowed her to buy maga-
zines and books because to him they
were "useless fantasies."65 Tess Durbeyfield,
daughter of impoverished and illiterate par-
ents, had attended a National School. "Be-
tween the mother, with her fast perishing
63Bazin, La terre, pp. 102-103.
" Streuvels, Flachsacker, pp. 19-20, 83-89.
65 Guillaumin, Pres, pp. 182-183.
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lumber of superstitions, folk-lore, dialect and
orally transmitted ballads, and the daughter
. . . there was a gap of two hundred years
as ordinarily understood. When they were
together the Elizabethan and Victorian ages
stood juxtaposed."16 Hourdequin, a large
farmer of bourgeois origin, blamed education
for filling the heads of peasant children with
vain ideas that persuaded them to leave the
land in search of an unachievable prosper-
ity.67 In contrast, Pontoppidan's novels
showed that the Danish Folk High School
movement (that began in mid-century and
spread throughout the country) succeeded
in its purpose of encouraging young peasants
to remain on the land. The High Schools,
however, instilled in their pupils the resolve
no longer to tolerate the inferior political sta-
tus and subservience that their parents had
accepted without question.
The most devastating impact upon the tra-
ditional peasant society came from indus-
trialization, urbanization, the growth of cap-
italistic business enterprise, and the improved
communications that accompanied these de-
velopments. As the realists showed, the
higher earnings, the opportunities for ad-
vancement, liberation from parental author-
ity, and the social and cultural attractions of
the city, drew young people from the land.
An embittered old man in a small Norwe-
gian country town complained that indus-
trialists "lured young men away from their
natural place in life." The factory worker, he
continued, leaves home, family, land, "ani-
mals, flowers, the sea, God's high heaven-
and in exchange he gets the Tivoli, the Work-
ing Man's Club, the saloon, bread and cir-
cuses."68 Frani;ois Lumineau tells his father
that he is leaving the farm to work in the
city because "I don't want to turn the soil
any more. I don't want to take care of the
animals. I don't want to knock myself out
at twenty-seven to earn money that goes to
6 Hardy, Tess, p. 19.
67 Zola, P. 162.
m K. Hamsun, The Women at the Pump (New York,
1978), p. 179.
 138 JEROME BLUM
pay the rent for the farm. There! I want to
be my own master and work for myself."69
When in Polenz's novel economic difficulties
overtake Traugott Biittner, his children leave
the homestead that the family had occupied
for generations. One becomes a factory
worker, one a prostitute in Berlin, one a
migrant farm worker, and one descends into
drunkenness and begging. On the other
hand, Rose van Dalen had a successful farm
operation but her children, too, left the land
as soon as they could. Other novelists told
of the exodus of young people now that al-
ternative employments and a new way of
life became available to them.
The downturn in farm prices in the so-
called Great Depression of the last quarter
of the nineteenth century added impetus to
the flight. "There were many auctions now,"
wrote Garborg of the region of Norway in
which he grew up, "the bank came and took
people's farms, the sheriff foreclosed mort-
gages and sold farms for taxes, and many
auctioned off their property and sailed for
America." In other countries, too, those who
would have stayed on the land were unable
to make ends meet and had to give up farm-
ing. Land lay empty and untilled and cot-
tages, long occupied by peasant families,
were abandoned and fell into ruins or were
pulled down.70
The change in the peasant way of life was
as much disintegration as it was transfor-
mation. The villager could not withstand the
new forces that brushed aside the isolation
that had till now insulated him. Traugott
into serfdom once again. However,
Buttner, innocent of any knowledge of credit
instruments, faced the loss of his holding to
unscrupulous businessmen who took advan-
tage of his ignorance. He did know what the
loss of his land would mean, for he had seen
it happen to his neighbors. When a peasant
lost his land "that was the loss of everything.
The peasant to whom that happened was
stricken from the list of the living, torn up
69 Bazin, La terre, p. 99.
70 Garborg, p. 213; Polenz, pp. 158, 165; Hamsun,
Women, p. 179; Zola, p. 75; Buysse, pp. 359-360; Hardy,
Tess, p. 404.
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from his land, rooted out, thrown out into
the road as one pulls up a weed out of the
ground and throws it over the hedge."'7'
Hardy told how the introduction of indus-
trialization on the farm itself, in the form of
the steam thresher that went from farm to
farm, reduced farm laborers to mindless au-
tomatons who became part of the machine.
The operator of the thresher "was in the
agricultural world but not of it. He served
fire and smoke; the denizens of the field
served vegetation, weather, frost, and sun."72
The postmaster of a small Norwegian coun-
try town remembered the time "when there
were no industrial workers in our country
but every cottage had its own industry. In
those days life was not too busy to allow us
time for keeping the sabbath, the way of life
was simpler, contentment greater."73
Polenz and Bunin, both of noble lineage
and from landowning families, showed a
similar yearning for the past as a better time,
and mourned the disintegration of the peas-
ant way of life. To them, however, the villain
who destroyed the old ways was not so much
industrialization or capitalism as it was the
emancipation of the peasantry in their re-
spective countries of Germany and Russia.
They maintained that the freed serfs, accus-
tomed for centuries to dependence upon
their seigniors, could not adjust to the sud-
den change in their condition. The penetra-
tion of capitalism in Germany that followed
upon the emancipation and the reduction of
increasing numbers of peasants into rural
proletarians reduced them, wrote Polenz,
in comparison with the new yoke the old obli-
gations owed to the seignior had been feather-
light. The benevolent lord had cared for his serfs
with that love which a wise householder has for
everything that is useful to him, and there were
many ties of common interest that bound serf and
lord to one another. The modern form of serfdom
lacked the equalizing and reconciling cement of
71 Polenz, P. 165.
72 Hardy, Tess, pp. 372, 373.
73 Hamsun, Women, p. 179.
 FICTION AND THE EUROPEAN PEASANTRY 139

