American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination by Amanda Brickell Bellows

Abstract

Reviewed by: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination by Amanda Brickell Bellows J. R. Kerr-Ritchie American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination. By Amanda Brickell Bellows. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. xvi, 304. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-5554-3; cloth, $90.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-5553-6.) In 1955, Hannah Goldman completed a Columbia University dissertation comparing fictional parallels in American slavery and Russian serfdom. Thirtytwo years later, Peter Kolchin's Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass., 1987) compared masters and slaves in the U.S. South with planters and serfs in Russia. Eschewing similarities, his comparison argued for differences: American slaveholders were more paternalistic than Russian landholders, while the Russian communal village (mir) was more autonomous than the slave community. Although erudite, the comparative approach reified the view of the U.S. South as exceptional. Over the past generation, scholars have increasingly compared unfree and post-emancipation societies to expand intellectual horizons, derive new critical inquiries, and identify compelling similarities and differences. Amanda Brickell Bellows's first book compares cultural responses by Russians and Americans to societal transformations wrought by abolitions of unfree labor. Six chapters examine different media comparatively: poems, novels, popular historical narratives, engravings and cartoons, oil paintings, posters, trade cards, ephemera, and other literary, illustrative, and photographic works produced by Russian and American authors and artists. The book's methodology is defined as a "'contrast of contexts,'" demonstrating how unique features shaped broader social processes (p. 3). Chapter 2, for instance, examines idyllic fictional accounts of serfdom and slavery in the post-emancipation decades produced by Russian noblemen Grigorii Danilevskii, Vsevolod Solov'ev, Evgenii Opochinin, and Evgenii Salias, and U.S. planter offspring [End Page 523] Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris. Their fiction employed similar literary strategies of abundant resources during unfreedom, grateful serfs and slaves, and loyal servitors. This comparison of Russian and American fictional writing reveals "unknown parallels" and "striking correspondences" in Russian and American landowners' responses to abolition, along with contrasting "racial considerations" in the U.S. South compared with their absence in Russia (p. 52). In the other chapters, the book likewise identifies "striking representational similarities and illuminating differences" in cultural production to make two key arguments (p. 6). Russian and American elites provided parallel portrayals of the past in order to maintain power in transformed post-emancipation conditions. The Russian post-emancipation imagination was "more expansive" because of the absence of racism (p. 7). The book's aim is to demonstrate the salience of cultural representations in a comparative scholarship dominated by materialist examinations of land, labor, class, ideology, and the state. This comparative study of post-abolition representations of unfree labor in Russia and the United States represents an important methodological contribution. Its attention to analogous writers and their works transcends simplistic parallels. One does not get the sense that the comparison is being evoked in order to further prove an existing historical interpretation. The rich array of cultural sources should spark the imaginative juices of specialists in Russian serfdom and American slavery, although whether they are tempted into comparative analysis remains to be seen. My two questions concern the comparative method. First, what is the efficacy of cultural comparisons when post-emancipation conditions varied so greatly? Bellows argues that the comparison of historical works revealing faithful retainers suggests that the romanticization seen in southern literature was not "unique" to the post-emancipation United States (p. 71). And yet this literature served the interests of white supremacists in the post-emancipation South with no analogy in post-emancipation Russia. We would have to await the advent of the Bolshevik Revolution before the peasantry marched onto the political stage to the same extent that former slaves did during U.S. Reconstruction. Second, there is a certain predictability about similarities of retaining power, and racial differences as cultural representations are marshaled ineluctably into both categories. It is not evident how each cultural medium looks different as a consequence of the comparison—one of the major objectives of comparative methodology. Still, Bellows's comparative work is to be warmly welcomed and encouraged...