Russian Intelligentsia's View On The Peasantry

With many social and political changes occurring during the 1800's, the Russian Intelligentsia's view on the peasantry also saw a shift. Recent emancipations in the country saw millions of former serfs and farmers with newfound rights and statuses but also saw exposed many faults in current labor practices and corruption within the bureaucratic levels of the Russian state. The current nobility took it upon themselves to decide how they handle the new working class problems and restructuring of the social hierarchy among themselves and the peasants without putting too much harm on their own social standings. While many of the nobility held the staunch belief that peasantry was incapable of life beyond simple farming, some believed to be rational
Many of the younger generations of nobility to the belief that free labor is much more productive than the serfdom that has been practiced for hundreds of years in Russia and pointed to the modernization and cultural improvements in western countries like England, France, and Germany as prime examples. They believed that the first steps to take begin to make Russia a modern and powerful nation of the world was to start with the emancipation of the serfs from their land owners and ceding some of the land away from the former owners in hopes that the communes that would form would allow for some to be easily dismantled for industrial uses and the nobles would begin to setup more modern agriculture businesses. The opposition on the other hand thought differently to the more optimistic view of the younger generation, viewing the serfs as a lazy and ignorant compared to the former serf classes of France and Germany. While having a more free labor market would increase profits, they feared the former serfs would be too ignorant and unmotivated to work beyond basic needs, which would put Russia further back on the path to modernization. When the time came for the Emancipations to be put in place, many of the of the older generations predictions came true. The communes began to increase in population and were
The story revolves around a family moving from the to live in the patriarch's native village. There, they find the peasants have devolved into a drunken, ignorant mass which became especially evident during the introduction of Kiryak, one of the in-laws of the family, as one of the first things he does in appearance punch his own daughter violently in the face. The family deal with drunken, abusive family members and loud neighborly spats that drive well into the night to the point where Nikolai, the sick father of the protagonist family nearly gets into fight with his brother Fyolka. At one point, the house they're staying in catches fire, but most peasants do nothing, with the narrator claiming "No one knew what to do, no one had the sense to do anything, though there were stacks of wheat, hay, barns, and piles of faggots standing all round." Their situation only gets worse as eventually Nikolai takes ill and dies, but it is left ambiguous if it was due to the medical incompetence of the local tailor. His family beings to make the trip back to Moscow, begging for money along the way. Peasants' view of the peasantry is depiction of hate, anger, and spitefulness. In no way would the savages represented in the novel be seen as the key to Russian