Things I Don’t Know Much About
Gogol and Dostoevsky both mention serfs in their stories, these people on the fringe of society. So I had to surf the Web and read up on Ukranian and Russian feudal history. Travels don’t always lead to other books. They often lead to the peripheral knowledge that can be garnered from the wonders of Wikipedia.
It seems the Ukranians had a tradition of turning peasants into proud soldiers. To be a Cossack was much better than being a slave to the man. In the translation I read of Gogol’s story “Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich
I’d have to read more than Wikipedia to truly understand what he meant by that. I mean, was registering someone to be a peasant like signing him up for welfare, putting him on the dole? Was it meant to say she was lazy, selling away her family’s dignity and independence? Was it meant to say that her act was a social castration of her husband? And what exactly was the process? What kind of paperwork did one fill out? Or maybe “register” is the simplest translation for something we don’t really have words for in English?
Do you know?