In 1909 a group of philosophers critical of the radical intelligentsia and its role in the Revolution of 1905 published a collection of essays called Vekhi (Landmarks) in which this disenchantment was power-fully expressed. The essays caused a huge storm of controversy - not least because their writers (former Marxists like Pyotr Struve and Nikolai Berdyaev) had all had spotless (that is, politically radical) credentials - which in itself was symptomatic of the intelligentsia's new mood of doubt and self-questioning. The essays were a fierce attack on the nineteenth-century cult of 'the people' and its tendency
to subordinate all other interests to the people's cause. Through this pursuit of material interests the intelligensia was pushing Russia to a second revolution, much more violent and destructive than the first. Civilization was under threat and it was the duty of the educated classes to face this reality:
This is the way we are: not only can we not dream about fusing with the people but we must fear them worse than any punishment by the government, and we must bless that authority which alone with its bayonets and prisons manages to protect us from the popular fury.102
There was a general feeling, which the essays had expressed, that the masses would destroy Russia's fragile European civilization and that, come the revolution, Russia would be dragged down to the level of the semi-savage peasantry. Andrei Bely's novel Petersburg (1913-14) is filled with images of the city being overrun by Asiatic hordes. Even Gorky, a hero and a champion of the common man, succumbed to the new apocalyptic mood. 'You are right 666 times over', he wrote to a literary friend in 1905, '[the revolution] is giving birth to real barbarians, just like those that ravaged Rome.'103
This dark mood was captured in what must surely be the bleakest portrait of rural life in any literature: Ivan Bunin's novella The Village (1910). Bunin had experience of peasant life. Unlike Turgenev or Tolstoy, who were scions of the elite aristocracy, Bunin belonged to the minor provincial gentry, who had always lived in close proximity to the peasants and whose lives resembled theirs in many ways. Bunin saw the peasant as the 'national type' and his stories about them were intended to be judgements on the Russian people and their history. He had never had any illusions about the spiritual or noble qualities of the peasants. His diaries are filled with horrific incidents he had seen or heard about in the villages: a woman who was beaten by her drunken husband so that she had to be 'bandaged up like a mummy'; another woman raped so often by her husband that she bled to death.104 Bunin's early stories dealt with the harsh realities of country life in the 1890s - a decade of famine and flight from the land. They are full of images of destruction and decay: abandoned villages, factories belching blood red smoke, the peasants old or sick. Here Bunin's village
was a realm of natural beauty that was being undermined and gradually destroyed by the new industrial economy. After 1905, however, Bunin changed his view of the village. He came to see it not just as a victim, but as the main agent of its own demise. The Village is set in 1905 in a place called Durnovo (from the word 'durnoi', meaning 'bad' or 'rotten'). Its peasants are portrayed as dark and ignorant, thieving and dishonest, lazy and corrupt. Nothing much takes place in Durnovo. There is no plot in Bunin's work. It consists of a description of the dreary existence of a tavern keeper who has just enough intelligence to realize the emptiness of his own life. 'God, what a place! It's a prison!' he concludes. Yet, as Bunin's tale implies, all of peasant Russia is a Durnovo.105
The Village gave a huge jolt to society. More perhaps than any other work, it made the Russians think about the hopeless destiny of their peasant land. 'What stunned the reader in this book', wrote one critic, 'was not the depiction of the peasant's material, cultural and legal poverty… but the realization that there was no escape from it. The most that the peasant, as depicted by Bunin, was capable of achieving… was only the awareness of his hopeless savagery, of being doomed.'106 Gorky wrote about The Village that it had forced society to think seriously 'not just about the peasant but about the question of whether Russia is to be or not to be'.107
