Book Review: Hard Times, by Vasily Sleptsov

The novel is set in the aftermath of serf emancipation in Russia, which, apparently, merely transformed the serfs into peons, because they had to pay onerous redemption levies and received very little of the best land to which they had once belonged. Worse, paternalism remained alive and well, as many of the newly emancipated peasants languished in some kind of dependent relationship with their erstwhile masters. Early in the book (pp. 36-39), when the ex-serfs of the “liberal” Shchetinin perfor...