Environments of the Post-Reform Village An Ecocritical Reading of Nekrasov’s Red-Nose Frost

Abstract

Nikolaj Nekrasov’s Moroz, Krasnyj nos (Red-Nose Frost) (1863) focuses on the death and legacy of the peasant Prokl and the suffering and death from exposure of his widow Dar’ja. Some relevant issues from an ecocritical perspective – creatures, natural forces, and the natural world in general – are portrayed as sentient and accorded respect and agency; peasants in the poem are fully enmeshed in the natural world – not insulated or isolated; and Nekrasov displaces onto a peasant Other a connection with the natural world that has been lost by his implied audience of the urban elite.