The Village (Grigorovich novel)

The Village (Derevnya, Деревня) was a debut novel by Dmitry Grigorovich, first published by Otechestvennye Zapiski (Vol. XLIX, book 12) in 1846. It had strong impact upon the Russian literary society and was praised for being "the first work in the Russian literature to face the real peasants life" by Ivan Turgenev.

1845-1846 were the years when Grigorovich was very close to authors of Otechestvennye Zapiski, its leading critic Vissarion Belinsky in particular. According to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, having published the Saint Petersburg Organ-Grinders in the Spring of 1945, the young writer was planning to spend that summer in his village but before the departure stayed at the house of Nikolai Nekrasov. Not long before that Belinsky published the Works by Alexey Koltsov, providing the foreword to it, which featured profound analysis of the poet's legacy. Grigoroivich took the book to the country with him and read it several times, enchanted by both Koltsov's verse and Belinsky's article. All of The Village' chapters are provided with epigraphs, three of them (to Chapters 3, 4 and 8), come from poems by Koltsov.

The story of Akulina told in The Village was based on the real life tragedy. In the village owned by Grigorovich's mother a young woman was forcefully married and subsequently beaten to death by her husband.

"I worked over the text - especially of the first chapters - diligently, re-writing it many times. After four years of continuous writing I finally went with it to Petersburg," the author remembered. There he brought the manuscript to Sovremennik, but Nekrasov for some reason overlooked it and the novel was published by Andrey Krayevsky's Otechestvennye Zapiski. "Its success surpassed all my expectations, probably due to its subject matter's originality: nobody had ever written a novel about every day Russian peasantry life before," Grigorovich wrote later.

The novel was strongly supported by Vissarion Belinsky, first in his essay "The 1846 Russian Literature Review", then the article "The Answer to Moskvityanin". Choosing for an example the caricature by M.L. Nevakhovich in Yeralash magazine (1847, book I, page 5) where Grogorovich was shown as someone searching in a garbage can, he lashed against the critics for whom the novel was too realistic and, by default, 'dirty'.