Serfs Who Are Snobs
Catherine Merridale: Aleksandr Nikitenko, 29 November 2001
Up from Serfdom: My Childhood and Youth in Russia 1804-24
by Aleksandr Nikitenko, translated by Helen Saltz Jacobson.
Yale, 228 pp., £20, June 2001,0 300 08414 5 Show More
by Aleksandr Nikitenko, translated by Helen Saltz Jacobson.
Yale, 228 pp., £20, June 2001,
“... Aleksandr Nikitenko’s memoir is unusual: the fact that it exists is odd enough. Nikitenko was a serf, born in 1804 or 1805 in the village of Alekseevka, in the Ukrainian province of Voronezh. Few people from his background would have been able to write their own names, let alone a full-scale history of their lives ... ”
