Word: serfdom
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...century ago these lyrical sketches of Russian country life were considered an incendiary call for the abolition of Russian serfdom. When the book first appeared in 1852, the czar's advisers strongly warned lim against it. But Alexander II read the book and later admitted that it had indeed helped persuade him to free the serfs...
...meets an unhappy woman whose husband bought her "freedom" from serfdom - but also tore her away from her lover, who remains a slave. At the house of a neighbor he watches the owner mercilessly bleed his peasants while affecting the most cultivated French manners. And another time a landowner tells him: "As I see it, the master is the master, and the peasant is the peasant... and that's all there...
...sorties against the social system give Turgenev the opportunity for digging deeply into human motives and habits. The profligate landowners, the simpering clerks, the passionate but suppressed girls whom Turgenev paints are universal types, recognizable in any environment. And some of his best stories have nothing to do with serfdom: The Singers, a rousing account of a singing duel between a peasant and a tradesman which ends in a drunken debauch, and Bezhin Meadow, a tender portrait of a group of boys whom the sportsman meets one evening...