The Career of a Parvenu: Alexei Pisemsky’s Thousand Souls

From the very beginning of his literary career, Alexei Pisemsky gained a reputation as a “somewhat cynical” writer, while his literary and personal friend Alexander Druzhinin privately referred to Pisemsky as a “tavernkeeper.” Indeed, in literature he was far from what was considered good taste and tended not only to point out but also to rather directly articulate what was customarily left to the reader’s imagination. This “cynicism” was seen by the public also in his particular, direct attention to the role of money in narrative fiction. In Pisemsky’s prose legacy, especially in the first two decades of his work, the role of monetary and property matters is very significant. Almost all characters of his works from this period receive, often as an introductory characteristic, a property-based portrayal, sometimes approaching the specificity of an inventory list. This article focuses on Pisemsky’s most famous novel, published in 1858 and titled directly through property status: Thousand Souls. This striking novel, which became the main literary event of the year, presents a complex construction about the role of money/estate in the career of a person without social position and a reflection on strategies available to a parvenu in the 1840s — the zenith of the era of Nicholas I.