tradition. Here parvenu power ruled with heart- He begins to awaken to the fact that there
less subjection under the cold hand of capital.74 were struggles going on in the world of
Bunin wrote elegiacally of the days that which, had he remained behind the plow,
he had known as a child when peasants, he would never even have dreamed. Enok
newly freed and not yet accustomed to their Haave, in Garborg's Peace, subscribes to the
new status, served contentedly in the home new journal published by Soren Jaabaek,
of their former masters, kissed their hands leader of a nationwide Norwegian political
and kissed their children and brought them organization that had been founded in 1865.76
gifts. He believed that the breakdown of the Participation in political life and flight
old order that followed the emancipation from the land to industry and to the city
brought about the alienation of peasant and were external indications of the transition
seignior from one another and from the land that was taking place in the life of the peas-
itself.75 antry. No longer isolated and alienated from
A new interest and participation in politics the world outside the village, the peasants
gave evidence of the revolution in rural life were entering into the mainstream of their
and of involvement with the outside world. societies with all the social dislocations and
Long excluded from any voice in govern- political perturbations that always accom-
ment, the peasants, as mentioned earlier, pany discontinuities of this magnitude. These
now found themselves wooed by politicians are facts that can be and have been docu-
who needed their votes. The Danish villagers mented by historians and economists and
in Pontoppidan's The Promised Land became sociologists using the orthodox methods and
increasingly active in politics as the years sources of their professions. The novels of
went by and the head of the parish council the realists afford us another way of looking
was identified in the city press as "the well- at these phenomena. They go beneath the
known peasant leader." Etienne Bertin, in external manifestations, the macro-dimen-
Guillaumin's story, after many years of polit- sions as it were, to tell what was happening
ical unawareness, becomes politically con- inside the village and inside the huts of the
scious. Resentful of the hard life of the peas- villagers, what was changing and what was
ant who, he said, was exploited by men who unchanged. In doing this they give content
were thieves and scoundrels, he attended a and meaning to what Gerschenkron called
socialist meeting in the village inn and de- "the lifeless shell of the scholar's mono-
cided that he was a socialist. In the early graphs." The realists' intimate first-hand
1890s, as Bazin relates in Le ble' qui le've, the knowledge of the rural world and their ar-
peasants of the Nievre who worked as lum- tistic genius enabled them to provide us with
bermen band together into a syndicate, speak an awareness of the realities of peasant life
among themselves of "the common interest that the accounts of scholars cannot hope to
of the workers," of the need for workers to achieve. To reject their evidence because it
unite, and claim that "the future belongs to fails to meet the usual professional criteria
the people." Gustav Biittner, who left home is to deprive us of a unique and valuable
to find factory work in the city, attends a source and thereby to lessen our knowledge
large meeting of unemployed workers where of our own past. That would make all of us
speakers denounce "bourgeois capitalism." the poorer.

74 Polenz, pp. 378-379. 76Pontoppidan, The Promised Land, p. 20; Guillaumin,

75 I. A. Bunin, "Apple Fragrance," "Sukhodol," in Sto-La vie, pp. 190-194, 234-239; Bazin, Ble, pp. 75-76; Polenz,
ries and Poems (Moscow, 1979). book 3, ch. 7; Garborg, p. 180.

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