An Extra Ruble and the Problem of Universal Equivalent in the Nikolay Nekrasov’s Poem Who Lives Well in Russia

The article discusses an episode from Nikolai Nekrasov’s poem Who Lives Well in Russia in which the hero of the work, Yermil Girin, returns to the people the money he was given as a loan to buy a mill. By depicting the relationship between “the people’s defender” Girin and the people, Nekrasov enters into a polemic with the ideas common in his time that the psychology of the Russian peasant hinders the economic development of the state, since it is based on contempt for the observance of labor contracts and a lack of understanding of the importance of money as an object of accumulation and enrichment. According to Nekrasov, the problem is in the fundamental viciousness of this capitalist economy itself, to which he contrasts an idealized folk economy based on the fundamental denial of the idea of a universal equivalent embodied in money. It is precisely the principles of such a folk economy that are symbolized by the extra ruble that Girin has left over as a result of his original “transactions” with the peasants. In this idealized folk economy, as depicted in Nekrasov’s poem, the price of a thing is determined not by the amount of money that can be obtained for it, but by the labor, suffering, dedication, and love that are invested in it. The extra ruble, which remains an unsolved mystery in the poem (it is unclear who owes whom, what was the mistake in the calculations), introduces the idea of the impossibility and uselessness of a correct balance or final settling of accounts, since it symbolizes an economy in which not money, not a measure that claims to be universal, but the human soul is the measure and judge of all values, an economy in which the more you give, the more you receive and the more you remain in debt.