Ivan Turgenev and Alexis de Tocqueville on the Economic Consequences of Serfdom and Forced Labor

Abstract

The initial paragraph of Turgenev"s “Khor and Kalinych” (the opening story of A Sportsman"s Sketches) contrasts the society and economy of two neighboring regions. The key difference between their two ways of life hinges on the use of forced labor in one region and its absence in the other. Although Turgenev"s description is certainly based on firsthand knowledge, it can be argued that the literary device he uses was inspired by a passage in De la démocratie en Amérique by Alexis de Tocqueville, who also contrasts the ways of life in two American states separated by a river with slave labour in one versus free labour in the other. Nor was Tocqueville the first to make use of a river separating economically divergent worlds: that device appears in Arthur Young"s Travels in France. Although Tocqueville and Turgenev have much in common on this topic, Tocqueville was an inquirer who concentrated on the destructive influence of slavery on the slave owners themselves and their society, while Turgenev in A Sportsman"s Sketches was a short story writer who showed how the institution of serfdom brutalized the serfs.