The historiography of slavery, serfdom, and their demise usually focuses on abolition projects and the historical imagination during the pre-emancipation era and on achievements after the official abolition of bondage. This innovative book describes how many people in Russia and the United States depicted freed people after their emancipation. Diverse textual and visual images constitute the bulk of materials that Bellows explores in her vivid, subtle, and highly sensitive analysis.
The first chapter discusses radical literature in the two countries at the eve of emancipations. Bellows locates no abolitionist movement in Russia that paralleled that of the United States; she contrasts the rare Russian serf narratives with the relatively more common autobiographies of U.S. slaves. Chapter 2 moves to the nostalgic historical fiction produced by American and Russian landlords during the post-emancipation years, depicting the relationships between serfs/slaves and their masters as paternalistic and nonconflictual. Chapter 3 examines illustrated periodicals...