IX. On Cultivating One’s Own Garden with Other People’s Labor: Serfdom in “A Landowner’s Morning”
Journal: Academic Studies Press eBooks
Year: 2019

It is true that slavery is an evil, but it is an extremely loveable evil." With these memorable words the young Lev Tolstoy characterized the institution of Russian serfdom. 1 Yet at the time that he wrote this cryptic, off-hand, and rather appalling diary entry in 1854, Tolstoy was also in the process of writing what was to become "A Landowner's Morning" [" "]-a story that depicts serfdom as anything but loveable.How can we make sense of the diary entry (an apologia, if equivocal, for human bon