Peasant to Revolutionary: Combined Genre in Populist Agitation Literature

Abstract

This article examines a series of literary agitation texts that have largely remained outside the purview of literary scholarship and cultural studies. These works were composed by revolutionary populists between 1873 and 1875 as part of the going‐to‐the‐people movement to spur working people toward action, and ultimately, a revolutionary uprising. The article will focus on one of these works, Sergei Stepniak‐Kravchinsky’s Tale of a Kopeck ( Skazka o kopeike , 1874), in order to demonstrate that members of the populist movement created idiosyncratic symbolic forms oriented toward interclass , quasi‐collaborative cultural interaction in the context of revolutionary struggle during the first half of the 1870s. These forms wove together archaic and modern generic elements as they attempted to stimulate a broad‐based revolutionary movement at the historical moment characterized by “combined and uneven development.” What resulted from this conjuncture was an unprecedented form of a folktale Bildungsroman , which, despite its apparent incongruity, anticipated the spontaneity‐consciousness problem haunting revolutionary politics to this day and offered an intriguing formal “solution” to one of its intractable dilemmas.