Gleb Uspensky’s Peasant Cycles and the Modernist Poetics of Labor
This paper argues that Gleb Uspensky’s Peasant Cycles of the 1880s (Vlast’ Zemli and Krest’ianin i krest’ianskii trud) develop a new literary style which is modeled on a concept of labor and characterized by a foregrounded narrative subject who is absorbed in the process of writing. A response to contemporary debates on the division of labor, this style tends toward modernism in several ways: by prioritizing a lyrical voice in confessional first-person narration and by theorizing the use of the detail. Using the definitions of Hannah Arendt, according to whom “work” is enduring product and “labor” is self-consuming process, I trace a shift in Uspensky’s poetics from durability and purpose to recurrence and destruction, arguing that the latter represents an anti-novelistic and self-referential discourse. Uspensky draws on the metaphor of labor by putting narrators and readers at risk in a mutually transformative interaction with the world while also condemning the distance between writers and laborers, leaving open the political stakes involved in the labor question while reshaping his style in terms of these same tensions.
