The limits of realism and the proletariat on the horizon: Fedor Reshetnikov's Where Is It Better?

Nineteenth-century Russian representations of peasants largely reflect, as Donald Fanger plainly framed it, “the changing moods and attitudes of the most influential segment of educated society,” and inform us about that society, rather than peasants themselves. There were, however, both subjects of literature and writers of it who fell between the polls of peasant and elite. Fedor Reshetnikov, the orphaned son of a postman, was such a writer, and his 1868 novel concerning ex-peasants' rural to urban migration, Where Is It Better? (Gde luchshe?) diverges from and critiques the expectations of its audience of educated readers. Populist-leaning critics and editors, seeking literary access to the landed peasantry, hoped that Reshetnikov would be uniquely able to bridge the distance between these educated readers and the masses. While Nikolai Nekrasov's Who Lives Well in Rus'? (1866–77) incorporates memory of Reshetnikov into a composite, symbolic character who carries out this mediating role, the author himself did not provide the mediation that was expected. Where Is It Better? instead dramatizes the failure of ex-peasant characters to integrate into urban society. Published in the midst of debates over how to prevent the formation of an urban proletariat in Russia, Where Is It Better? makes visible a contingent of the population that political and aesthetic discussions treated as something that should not be given form. In doing so, Reshetnikov does not present a viewpoint from outside of the terms described by Fanger, but rather apprehends the limitations imposed by those terms.