Advertisements and Ephemera

This chapter examines the ways in which Russian and American businesses represented the histories of slavery, serfdom, and emancipation in late nineteenth-century advertisements. Images of African Americans and peasants appeared in posters, trade cards, and ephemera. A comparative analysis of these depictions illuminates businesses’ distinct marketing strategies and efforts to target specific consumer groups through portrayals of historically subjugated populations.

Literature and Visual Culture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

In the early twentieth century, an increasingly diverse group of Russians and Americans reflected upon their changing worlds in literature and visual culture. They produced competing representations of serfs, enslaved African Americans, peasants, and freedpeople that alternately idealized and criticized the pre and post-emancipation eras. This chapter studies the work of Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, Kate Chopin, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Thomas Dixon, Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois, Anton Chekhov, and Evgenii Opochinin.

Introduction

The introduction provides an overview of the abolition of Russian serfdom in 1861 and American slavery in 1865. It explores how Americans and Russians of diverse backgrounds responded to emancipation through cultural production. They created textual and visual representations of African Americans and Russian peasants in fiction, poetry, illustrated periodicals, oil paintings, and advertisements. A comparison of these depictions reveals striking similarities and differences that show how people remembered or sought to portray serfdom, slavery, and the post-emancipation era.

Illustrated Periodicals and Lithographs

This chapter categorizes and analyzes representations of Russian peasants and African Americans in illustrated periodicals and lithographs between 1865 and 1905. It examines popular American publications including Harper’s Weekly, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, the Indianapolis Freeman, the Colored American Magazine, and the lithographs of Currier and Ives. It also assesses widely circulated Russian periodicals Niva and Vsemirnaia illiustratsiia, as well as lubochnaia literatura and lubki, illustrated materials written for the peasantry. The range of portrayals reveals both the multiplicity and evolution of perspectives of peasants and freedpeople during the four decades that followed emancipation.

Oil Paintings

After the abolition of serfdom and slavery, Russian and American artists created oil paintings of peasants and African Americans that revealed to viewers the complexity of their post-emancipation experiences. Russian painters from the Society of Traveling Art Exhibitions and American artists including Henry Ossawa Tanner, William Edouard Scott, and Winslow Homer created thematically similar works that depicted bondage, emancipation, military service, public schooling, and the urban environment. Their compositions shaped nineteenth-century viewers’ conceptions of freedpeople and peasants and molded Russians’ and Americans’ sense of national identity as the two countries reconstructed their societies during an era of substantial political and social reform.

Epilogue

The conclusion compares the fiftieth anniversaries of the abolition of Russian serfdom and American slavery in the early twentieth century. Russians and Americans celebrated these occasions through public ceremonies, the construction of monuments, the production of commemorative objects, and the publication of books and articles. In both countries, people expressed different opinions about the causes and consequences of emancipation, revealing that abolition’s meaning remained contested.

Popular Historical Fiction

During the post-emancipation era in Russia and the United States, authors created nostalgic historical fiction that romanticized Russian serfdom and American slavery. This chapter compares the short stories of white, Southern authors Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris with the mass-oriented historical fiction of Russian aristocrats Grigorii Danilevskii, Vsevolod Solov’ev, Evgenii Salias, and Evgenii Opochinin. In their literature, these privileged authors created narratives targeting middle-class readers that deliberately misrepresented the histories of slavery and serfdom during a period characterized by the acquisition of critical new rights by peasants and African Americans.

Radical Literature on the Eve of Emancipations

This chapter compares antiserfdom and antislavery literature produced on the eve of the abolition of Russian serfdom and American slavery. It studies Nikolai Nekrasov’s poetry, Aleksei Pisemskii’s A Bitter Fate, Martha Griffith Browne’s fictional Autobiography of a Female Slave, and Louisa May Alcott’s short stories. With different degrees of success, these authors used similar strategies to transform public opinion toward Russian serfs and enslaved African Americans.