New Approaches to Representations of Peasants in Russian Literature. Introduction

Abstract

This introduction to the cluster seeks to reestablish “peasant studies” as not only a historical but also a literary subfield of investigation in Slavic Studies. The representation of peasants in mid-nineteenth-century Russian literature is regarded in this article as an issue of sociological poetics, cultural history, and institutional theory. The authors give a critical overview of well-known and recent scholarship on the images and depiction of peasants and the narod in Russian literature and propose an interdisciplinary combination of approaches to the topic.