The Family Chronicle by Sergey Aksakov as a Patriarchal Ideal of Serfdom and Its Death Verdict: A Historical and Political Analysis

In the late 1850s, a surprising fact can be observed. Representatives of the two main social movements in Russia, the Revolutionary Democrats and the Slavophiles (more widely, the Conservatives), equally enthusiastically welcomed the publication of The Family Chronicle by Sergey Aksakov, but the interpretation of this literary work was completely opposite. In the text, the former saw evidence for the conviction of obsolete serfdom orders, the latter the expressive description of the ancient traditional way of life, the basis of age-old economic relations in Russia. In such interpretations, The Family Chronicle suddenly received a serious political content, and the discussion on the book gained social significance. The impetus for the "politicization" of The Family Chronicle was Nikolay Dobrolyubov's article "The Country Life of a Landowner in the Old Years", published in 1858 in the magazine Sovremennik. It was one of the first printed attempts to openly comprehend the phenomenon of serfdom, to condemn it in the time when the question of the liberation of peasants was still far from being resolved. And Aksakov's book, which was about the 18th century, became a highly relevant work for Dobrolyubov. It gave him an opportunity to show the ugly manifestations of serfdom from all sides. Dobrolyubov's impatience with the too slow progress of reforms was reflected in the unjustly sharp conclusions of the article. For the readers of Sovremennik, The Family Chronicle became a work denouncing the old orders, although Aksakov himself could hardly call himself a denouncing writer. The Slavophiles and representatives of the conservative direction could not like this reading of The Family Chronicle. Stepan Shevyrev undertook to restore the true meaning of Aksakov's work in the article "The Childhood Years of Bagrov the Grandson, Serving as a Continuation of "The Family Chronicle" by S. Aksakov", published in Russkaya Beseda, a Slavophile magazine, in 1858. In this article, Shevyrev insisted that Dobrolyubov "did not understand the spirit of the writer's works completely". According to Shevyrev, in a troubled time, Aksakov managed to create a "calmly epic representation of the old Russian life" without making a trial of it and to remind readers about the eternal human values in the images of the old time. This article is an attempt to have a new look at The Family Chronicle and try to reconstruct the social ideal expressed in Aksakov's work. The Family Chronicle shows an example of the creative activity of landlord economy of the 18th century, its effectiveness in terms of the socioeconomic development of the country, and it was patriarchal by the type of relations. Despite the existence of "bad" landlords, Russia held on and grew rich, relying on the active patriarchal landowner "cells of society", which constituted the "healthy" majority. This is what Aksakov showed with his The Family Chronicle at the historical moment when fiction in Russia became a full-fledged supplier of new ideas for Russian life and began to develop images of the social ideal.

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