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Unit 5: The Spark Neglected Burns the House by Leo Tolstoy

the late 1820s and early 1830s. It was promoted by the important Russian literary critic VG Notes
Belinsky and blossomed in the mid-1840s into the “Natural School,” which produced such
works as DV Grigorovich’s The Fisher Folk (Rybaki) and the anthologies The Attics of St. Petersburg
and The Organ Grinders of St. Petersburg. Following this precedent, literature about the people
continued to be marked by the realistic style and a tone sympathetic to folk life. Famous early
examples are certain of Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches (Zapiski okhotnika) from the late 1840s.
Literature about the people gained renewed support from the populist critics of the 1870s and
1880s, especially NK Mixailovsky, and continued to be a powerful movement in literature
even well into the twentieth century. A main tenet of Socialist Realism was that same sympathetic
and realistic approach to the lives of common folk for which Belinsky called in the 1840s.
Tolstoy’s story of the early 1860s, “Polikushka,” is one example among many that he wrote in
this category.
Tolstoy made his most distinct contribution, however, to the third category of popular literature:
works created by writers from the educated classes for a popular audience. There were two
main subdivisions of this “literature for the people.” The more successful, purely commercial
in character, had formed an identifiable part of Russian literary culture since the early 18th
century when, because of the developing literary taste of educated society, there began to be
an unmet demand for works to satisfy the relatively static taste of readers from the lower
social classes. In the middle of the nineteenth century this type of literature remained what it
had been at its beginnings. Song books, books on the interpretation of dreams, casual collections
of folklore, and stories of romance and adventure comprised the main store of the commercial
inventory. Chapbooks (i.e., naive tales of romance and adventure) like “Bova Korolevich” and
“Peter of the Golden Keys” together with picaresque stories such as those attributed to Matvei
Komarov, “inhabitant of the city of Moscow,” continued to fascinate the popular reader. Standard
titles were printed over and over again, while around this core there gathered a fairly numerous
crowd of hack writers who earned their bread by producing quantities of similar works,
always mindful of the cardinal rule that one should never stray far from a successful formula.
The works of such now-forgotten writers such as Evstigneev, Volgin, V. Suvorov, Kassirov,
the brothers Pazukhin, Kuz’michev and many others provided the staple printed diet of the
popular reader in Tolstoy’s time.
The second, and lesser, category of literature for the people, more idealistic in its purposes,
sought to enlighten or edify the masses rather than to profit by entertaining them. Its history
was much shorter than that of its commercial counterpart. Its first notable success was the
journal Village Reading (Sel’skoe chtenie), published (1843-48) by VF Odoevsky (who dabbled
also in folklore stylization) and AP Zablotsky-Desiatovsky. Conducted on a very high level,
Village Reading contained contributions from such well-known writers as MN Zagoskin, AF
Vel’tman, and VI Dal’ (who also, under the pen name “The Cossack Lugansky,” contributed
very significantly, as a leading writer of the Natural School, to the development of literature
about the common people). In the late 1850s and 1860s the efforts of AF Pogossky took his
magazines Soldier Talk (Soldatskaia beseda), Peasant Talk (Narodnaia beseda), and Leisure and Labor
(Dosug i delo) to success.
In the 1870s, interest in raising the quality of the literature available to the people led to the
formation of enterprises devoted solely to this goal. The most representative of these was VN
Marakuev’s Popular Library (Narodnaia biblioteka) founded in 1872 and engaged mainly in the
production of inexpensive editions of the classics of Russian and other national literatures.
Most of the concerns established for such purposes failed because they lacked adequate means
of distributing their products to the common folk, mostly rural, for whom they were intended.
In 1884 Tolstoy and two collaborators, VG Chertkov and P. I. Biriukov (later Tolstoy’s authorized
biographer), founded The Intermediary (Posrednik), a publishing house for works intended for

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