Authors

Discussion

In his speech at the Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, Maksim Gorky reproached Russian pre-revolutionary authors for silencing the theme of the horrors of serfdom, as manifested in the cases of two infamous landlords, Saltychikha and General Izmailov. Gorky was mistaken, since both villains occupied a significant place in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian imperial imagination. In this paper, I will trace the origins and explore the cultural symbolism and impact of Lev Izmailov’s legend from the 1820s through the age of the Great Terror.