The writings of eighteenth-century Russian so-called serf
intelligentsia
have received surprisingly little academic
attention both at home (that is, in pre-, Soviet, and post-Soviet
Russia) and abroad. Russian, as well as West European or American
scholars of eighteenth-century Russian culture and literature, have
been almost unanimous in their decision to ignore the literary
achievements of the few boldly writing krepostniki on the grounds of
insufficient materials and/or the little aesthetic value of the serfs'
texts. The situation is highly reminiscent of the state that
Afro-American Studies was in only some twenty years ago. Fortunately
for the student of Black Slave narratives, the
discoveries
of people like Marion Wilson Starling,
Henry Luis Gates, Jr., Angelo Constanzo, and many others, recently
opened up a whole new world of writings that since then have not only
become a legitimate
subject for numerous scholarly
dissertations and various publications, but also have managed to
change irreversibly the way we perceive the colonial history of the
last two centuries. Unfortunately for the student of
eighteenth-century Russian literature, the highly original work of
writing serfs like Locmanov, Trevogin, &Chachek;emerovcov, and Smirnov
(to mention but a few) is still waiting to be saved from almost total
obscurity.
Realizing the impossibility of a thorough study or classification
of the texts by serf-authors within the context of a comparatively
short paper, the purpose of the present essay will be to focus only on
a particular characteristic of some of the narratives of
eighteenth-century krepostnye volnodumcy (serf freespeakers): namely,
the metaphorical appropriation of the theme of the black slaves'
struggle for freedom in America and Britain, for the needs of the
local proponents of the abolition of serfdom. In my account of the
peculiar interconnectedness and similarities between nineteenth-
century slave narratives and Russian serfs' (autobiographical)
writings, I have borrowed three of Mary Luise Pratt's
terms—contact zone, transculturation and autoethnographic
writing—because I believe that the language created by present
day theoreticians of the colonial experience will be highly valuable
for the discussion of, and can be easily transplanted to, the context
of my proposed area of study. Thus, it is important to uncover the
interrelations between the language of the underprivileged authors
(krepostniki) and the dictum of the dominant class (the aristocracy),
as well as to attempt to illustrate how the ensuing transculturation
appropriates the signifying practices of the oppressors only to
subvert their power and turn it against themselves. The use of the
black slave
theme in the autoethnographic texts of both
the upper classes and the serf-authors (for very different ends in the
latter case) in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russia
is a good case in point.