Word: serfs
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...Panaceas. Like any Russian of conscience, he longed to improve miserable conditions in his country, languishing under Czar Alexander III. Chekhov wrote stories about the brutalized existence of the serf and the stagnating intelligentsia. In 1890. he journeyed 10,000 miles to write a report on the penal colony on Sakhalin Island. He built schools for peasants and treated their ills for nothing. But he could not shake off a medical man's distrust of all panaceas. Whether it was Communism, Tolstoy's windy plans for the spiritual regeneration of mankind, or Dostoevsky's wild chiaroscuro Christianity...
Lacking educational opportunities and skills, they were victims of a vicious exploitive system under which each family gave three man-days of labor every week in return for a meager plot of land on which to live and farm. A "serf" mentality, inability to make decisions, and complete distrust of outsiders after centuries of being cheated, beaten, and exploited made progress impossible. Vicos and many similar haciendas remained feudal anachronisms in a rapidly changing country...
This bum, memorably played by Donald Pleasence, is the smelliest, itchiest, un-deloused scamp ever plucked from the rim of a rubbish barrel. Every time he opens his mouth, he picks at the scab of past wrongs and present hates. A wily slum serf, the tramp raises a mock one-finger salute to his masters, and plays the brothers off against each other. They, in turn, offer him the nebulous post of care taker, and finally, in mutual revulsion, cast him out to an unknown fate...
Tartars & Indians. The pearl of this collection. The Enchanted Wanderer, is the skaz at its purest, with a framework of auditors who listen to the story and occasionally interrupt with provocative questions. It is a picaresque short novel, narrated by its hero, who was born a serf, trained as an outrider, and who became in turn a thief, a Tartar captive and husband of Tartar wives, a soldier, a horse dealer, a civil servant, an actor and a novice in a monastery-always resigned to his fate, yet full of curiosity and humor, always interested in the experience of being...
Turgenev's target is not war, but societal injustice. But since wicked serf-owning aristocrats are now hard to find, the message has little relevance, and what remains is a sometimes amusing, sometimes touching vignette of the Russia of Alexander I. The camera follows a huge, strong, good-natured but deaf and dumb peasant, played by Anatol Kochetkov, who is taken from his plow to serve at his mistress' city house. Her whims and the cowardice of the other servants then proceed to ruin his romances, first with a peasant girl, and then with Mumu...