As Rumor Makes It: Strategic Idealism and the Subtextual Peasant Woman in Vladimir Korolenko's 'On a Cloudy Day'

• In Event: Literary Landscapes of Collision: Life and Afterlives of Russian Realism

Abstract

This paper investigates the representation of violence on peasant women in Vladimir Korolenko's “On a Cloudy Day” (“V oblachnyi den’”). The most famous of Korolenko’s sketches, “On a Cloudy Day” confronts the reader with an atrocious scene of violence, where a landlord forces a peasant woman to breastfeed his pedigree hound puppies. This scene is narrated to a gentry girl by a coachman eager to share countryside rumors with her. I analyze the peasant body as a site of philosophical investment, political polemics, and aesthetic experimentation. First, I situate “On a Cloudy Day” within the debates of the thick journal The Russian Wealth (“Russkoe Bogatstvo”), where the sketch first appeared in 1896. This context allows reading “On a Cloudy Day” against the background of the philosophical contentions between Populists and Marxists that were unfolding in the journal. Second, I look at Korolenko's engagement with the peasant in the post-Reform era. Lastly, I place emphasis on the devices that make the peasant woman's body irretrievable in the text. In the early Twentieth century, Korolenko's story was integrated into official Soviet historiography. As shown by existing literature, the trajectory of this subplot from fiction to history turns the sketch into a subtext. Analogously, I argue that the peasant woman's body is already “subtextual” in the sketch itself.

Author

• Sofia Guerra, Princeton U